Serial murders have dwindled, thanks to improved technology | Hacker News Reader

Serial murders have dwindled, thanks to improved technology

nytimes.com

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Gift Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/nyregion/serial-killers-g...

Thanks kind stranger

Use the upvote button instead of filling the thread with comments that add nothing to the discussion.

Actually I think "thanks kind stranger" adds something to the discussion. A sense of human connection.

Saying “me too” like some brain dead AOLer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

> instead of filling the thread with comments that add nothing to the discussion

Like yours? (And this one...)

58 Karma users shouldn't be telling others how to behave. (See: karma is good for something...).

1) It is indeed my fault for replying, I thought flagging is only available for users with a certain number of karma but apparently you have to click on the comment for the flag button to appear (which is weird).

2) The number of karma I have doesn't affect the correctness of my statement.

No but there is a culture and it behooves you to learn it prior to trying to enforce it.

A simple downvote would suffice as well.

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20090206141746/http://www.ycombi...

I read the whole article by stopping it from loading and toggling reader view, then with your gift link I confirmed that it was complete.

Something I was wondering about in this case ... They tracked the killer through his use of burner phones 10 years ago.

And I obviously know phones continuously ping cell towers.

So that means somewhere out there, there's a database of all cell phones and their locations for all time, with fine-grained resolution? They don't ever delete it, at least not in the last 10 years?

Or it's 1 database per cell provider ? I guess phones ping towers that are not owned by the company that provided the phone

I'd be curious if anyone has a link to a good summary of how this works, and the location tracking implications. Do they have to do a subpoena, or is it just a big database everyone's doing joins against? What's the resolution of the data?

I knew that people obviously get caught due to cell phone tracking -- it comes up in every one of these cases, like the Idaho killer recently. But I'm slightly surprised they reached back 10 years and did it

There’s an LE chart floating around out there, slightly different than this[1] that shows how long carriers keep records.

AT&T in particular keeps records forever. I suspect all the other carriers do as well despite their claims.

1. https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_nbcnews-ux...

Can confirm AT&T retention. In the late 90's they were already approaching trillions with-a-T metadatums.

Federal LE, telecoms, and "the intelligence community" have always worked closely together.

AT&T doesn't merely keep call record data, but does so explicitly to share it with law enforcement. Going back to the 1980s.

<https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record>

<http://epic.org/privacy/nsa/Section-215-Order-to-Verizon.pdf>

You get some insight into it if you carefully read Mahoun’s blog about looking for Bill Ewasko.

This?

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/search...

Bombcar, my good HN buddy, it'd be great if you included the link rather than a few keywords. I've never heard of any of these people before. Additionally, lots of people won't bother to search and won't ever see the cool, interesting thing. Unless that's your intent.. ;)

My intent was to breadcrumb enough but I didn't have the availability to search :)

Wow, that was fascinating. Reminded me of the search for MH370.

Now that I'm at computer I can note that Bill was found: https://youtu.be/2J9wsJb8P1Y

Thanks! Sorry to be that guy, but is there a text write-up of the conclusion you’d recommend? I searched and came across some local news articles and Reddit posts but nothing as detailed as the blog you mentioned (which surprised me that it didn’t have an update including the discovery).

The bones were found in a very strange location "the last place you'd look" and it didn't make sense why he'd end up there - the video provides (during a walk to where the remains were found) about "how would an experienced hiker end up like this" and basically lays out how each step of the journey "made sense" and the last attempt was based on a relatively low detail map - he was heading cross-country to try to get to a road in the shortest distance possible.

It also drives home how you should not deviate from planned travel and always try to back track, but I digress.

Excellent advice, appreciate the digression.

I've been running WiGLE on my phones since 2013 or so and I have 2.1 million observations recorded, notably I don't run this 24/7. I'm just one guy with a phone and I wager I could sus out some interesting patterns from my neighborhood and city. I fully plan to as well, it's one of those back burner projects I keep plotting on. That said it really opened my eyes after they added Bluetooth support sometime ago. I can tell when particular nextdoor neighbors are home just by seeing their Galaxy Watch or earbuds in my network list. I can't even imagine what clever people could do with a continuous stream of wireless observations from thousands of points all recorded 24/7. It makes me feel naked in a way but I trust no one will bother to look my way and I go on with my life but I am at least aware of it. I wonder if normal people would care that corporations and the government can see their travels, patterns and habits and what can be potentially be surmised by such data.

> I can tell when particular nextdoor neighbors are home just by seeing their Galaxy Watch or earbuds in my network list.

I know when the mail arrives even though I can't see the mailbox from where I'm sitting. The number of recognizable bluetooth and wifi beacons is large enough that you can draw all kinds of very privacy invasive conclusions from them. Occupancy is one thing, but also patterns of behavior, and more. Very, very scary stuff and really easy to abuse.

> So that means somewhere out there, there's a database of all cell phones and their locations for all time, with fine-grained resolution? They don't ever delete it, at least not in the last 10 years?

If this surprises you, what do you think the carriers did with all their SMS traffic?

I worked the SMS department of a major carrier about 15 years ago.

We only kept messages for about 2 weeks.

Long term storage would have been crazy expensive and I'm pretty it's illegal to mine that data.

> Long term storage would have been crazy expensive

Not really, an SMS is probably only 200-500bytes to store with metadata so let’s say 1kb just for simplicity.

This site estimates 8.4 trillion SMS per year, globally [0].

So that’s only 8.4trillion kb or 8.4 petabytes.

That’s big, but that’s the whole world.

For comparison, google stores about 2,500 petabytes per day. [1]

So I would guess that not only do they store this forever. There’s also lots of copies and that there’s probably LE firms mining texts for all sorts of pattern recognition, AI stuff.

[0] https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-many-text-messages-are-sen...

[1] https://skill-lync.com/blogs/how-google-handles-over-40000-p...

> Just by walking outside, people are now tracked by ever-present cameras, from Amazon’s Ring units outside homes to surveillance at banks and retail stores

I’m certainly not advocating in favour of serial killers, but I can’t help thinking that George Orwell apparently never envisaged that people would not only welcome Big Brother into their homes, but actually pay for the privilege.

1984 was not about surveillance. Surveillance was not what enabled the state depicted in 1984 to exist. The entire final section of the book explains, in detail why the state in 1984 exists and it's not because of the telescreens.

The telescreens and their usage was a tool in the arsenal of the state, but it wasn't why it functioned, nor how it came into existence.

Well what was it

Control, indoctrination, and fear. The books makes a big deal about language and editing history because of how important they are in framing how people think.

The ration increased from 200 units from 15p units without mention that last years ration was 250. You couldn’t trust anyone including friends or family members etc.

But what’s so masterfully done was the realization that the revolution had become a tool for the state.

IMO, surveillance is a necessary tool for control and fear. It need not be total surveillance (see e.g. the panopticon), but a belief that you will get caught is needed.

But the surveillance was a crucial part of control and indoctrination. Surveillance of the home, never knowing whether or not someone was watching, led Winston Smith, and presumably other citizens, to change their thought patterns. He was literally afraid to have an unapproved thought lest it change detectably his behavior while he was being watched. This was very similar to Soviet-style control where you could never be sure your neighbor wasn’t spying on you.

One big difference, though, is that people in our society generally accept the set of forbidden things.

Do we have any confidence in the narrator in the last section? I assumed that there was no more reason to take any of that as true than there was at any other point in the book.

Probably the only thing that we truly know at the end is that Winston really did love Big Brother.

Although it's many years since I (re-)read the book, I do understand that. Nevertheless, in fiction, the surveillance was apparently mandated by the central government.

In reality, we invite the surveillance home, and give it breakfast.

Or thanks to the end of leaded gasoline, or the advent of legalized abortion, or some combination of the three, or none of this. The only evidence in this article is one serial killer they maybe tracked down after 25 years of searching.

Why would legalized abortion reduce the rate of serial killers?

Reduced child neglect and abuse

With more economic strength comes better child rearing environments. Fewer children means greater economic strength. Greater economic strength leads to less stress. Less stress means better childrearing. Abortion is an unmitigated good for most women who choose it.

> Fewer children means greater economic strength.

I don't think you understand the utility of having children. Neoliberals love this position because it effectively supports importing as many immigrants as possible for megacorps to pay bottom dollar to. There's an entire industry (industrial farming) that loves this.

> Less stress means better childrearing.

The context of this statement is not supported by the unmitigated economic disaster we are currently in, and have been in, since at least the great financial crisis.

> Abortion is an unmitigated good for most women who choose it.

Have you ever wondered why you can almost predict the location of abortion clinics by the number of pawn shops and pay day loan centers? When you break down those locations by race it may become more clear. Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist and racist [0][1] who wished abortion to be used to clean out the mental defectives. Her own words: “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective,” [0]. What's funny is I could've swapped her name out with any 19th and 20th century dictator and you'd believe me.

It would be wonderful if activists stopped hiding behind the banner of freedom and acknowledge the roots of their alleged "unmitigated good".

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/07/21/pl...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221104040930/https://www.pbs.o...

Abusers, rapists, serial rapists, and human traffickers love abortion, because it allows them to destroy "evidence" (unborn children are not typically given a dignified burial, their dismembered, bloodied human remains are painstakingly reassembled in a lab on-site, and then they are hucked into a barrel and carried away in Stericycle vans as "biohazardous waste").

If an abuser can hustle a pregnant mother in for a quickie abortion, the clinic is happy to accomodate him, and then Mom is back on the streets or back into the brothel and making the big bucks. Turning one or two tricks will pay for that abortion, easily. But of course it's preferable that the child didn't live, because we can accurately predict that they'd have a sort of unhappy life, after all.

Abortionists are state-sponsored serial murderers, by any definition, and of course a couple of them have been caught in the act, such as Kermit Gosnell.

The children's mortal remains are reassembled in a lab which is called at some locations, "POC Lab" or "Pieces of Children".

When a so-called medical professional is trained and skilled in decapitating a human, snipping her delicate, half-developed spine with scissors, dismembering her with long-handled forceps and scalpels, and then suctioning out every last trace of the "clump of cells", that sort of takes a moral toll on them.

For Kermit Gosnell, it was only a logical progression for him. He routinely performed "late-term abortions", that is, children who were capable of surviving, and living well, outside the womb. So Gosnell once in a while had a dilemma where a child would be delivered, still alive, still breathing and begging to live. Gosnell's impeccable medical training took charge of the situation, and he snipped her spine and tossed her into the Biohazard Bin all the same.

Kermit Gosnell benefited immensely from technology. He had ultrasound to guide him so he could perform a "safe abortion", that is, not harm the mother physically while he ripped the infant out of her belly. He had sterile tools and an autoclave where he and his staff could easily clean the blood and gore off the instruments so that they would not infect the next mother, or Gosnell himself. Isn't technology wonderful? That big ol' Biohazard Bin and the Stericycle Van that came to pick up barrels full of human remains, they have good technology too; their supply chains are down to a science, and they will clean up any serial killer evidence that Gosnell might have left behind. If only Gosnell would've done something about the adult witnesses.

This is an argument popularized in the book “Freakanomics.” The authors presented data that correlated the legalization of abortion to reduced crime rates 16-18 years later (young men disproportionately commit crime, especially violent crime.) This was ascribed to less unwanted children being raised in bad circumstances.

Later research showed a (I believe even stronger) link between leaded gasoline being phased out and reduced crime later. Environmental lead is well known to have psychological effects, including an increased propensity for violence.

I think the general belief is that environmental lead had the stronger effect, but legalized abortion can’t entirely be counted out, but I’m hardly an expert and I suspect it is all still under debate.

Because you have to be born before you can become a serial killer

When you look at near-history serial killers - ie the famous cases of the 50s-80s, you often find the phrase 'unwanted child' who was neglected/abused by a mother that didn't want the child, often born as a consequence of sex work. In some cases the child was abandoned and sent a broken care system that brought them up with a traumatic childhood.

Legalise abortion and the number of those children brought up with such a defining childhood fall, not completely, but statistically serial killers are rare anyway.

Abortion preponderance is inversely correlated with IQ. Low IQ is correlated with criminality.

Unwanted kids raised poorly are more likely to turn to criminal behavior.

Clearly the people who wrote this article have never been to the city of Chicago. The statistics might just say shootings, but those shootings are perpetrated by the same people and the cops aren't doing anything.

There's no reason to be racist.

If you think it's bad now it means you don't remember how it used to be, because it was a lot worse.

the same people

Unpack this. Which people, precisely, do you mean?

I see what you’re saying but I think I’m this case he means the same individual/gangster doing multiple shootings over an extended period of time which fits the bill for a serial killer. Atleast I hope that’s what he means.

We’ll see. The longer my question goes unanswered, the less likely it is that your overly generous interpretation holds.

Do you think OP is confused what a serial killer is?

That would be the charitable possibility that soligern pointed out. I'm still weighing P_I_Staker's interpretation, pending clarification.

When I read OP my immediate understanding was that they were talking about the same individuals (gang members) committing numerous murders. That makes perfect contextual sense.. I think you’re racism detector was a little overly sensitive here.

The article thesis about technology impact on the prevalence of serial killers doesn't really hold up against the fact that rate of unsolved homicides has sky rocketed since the 60's [1]. One could offer a lot of speculations on how to reconcile the disappearance of "traditional' serial killers with the jump of unsolved homicides. For instance, I have read in the past articles about "experts" warning about a possible epidemic of undetected serial killers...

[1] https://www.murderdata.org/2015/01/how-many-unsolved-murders...

Cell phone ping data from nearest towers can help solve problems. What if missing people reports are not filed? What if dead bodies are not found?

There are many unsolved homicides even today, even though family and friends know who could be behind. It is just that cops can't pin down suspects.

https://archive.today/EFeEG

> By 2018, there were only 12 known serial killers and 44 victims, according to the report

Ok, I’m calling bullshit. There were 27 mass shooting events with >= 4 dead in the US in 2018:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...

(I used 4 dead as the cutoff, since it is close to the mean in the article’s data set.)

If you count people that managed to shoot at least 4 others, then there were 323 attempted serial murders, “resulting in 387 deaths and 1,283 injuries, for a total of 1,670 victims.”

The article may as well be titled “Serial murders can mow be performed in under an hour, thanks to improved technology”

Serial killing and mass killing aren't the same thing. I like to think of mass killing as "parallel killing." The "serial" refers to one killing event after another, whereas mass killing is lots of killing in single events.

Having said that, you are right - technology might be better at finding and stopping serial killers, but doesn't really do much at all for finding and stopping parallel killers. Mass killing is way up, so the article's conclusion is not really all that reassuring.

Mass murder≠serial murder. Serial murder requires three or more murders committed by the same perpetrators with more than a month of time between each murder.

I'm as horrified as you are by the rate of mass shootings in the US but this is a basic misunderstanding of terminology on your part. Criminology distinguishes between mass killings (single event), spree killings (multiple separate killings rapidly with no "cooling off" period between them), and serial killings

I personally suspect inequality in social status among such victims to be rising as well.

Before times, you had propaganda of the deed, serial killers, political violence etc. keeping elites on their toes. Now the Columbine meta has solidified and that has turned Wal*Marts and public schools into shooting galleries for these rage-filled losers to maximize their KDR by shooting in high-density and low-defense areas.

KDR, for the uninitiated, is "kill-to-death ratio":

<https://www.cyberdefinitions.com/definitions/KDR.html>

Kills are by the shooter, death is of the shooter.

The language is pretty descriptive of the phenomenon going on I thought but looks as though others disagree.

It might help to note that it comes from gaming. First-person-shooters I presume.

(I'd meant to include that in my own prior comment.)

Todays mass killers go for their whole body count up front with a machine gun instead of racking up kills slowly over a long serial killing career.

Instant gratification culture man… even the killers don’t have any attention span or patience anymore.

Not really the same profile

sarcasm

Nowadays if somebody wants to commit murder and go unpunished ironically one of the few remaining options is to enter the police.

or get said victim on a bicycle, then run them down in your car and say "I didn't see them"

Yes, technically murder would be hard to prove in such a scenario if it was a crime of passion, but I don’t see how being charged with vehicular manslaughter lets you get away with it.

“I didn’t see them” is not the “get-out-of-jail-free” card when it comes to manslaughter.

It really, truly is at least in my part of the USA. Most drivers who kill people and aren’t found to be drunk will never see the inside of a prison.

Absolutely is in NYC.

The driver was most likely on their phone when it happened, so hopefully there will be some charges filed. I would love to see the precedent set where killing someone while distracted is treated as murder.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/31/1191096086/cyclist-magnus-whi...

Yeah. Now we have parallel murders.

Only until the tech to develop universal serial killers displaces it.

NYTimes has basically created an entire new generation of serial killers with this article by basically advertising to the deranged in the world that there's empty space with their serial killer alter-ego-name on it.

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