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I've been on a True Crime
spreehabit over the past few weeks. This happens every year or so. This year, among other material, I listened to the audiobook Hunt For The Green River Killer about the initial investigation into Gary Ridgway (I do recommend this book). Additionally, earlier this week, I watched American Nightmare on Netflix about the so-called "Gone Girl" case in Vallejo, California. Netflix streteches out what should be a 90 min doc into 3 almost hour long episodes. The directors also shoehorn in a MeToo theme towards the end and, with some selective editing, make a single female police look like the only pure police hero. They are swimming as hard as they can against the riptide of a poor business model.In Hunt For the Green River Killer, you see just how complex a "Task Force" investigation at scale is. The various intertwined jurisdictions in and around Seattle threw everything they had at trying to catch (then unknown) Ridgway in the 1980s. The result was so many possible leads and suspects that they drowned in their own noise. At one point, the lab work backlog was over 50 years. At other points, they had at lest two suspects that, at the time, looked almost like sure things. The authors do a good job of then demonstrating how obvious it was that those suspects were in no way sure things. This shows the level of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning that can crop up in these kind of investigations even in otherwise experienced and talented cops.
The Ridgway people even brought in the legendary FBI behavior psych unit (of "Mindhunter" fame). Their composite profile of the killer was along the lines of "white male between 30-50, does a manual labor type job, drinks beer, smokes, may have prior military service or outdoors interests." Again, the authors point out that that profile narrows it down to .... 40% of all men living in Seattle! Interesting and also infuriating to see how far people can build a career off of what amounts to a Forer statement.
As a fun side note: Even back in the 1980s, you had pro-sexworker women's groups who demanded the police "do more!" with the investigation, complete with statements like "if this had happened to a bunch of high school cheerleaders and not prostitutes, we would already have an arrest!" It's turtles all the way down, and Witches v. Patriarchy all the way back up, I guess.
With American Nightmare, due to its recenecy, I won't give out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that the police actually try to employ Occam's Razor and go with a basic explanation first but reality intervenes and a fairly wild story unfolds instead. The initial investigating cops don't come out looking good - although I feel like the Netflix editing team was responsible for thumbing the scales hard in this case.
The question I find myself asking in regards to both is; just how well equipped is American law enforcement (outside of the FBI) for complex investigations without a pretty obvious narrative with a lot of obvious circumstantial pointers? An example of what I mean here is; when a drug murder happens, any decent police in the area will know "this was a drug murder. the victim was a known dealer." A slightly above average police probably has some awareness of the recent conflicts between the locals gangs and can therefore say, at least, "It was probably this crew that knocked this guy off, now I just have to try to figure out who exactly did it."
With the "whodunnits" of serial killer victims and frankly just bizarre circumstances of cases like that of American Nightmare, do cops have a playbook / infrastructure / support to actually perform a full investigation effectively? The simple narrative (which Netflix eagerly jumps to without second thought) is that "Cops are often stupid / lazy / racist / sexist / corrupt and so they don't solve cases." I don't buy this for a whole host of reasons. You can debtate me on that, but I'd prefer we stay focused on the question of "are police departments setup to handle complex investigations?" The Ridgway investigation is particularly illuminating, I think; a bunch of well intentioned and talented cops eventually buried themselves in a volume of work that was utterly unmanagable. They really did pull out all of the stops and, in so doing, pretty much led themselves back to square one where their only hope was catching Ridgway in the act. (What ended up actually leading to the arrest was a 20 year wait and the advent of DNA technology, which is just as much of a magical solution)
The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare. American Nightmare gets a netflix special and Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and Jeffrey Dahmer get hundreds of books, documentaries, and podcast about them because they are so rare and bizarre. The "murders that matter" to use a slightly indelicate phrase are those that are part of a larger anti-social pattern; drugs, gang violence, preventable domestic violence, etc. I'd much rather have a PD that is doing the leg work day in and day out to know about the goings on in bad neigborhoods so that once a murder does occur, they can jail the offender swiftly and, hopefully, interrupt a retaliatory cycle.
I have only the deepest sympathy for the victims of the "one in a million" crimes of serial killers etc. But I must admit that, at a societal level, these aren't things we can really systemically remedy (same goes for a lot of the more sensational gun violence incidients. See: Las Vegas). What we can do at a systemic level is police and enforce known areas of persistent anti-social behavior aggressively.
So, again, two primary lines of questioning:
My understanding as an outsider aligns with yours. The vast majority of murders are either really easy to solve ("he was probably shot by that guy who stole his girl who he's been beefing with for the last three months") or almost impossible to solve ("he could have been shot be any one of 100 gang bangers in the neighborhood"). The genuine who-dun-its are more fun and interesting, but far rarer, and there's probably no systematic way to solve them. At best, you can throw some smart people at these cases and maybe they'll be lucky enough to identify and pursue the right thread. But ultimately, these cases have a terrible cost-to-success ratio for police forces and probably shouldn't be prioritized as a high-level objective. Maybe there's room for private investigators here?
EDIT - Thinking more about it, it makes sense for the FBI to have a system in place for dealing with complex, especially dangerous criminals, like serial killers or Ted Kaczynski types. From a law-and-order perspective, it's probably worth it to spend a lot of money and resources to take these guys out because they set bad precedents and spread social contagions.
Do most serial killers spread social contagions, though? Obviously guys like the Unabomber who've actually communicated with the media are one thing, but it feels like a lot of serial killers targeting the margins of society will never get any meaningful engagement whilst conducting their business. It's only after their investigation, capture and public trials that the real visibility becomes a thing.
I don't know about "most" serial killers, but IIRC, a lot of the most high-profile ones were big in the 1970s and early 80s, and then serial killing went into decline. Like school shootings, it seemed to be partially driven by social contagion.
From my true crime reading, the (sort of) consensus is that
There were probably just as many Serial Killers before the 1970s and 80s, but due to policing practices they weren't identified as serial killers. In fact, if their victims were largely prostitutes or other edge-of-society types, its likely the cops launched no investigation whatsoever.
Starting in the 1990s, DNA evidence made it somewhat actually easier to catch bad guys, but perceptively WAY easier. Phrased differently, people started to think they were leaving testable amounts of DNA all over the place and that cops could just zap it with a magic DNA laser and get an immediate location on a 'perp'. This may have acted as an effective enough disincentive for would-be killers.
The awareness of the existence of serial killers and general lower society wide trust made people (especially younger women) generally more aware of surroundings and personal safety.
When smartphones arrive on scene, not only is everyone always carrying around their own personal recording studio and security camera, they're also carrying around perfect evidence of their social network. If someone kills you today, there's a good chance they're in the top 10 of your most recent text messages.
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It comes down to whether they want the attention; I would be surprised if a smart one could not reliably get visibility by putting culture war bait for the media.
If a killer left a note or sent letters to the media saying he was doing it "for President Trump", do you really think the media would be able to contain themselves from making it a national issue? And the right's reaction when there's hints of a killer being trans or an illegal gives little doubt that they'd be just as impossible to contain if they were in a position of power in the media.
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