A Texas Ranger got a prolific serial killer to talk
latimes.com
latimes.com
One piece of Ranger history I didn't know was that their badges are made from Mexican 5-Peso silver coins.
https://www.americancowboy.com/people/history-texas-ranger-b...
Just a note, I understand that serial killers almost exclusively stick with their own ethnic group. If you watch the (short) video, that becomes very apparent here. The photos in the article don't show that so well, the video does.
"were almost all prostitutes, drug addicts or those he didn’t think would be missed."
Christ, the ultimate throwaway culture. Well done James Holland, you did a job I could not face.
He said it, but I have trouble believing that. There had to be something before that, perhaps something too far back to remember?
Is it hard for you to believe that someone could be born with schizophrenia? What about autism? What about poor impulse control?
When you think about the complicated interplay of social interaction in HEALTHY humans, which includes their innate capacity for violence (We definitely are part hunters with a propensity for war), and you compare the things we know that can go wrong and produce mental deficits of one form or another, it really shouldn't be that surprising that some people in the population would also be born with distinctly anti-social tendencies of one form or another.
Brains are complicated... there's all kinds of interesting things that happen too that may be related. For example, the disgust response of humans is typically lessened or even reversed during sexual arousal. So you can have almost a complete flip in behavior depending on context! The regions of the brain responsible for aggression and sexual arousal are also really close together and related. So is this really that much of a stretch?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Causes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_of_schizophrenia#S...
[...]
It's a fun thought experiment for quite a lot of social (and economic) issues really because it makes you consider notions of nurture vs nature and how many things are likely to emerge even without the preconditions which we have which do make them much more likely. For instance I'd certainly agree if we took 1% of our Rosies and forced them to sexually and physically abuse their charges, we'd certainly see a much larger ratio of those 1% end up as psychopaths, but that doesn't preclude the fact that, as I think you'd agree, you'd also certainly see plenty of psychopaths within the other 99% as well.
I'm not saying your theory isn't plausible, but what makes it any more likely than him just lying?
... This hypothetical enacted would directly result in chaos. There is no possibility of raising human beings to be civilized without human beings doing the raising.
“Hmm, I like being loved and praised and fed milkshakes here in prison, I’m going to keep talking, even if it isn’t true!”
Bringing closure to the people involved in those deaths is worth being nice to a serial killer.
Maybe sometimes it's better to get very unreliable information and try to confirm it independently, the classic example being if they say something only the killer would know like where the body is buried.
Personally, I'm not bothered by building up the serial killer's ego. The important thing about imprisonment is that he's prevented from killing more people.
There is a mutual relationship here: Little gets company, attention, and praise, police get to wipe 57 cases off their books that they have no intention of ever trying in a court, and this particular investigator gets lionized.
edit:
> After the confessions came the painstaking work — confirming killings. There won’t be time to prosecute Little for all the deaths, but authorities believe they can sufficiently tie him to a homicide to consider the case solved.
This is the entirety of the content detailing the confirmations that I can find in the article.
> By his count, Holland and his team have confirmed 57 of Little’s 93 confessions, not including 21 in Southern California
That's a definitive statement. I agree that it would have been nice if the article had included a bit more regarding how they were confirmed (assuming it's reasonable to release such information - even if vague - at this point, as it may not be).
These techniques may be useful for serial killers (although we don't know, there's no research) but we know these interrogation techniques have caused many miscarriages of justice.
I would think it's also logical that serial killers tend to focus on women and children because they are generally easier to overpower than another male. There is probably also a sexual component to killing and I would guess that most serial killers tend to be heterosexual, hence why they mostly target women.
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_numb...
Maybe I didn't have my coffee on time!