I just always assumed that serial killers like that of Jeffrey and Gacy probably smelled like rot and pure ass.
Gacy's home began to smell after his first kill, I think. His wife complained about it, but he said it was a dead animal, IIRC. This was early when he still had her as his beard. When they split and she moved out, he had more time to kill boys. With more bodies, more smell, so neighbors complained; he claimed an issue with plumbing backing up or flooding or something. He then hired boys to dig around and spread lime everywhere down in the crawl space. Some of the boys definitely dug their own graves throughout this spree.
John remodeled pharmacies and had offered Robert a job when visiting the pharmacy he worked in. Robert went off with John, never to return. Investigators ran a background check on John, found his prior molestation conviction, and obtained a search warrant for his home.
Allegedly, Robert's female coworker had borrowed his jacket prior to his departure. She'd left a receipt for a roll of film to be developed in the pocket, which was in the jacket when Robert put it on and left with John. Subsequently, investigators found the receipt from Robert's jacket in Gacy's house, providing them the evidence of his presence in Gacy's home.
From this, they placed Gacy on round-the-clock surveillance and sat on his house. When Gacy realized he was being surveilled, he invited them inside his home as it was cold outside in their cars. Once inside, a detective wound up turning on a heater; the air coming in from the vents allegedly wafted in a decomp smell, triggering a second search warrant that ultimately lead them to 30 or so bodies in the crawl space. Oddly to the detectives, Robert Piest wasn't among them; he was dumped in the Des Plaines river as Gacy had run out of space.
I use the allegedly's because it was later admitted by the detectives that they'd fabricated the evidence to secure the warrants. IIRC, they likely coerced the pharmacy coworker to lie for them by telling them that John was for sure their man. Gacy wasn't stupid and wouldn't have invited them in if it smelled like death. He also mentioned the plumbing issues that should've been an okay cover (assuming the smell wasn't like straight cadaverine from putrefaction).
Given how freezing Chicago winter's are, the ground in the crawl space was likely frozen, too. I believe it took quite a while for them to locate Robert Piest's body as the river had froze over, too. Anyway, the idea that turning on a little heater brought on the stench of death seems unlikely. They almost certainly framed a guilty man.
For more information on this, I recommend Bob Motta Jr.'s podcast,
Defense Diaries. He's the son of one of Gacy's original lawyers. It's this podcast that broke the fabricated evidence news.
Pickton is just an incredibly gruesome story, his whole live was disgusting and its one of those cases were is an entire community, no fucking way no one else knew that something fucked up was up at that pig farm. .
Robert Pickton is along the same lines. He got away with kidnapping and killing prostitutes in Vancouver, Canada for many years. He chopped up his victims and fed them to his pigs. Beyond the pisspoor job by the RCMP and their ignorance of the situation is a supposition that Pickton couldn't have possibly worked alone. Not only is it incredibly difficult to coordinate what he did, but there were constant parties at his farm and Pickton is assumed to be too dull and stupid to have planned it all out and carried it out so effectively. There's an assumption that Pickton was a fall guy, both for the group that committed the murders and for the RCMP and VPD who desperately needed to close the case due to public backlash.
I thought it was believed that Pickton was doing body disposal for the chapter of HA he'd party with?
the other three are terrifying because it wasn't just killing someone , but restraining and videotaping them for long periods of time for all sorts of torture. In the case of the toybox i remember reading how a ton of hillbillies knew the family had drugged sex slaves and they participated in the torture, they even raped them at parties or watch as dogs fucked the women while they all had a beer. The tape transcripts and the photos of the sex dungeon are nightmare fuel.
Did you see that a few years back, someone had submitted a public records request or FOIA for the files on the Toy Box Killer's case? All these years, the transcript audios online were just random people reading it, but the actual MP3 of his tape was sitting around.
Here's the
actual tape the women would hear when waking up in shackles. Fucking horrific, this piece of shit. You can compare to the video of his talking voice in the YouTube video. It's always terrible to remember that he died before any conviction. He's not proven to have murdered anybody, by the way.
I'd like to know more about Israel Keyes, but that ain't happening, lol.
Post from another
thread with more SK stuff, but relevant shit below is expounded on post-quote:
Y'all seen the John Wayne Gacy series on HBO, The Devil In Disguise? It and the Dean Corll one, The Clown and the Candyman are very good. Those guys were some of the worst, fuck. There was a decent podcast on JWG by the son of his first lawyer. He revealed that the detectives who were tailing John after Robert Piest went missing actually planted the evidence to get their warrant. Pretty interesting.
Oh, the Israel Keyes podcast True Crime Bullshit is seriously unsettling. I only got a few episodes in, but the dude describes what he did to that couple in Vermont and it genuinely disturbed me enough to want to stop. Not that it matters, but just for reference, that's not really common at all for me. Oh, Project Warhead is a great podcast on global efforts to take down those fucking weirdo CSAM rings.
The True Crime Bullshit podcast has a lot of information. I have no idea how it's doing now, though. I think the dude behind it started pursuing a bunch of random shit in the later seasons. I only did a few episodes of the initial season, but stopped. There's an episode that describes pretty graphically what he did to the couple in Vermont.
I've seen all sorts of fucked up shit online, know quite a bit about SK's, and am good at compartmentalizing when reading up on sickos. YRMV, but I was quite disturbed by that episode and told my GF at the time that I didn't want her listening to it (not in a controlling way; she just respected my gauge for what she could handle).
It should be noted that the FBI had absolutely zero information on the Currier's disappearance prior to him volunteering it. It sucks because Israel really, really wanted to be executed fast. He didn't want his daughter to find out about him being a necrophile; pretty sure he also raped the men, too. But he essentially told the feds that he'd give them more murders if they could speed up the execution and keep the gritty details private and out of the papers.
Unfortunately, details made it to local papers, he became less forthcoming, then subsequently killed himself in his cell. The interrogation videos/audios are online. His stupid laugh is so annoying, especially with how nonchalantly he talks about murdering that couple. He says something like, "nobody ever thinks something like this could happen to them." Ugh.
Random, but someone found him on Google Streetview about a year before being caught:
Those Gacy/Corll HBO docs are on torrent sites and are highly recommended.
And I’m being cliche, but the zodiac killer. He’s clearly not a smart man but the fact that his codes have remained uncracked for nearly 60 years… And one being cracked just a year ago! I don’t think there’s any real clues in the remaining ones. He doesn’t seem like someone who would ever give any real possibility of being caught, just clues, but I’d like to know what it says.
Why do you think he's clearly not a smart man?
But Zodiac is interesting to me because his killing wasn't motivated by some deranged desire brought out by the rejection of a mother's love or a spurned love interest or whatever. If it was, he never said anything about that.
Perhaps he was trolling, but wasn't he pretty clear that he believed his victims had to be his personal slaves in the "paradice" afterlife?
I take a lot of interest in cases that flew under the radar for extended periods of time. Most of the people we think of when we consider serial killers are like Dahmer and Ramirez: deviant degenerates with brains wired in ways that we can't begin to understand. What I like to consider are people like Leonard Lake and Charles Ng who created an entire rape dungeon and got away with kidnapping victims for a very long time, and then a very stupid mistake got them caught. As I recall, Charles stole a vice from a shop and Leonard came back around to apologize and pay for it. Shop owner wasn't having it and got the cops there. Lake assumed it was for the murders and committed suicide in the interrogation room after confessing and revealing Ng's identity.
I think they were driving the car of one of the victims and Lake gave a fake ID to the cops. The fake ID didn't match the car, but was linked to the rape ranch spot. The reserve officer who witnessed the vise being stolen got into the car's trunk, too. It had an illegal gun with a silencer on it. I know little about their case, but I think were cooked so Lake's cyanide wasn't the dumbest.
EARONS is a perfect candidate for flying under the radar, going on for extended periods of time (one of the most prolific criminals ever, IMO), and also involved a funny shoplifting incident, albeit not to get him caught. He's one of the worst to me. Him leaving semen everywhere got him caught, which wasn't even a concern during his heyday. He would've gotten away with it if not for science advancing.
It's actually crazy because they were going to throw out the last of the DNA samples from their freezer. I'm pretty sure it was actually Paul Holes who preserved them. Then he saw
Barbara Rae-Venter solve the
Bear Brook murders with genetic genealogy and linked up with her (though their use of that online database wasn't fully legal, IIRC).
That's what freaked me out so much about BTK, he was doing this stuff for years but at the same time he was by all accounts a loving husband and father to his children as well as Cub Scout leader and member of his church council. It's like there was this completely normal life built around a very evil core.
I'm pretty sure BTK was a controlling asshole who would fuck with people's dogs as the local dog catcher. He'd also stand oddly close to bushes.
Richard Kulinski AKA the Iceman was charged with 17 murders and claims to have committed over 100.
Ice Man is widely understood by folks knowledgeable on mafioso to be FOS with his exaggerated killings.
