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Leavemywife posted:Can someone here give me the lowdown on Heaven's Gate? I can't think of where else to ask, or where I could get better sources. just read the wikipedia article man or you could email them and ask. someone will answer. i'm not kidding, i've done it.
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Jan 2, 2018 20:32
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The scary thing about Heaven's Gate is how late in the game suicide was introduced. Late enough that a few followers tried to lobby against it but unsuccessfully. The group had been practicing for like 20 years, and Applewhite always consistently maintained that they'd be able to physically board a UFO, where they'd undergo some sort of process that would implant them in new "vehicles"(bodies). Then all of the sudden when Applewhite decided that he wanted to take his ball and go home, the story changed to "actually the UFO hiding in the wake of a comet that's passing Earth today, we have to kill ourselves so that we'll be taken aboard as it passes". Just shows you how deep the hooks can go in these situations, where even without being primed for suicide in advance the followers were still willing to do what Applewhite said, for the most part.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:02
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Basebf555 posted:I've read that before but I don't remember, does I go into how that story inspired Candyman? In the movie they even reference Ruthie-May but change her name to Ruthie-Jean. This follow up does. https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2014/03/14/how-a-story-about-the-horrors-of-housing-projects-became-part-of-a-horror-movie
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Jan 2, 2018 21:20
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Honestly, tales of Chicago low income housing are worse than a lot of horror stories: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-04-06/news/9704060317_1_schwab-rehabilitation-hospital-friend-girl warning, this isn't a happy tale
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Jan 2, 2018 21:28
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I realize having "favorite" aspects of serial killer stories is weird, but thankfully here we have a thread full of weirdos. One thing I always enjoy in serial killer stories is a good denouement via escape. A victim gets away, calls the cops, and the whole thing comes crashing down. It's not so much that I feel good for the escapee (though there is that), but more that I'm struck by the way the weird and horrible comes crashing into reality. You know, you're out watering your lawn and somebody comes running up screaming that someone locked them up in a basemement full of corpses for a week and for the love of god call the cops. One story with a great escape-reveal is Robert Berdella, "The Kansas City Butcher". Berdella was an awkward nerd from a blue-collar Italian-American family, and in his teens realized that he was gay, and around the same time became obsessed with the movie The Collector, about a man who captures a woman and locks her in his basement. Berdella owned a shop called "Bob's Bizarre Bazaar" that sold primitive art, foreign curios, things like that. And in his spare time he hung out with a lot of drug addicts and male prostitutes, and would let them crash at his house sometimes. One day he decided to kill a neighbor's teenage son, so plied him with booze and pills, shot him full of tranquilizer and tied him to a bed back at his house. Over the next 28 hours, he tortured and raped the boy until the teen accidentally died from asphyxiation; then he hung the body upside down in the basement to drain the blood out, chopped up the body and put it into garbage bags for the trash. He went on to have five more victims, a lot of them hustlers, and keeping them alive and tied up at his place for up to *two weeks*. His tortures were genuinely pretty creepy, including swabbing their eyes with ammonia to blind them, injecting drain cleaner into their larynx to make them mute, running electric current through their genitals, eyes, etc., wrapping their wrists with piano wire to kill the nerves, the works. Some of his victims died as a result of blood loss or infection from Berdella repeatedly ramming large objects up their anus. Throughout it all he kept detailed notes on what acts he committed, time hacks, victim responses, time of death, etc. Then comes the last would-be murder victim, a 22yr old male prostitute he lured in for a date, Chris Bryson. Bryson was apparently a really level-headed guy, since despite the sodomy and torture he figured that staying on Berdella's good side was better than getting on his bad side, so after three days of torture Berdella trusted him and gave him special privileges, like leaving the TV on and putting the remote in his lap, tying his hands in front of him rather than above him so his arms could rest, and most importantly leaving him a pack of cigarettes and book of matches. As soon as Bryson figured Berdella had left the house, he got busy striking matches and steadily burning through the ropes holding him down. As soon as he got free of the ropes, he ran to the window and jumped to the ground (breaking a foot in the process) and ran across the street wearing nothing but a dog collar and burned strands of broken rope. Flagged down a meter-reader, who got him into a house and called the cops, and that was the beginning of the end for Berdella. He ended up getting a long sentence, but dying of a heart attack just four years in, at age 43. So ends the tale of the modern Collector. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Berdella TapTheForwardAssist has a new favorite as of 22:32 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 22:29
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The Alaskan serial killer who did the Dangerous Game thing by dumping women in the middle of nowhere and shooting them for sport, was caught when one of the women got away and reported it. Not immediately though, like a year later because she was a prostitute and assumed to be a liar despite showing up with no clothes screaming for her life from a private aircraft.
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Jan 2, 2018 22:34
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Pick posted:The Alaskan serial killer who did the Dangerous Game thing by dumping women in the middle of nowhere and shooting them for sport, was caught when one of the women got away and reported it. Not immediately though, like a year later because she was a prostitute and assumed to be a liar despite showing up with no clothes screaming for her life from a private aircraft. I was just going to bring up Hansen. He had plenty of time to clean out his plane, his truck and his house but was so arrogant he didn't even stop bragging about it to random people.
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Jan 2, 2018 22:35
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That's at least the second serial killer (that I know of) obsessed with the Collector, Leonard Lake being the other.
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Jan 2, 2018 22:38
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It is strange that he is not better known, considering that he is thought to have one of the highest, if not the highest, kill count in the United States. If every mark on his map actually did have a body, and a lot of them did and were found, then I think it would be… What was it, 70? He was not charged with them all, but it was just because there wasn’t any point.
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Jan 2, 2018 22:39
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I thought Tommy Lynn Sells and Gary Ridgeway were the two most prolific. Or at least suspected most prolific.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:19
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It seems like they don’t really care about getting an exact number. Like, it seems like they just care about establishing serial killer status, they don’t bother going through the courts every time for every murder. Honestly, it comes across as pretty half assed. Although, to be fair, probably the American who is killed the most people (as a serial killer) isn’t known, or was never known as that person.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:26
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Pick posted:It seems like they don’t really care about getting an exact number. Like, it seems like they just care about establishing serial killer status, they don’t bother going through the courts every time for every murder. Honestly, it comes across as pretty half assed.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:28
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PetraCore posted:Did they even go to each spot on the map? 70 missing people is a lot. Families deserve closure. Who, this hansen guy?
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Jan 2, 2018 23:37
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Iirc no they didn’t. Admittedly, a lot of them were so remote it would be difficult to excavate. and, you know, Alaska wilderness. It is likely anybody left out there would be dug up and eaten by animals.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:39
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Solice Kirsk posted:I thought Tommy Lynn Sells and Gary Ridgeway were the two most prolific. Or at least suspected most prolific. Ridgeway is the confirmed most prolific.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:39
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What was the name of that one police officer that had a notebook full of names and one of his associates said that he only made notes for "interesting" kills he made and that there were tons more.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:42
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This is murder, Brad, not loving Pokémon snap!
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Jan 2, 2018 23:44
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Pick posted:Iirc no they didn’t. Admittedly, a lot of them were so remote it would be difficult to excavate. and, you know, Alaska wilderness. It is likely anybody left out there would be dug up and eaten by animals.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:46
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Well, there were also bodies that were found, that were definitely killed by him, but they never found out who they were.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:47
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There's a podcast that does an interview with two of the cops involved in the case and while it's really in depth and interesting, it's also two now-geriatric ex cops from a city with a high murder rate so they're not exactly up to current standards on how to view/what to call gay people. So get ready for some old timey prejudice at first similar to the Dhamer stuff (the victim wasn't returned) and them having brief but gross terminology for gay people and gay practices. They also seem just a little too jovial while telling the story but I guess if you're working around murder cases constantly you're probably going to have some gallows humor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcfbT6ylM_g 16:10 is when they actually get to talking about the case
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Jan 2, 2018 23:49
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That happens a lot when killers are targeting prostitutes and runaways.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:50
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Do you really wanna set a high water mark for would be murderers trying to break someone’s kill count?
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Jan 3, 2018 00:43
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Solice Kirsk posted:That happens a lot when killers are targeting prostitutes and runaways. Which is probably why those groups are targeted, minus some occasional "sex is badbad" serial killer stunted development madness for the prostitutes.
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Jan 3, 2018 00:47
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Solice Kirsk posted:Honestly, tales of Chicago low income housing are worse than a lot of horror stories: 1. You're right: it's not. 2. It seems cliche to say it now, but I remember the "Law & Order" episode based on this. They even used the roach spray detail.
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Jan 3, 2018 00:52
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Pick posted:Iirc no they didn’t. Admittedly, a lot of them were so remote it would be difficult to excavate. and, you know, Alaska wilderness. It is likely anybody left out there would be dug up and eaten by animals. You don’t even really have to go that far from civilization in Alaska to disappear forever. A couple years ago there was a guy who fell off the trail during the Mountain Marathon and they never found him. There were literally thousands of people in the area but he was just gone.
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Jan 3, 2018 02:42
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Glazier posted:You don’t even really have to go that far from civilization in Alaska to disappear forever. A couple years ago there was a guy who fell off the trail during the Mountain Marathon and they never found him. There were literally thousands of people in the area but he was just gone. I mean it's highly likely there are some women he dumped out there who he didn't manage to successfully shoot himself, but who died of exposure. He might have had no idea where they actually died.
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Jan 3, 2018 03:02
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That's stupid. If I were hunting people as a hobby, then I would give them a cash reward and a 3 day/2 night stay at a Hawaiian resort for surviving the game. How are you going to get more contestants if you just leave the winners in the woods to die? Hansen was a terrible host.
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Jan 3, 2018 03:17
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Glazier posted:You don’t even really have to go that far from civilization in Alaska to disappear forever. A couple years ago there was a guy who fell off the trail during the Mountain Marathon and they never found him. There were literally thousands of people in the area but he was just gone. My go-to story for that is always Joe Vogler, who was a bizarrely big deal in early '90's Alaska and the face of an Alaskan independence movement that had a weird amount of momentum behind it. Vogler fell off the face of the earth in 1993, and it was widely publicized and believed to be a government hit of some form, until it turned out that he'd just been killed by a weird survivalist neighbor in an attempted robbery (or apparently a plastic explosives sale gone bad, according to the Wikipedia article). Life in the major cities in Alaska is generally very normal, often more normal than people give it credit for, but when you step a foot outside of that... it can get really weird, really fast.
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Jan 3, 2018 03:19
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Major Alaskan cities, plural? Isn't Juneau like 30,000 people.
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Jan 3, 2018 03:20
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There isn't much information out yet, but Joshua Boyle, the man who was held hostage along with his wife and children by the Taliban for five years, was just arrested on a raft of nasty charges, including sexual assault, giving someone Trazadone against their will, death threats and unlawful confinement. It sounds like he wasn't very stable (or a good decision maker) before going, and snapped even further after returning. https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...m=.b914846b5b02 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42548816 What amazed me was their reasoning for having children while being held hostage. Washington Post posted:Boyle also told AP that he and his wife decided to have children even while held captive because they always planned to have a big family, thinking: “Hey, let’s make the best of this and at least go home with a larger start on our dream family.” So, yeah, she's being raped and given forced abortions, they could be killed any time, but no time like the present to start having kids!
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Jan 3, 2018 03:34
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Bonster posted:There isn't much information out yet, but Joshua Boyle, the man who was held hostage along with his wife and children by the Taliban for five years, was just arrested on a raft of nasty charges, including sexual assault, giving someone Trazadone against their will, death threats and unlawful confinement. It sounds like he wasn't very stable (or a good decision maker) before going, and snapped even further after returning. 
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Jan 3, 2018 03:54
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Bonster posted:There isn't much information out yet, but Joshua Boyle, the man who was held hostage along with his wife and children by the Taliban for five years, was just arrested on a raft of nasty charges, including sexual assault, giving someone Trazadone against their will, death threats and unlawful confinement. It sounds like he wasn't very stable (or a good decision maker) before going, and snapped even further after returning. I genuinely think this guy went to join the taliban/al queda and they eventually got sick of him, sending him back on the promise they'd say they were kept hostage.
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Jan 3, 2018 08:24
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Apropos of the "victims nobody cares about" and also "WTF British Columbia?", I stumbled across a really distinctive serial killer case from Vancouver BC: Gilbert Paul Jordan killed maybe ten women from 1965-1988 (and was only convicted for one case of manslaughter), in a particularly unusual way. Jordan would pick up women in bars or off the street down on Skid Row, often First Nations and sometimes prostitutes, bring them back to his hotel room, and pressure them to drink alcohol heavily until they passed out. And in some cases, he would pour *more* alcohol down their throats while they were unconscious. Jordan was himself a hardcore alcoholic, allegedly drinking 1.5 *liters* of vodka per day. To put it another way, that's like doing 34 shots of vodka. That vast majority of his victims weren't killed, just presumably a horrendous hangover or maybe a trip to the hospital. In the 1980s he was apparently doing this 200 times per year, just picking up women and pressuring them to drink insane amounts for his perverse jollies. So killing 8-10 out of thousands isn't huge numbers, but it's hard to tell if there weren't more that were just written off as normal misadventure. The wiki mentions the Blood Alcohol Content of the women who died, with the highest being 0.79%. For some strange reason, the incident that cracked the case involved a woman who was white and not a prostitute; apparently that was just a bridge too far. He was picked up and successfully charged with manslaughter for "...supplying a lethal amount of liquor to a female alcoholic, who died as a result." He did six years of a fifteen year sentence, was released, and before too long was popping up again in cases of excessively drunk women, despite being under court order to not drink any alcohol whatsoever, and not to hang out with women if it involved alcohol in any way. He died in 2006 at the age of 74, which is pretty drat good for a guy who drinks his vodka by the liter. Wikipedia has a particularly creepy direct quotation, gathered by Vancouver cops when they were tailing him to see what he could be pinned with: Have a drink, down the hatch baby, 20 bucks if you drink it right down; see if you're a real woman; finish that drink, finish that drink, down the hatch hurry, right down; you need another drink, I'll give you 50 bucks if you can take it; I'll give you 10, 20, 50 dollars, whatever you want, come on I want to see you get it all down; you get it right down, I'll give you the 50 bucks and the 13 bucks; I'll give you 50 bucks. I told you that. If you finish that I'll give you $75; finish your drink, I'll give you $20 ..."
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Jan 3, 2018 13:02
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That's one of the weirdest accounts I've read. Was he trying to normalize his alcoholism? Was he actually trying to kill them? Was it some sort of weird OCD thing?
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Jan 3, 2018 13:06
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It can't be stressed enough how little a poo poo the Vancouver PD gave about prostitutes/homeless at the time, which is one of the reasons Picton was able to operate for so long.
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Jan 3, 2018 13:32
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Randaconda posted:It can't be stressed enough how little a poo poo the Vancouver PD gave about prostitutes/homeless at the time, which is one of the reasons Picton was able to operate for so long. That, and if you’re First Nations generally police won’t bat an eye if you up and vanish. “Don’t you people have your own police force back on the res?”
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Jan 3, 2018 14:13
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Olewithmilk posted:I genuinely think this guy went to join the taliban/al queda and they eventually got sick of him, sending him back on the promise they'd say they were kept hostage. Agreed. He'd already been married to the sister of an extremist, and you don't whimsically decide to take your pregnant wife backpacking in Afghanistan.
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Jan 3, 2018 14:56
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Aesop Poprock posted:That's one of the weirdest accounts I've read. Was he trying to normalize his alcoholism? Was he actually trying to kill them? Was it some sort of weird OCD thing? When he's having one-on-one bingefests over 2,000 times in his life, I think it's definitely a compulsion and not just a hobby. Particularly given that he kept doing it even after doing prison time, and after the local government was very aware of his MO. I would say that he looks like more of a "serial manslaughter-er" than a murderer, since 10 out of thousands doesn't look particularly deliberate. But the damning thing is he didn't check himself after the first one or two died, but kept on doing the same thing even though it was clearly potentially lethal, and had definitely been a few times. If I had to armchair analyze it, I'd speculate that (like a lot of the more famous serial killers) it came down to a need for control. If he can take someone and deliberate push her into insensibility on his whim, and potentially kill her, there's probably a mental payoff there for someone like him. I wouldn't imagine that "normalizing alcoholism" was a factor; I've never been an alcoholic but I'd imagine that if you're at 1.5 liters per day, you've more or less made peace with yourself.
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Jan 3, 2018 15:08
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Bonster posted:There isn't much information out yet, but Joshua Boyle, the man who was held hostage along with his wife and children by the Taliban for five years, was just arrested on a raft of nasty charges, including sexual assault, giving someone Trazadone against their will, death threats and unlawful confinement. It sounds like he wasn't very stable (or a good decision maker) before going, and snapped even further after returning. I can't imagine what she's gone through in all of this.
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Jan 3, 2018 15:20
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Not much. One article said it was a sexual and physical assault of a woman and physical assault of a child, and there's a court order banning naming the victims. I would be stunned if it weren't her.
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Jan 3, 2018 16:03
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