|
OutOfPrint posted:This isn't necessarily true. Serial killers tend to be impulsive and, well, stupid. This is only based on the serial killers we know about, though, so isn't it more accurate to say that the only serial killers the police are capable of catching are the stupid, impulsive ones?
|
#
?
May 11, 2019 10:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 17:02 |
|
|
Your Gay Uncle posted:Don’t forget the two cops who returned a physically beaten and drugged 14 year old Konerak Sinthasomphone To Jeffery Dahlmer’s apartment where he was promptly murdered. They even missed the decomposing body of a previous victim in the apartment . They punished one of the officers by making head of the police union for 5 years! Yeah that was screwy, though I do hear that partially happened because Dahmer could be scarily persuasive and charismatic when he could be bothered to put the effort in Also anyone hear who hasn't read the graphic novel My Friend Dahmer, you should do yourself a favor and go read it right away, as it's amazing
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2019 11:15
|
|
|
Whybird posted:This is only based on the serial killers we know about, though, so isn't it more accurate to say that the only serial killers the police are capable of catching are the stupid, impulsive ones? That's possible, but I think it overstates how difficult it is to be a serial killer. Any serial killer who targets any combination of a) sex workers, b) minorities, c) non-locals, d) random victims without a clear pattern, or, in the case of angels of death, e) the infirm and hospice bound, especially across multiple cities, down highways, or across state lines, means he or she would need to be caught literally red handed to be caught at all. Or, I guess, be an idiot and taunt the police like Dennis Raider. As horrific as it is, all of that, plus good ol' fashioned police incompetence and laziness, makes getting away with serial murder easy enough for a stupid, impulsive person like Gary Ridgeway or Henry "Seeping Eye" Lucas to get away with it for years.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 15:55
|
|
|
My favourite "smart" serial is the BTK killer who got caught because he was taunting the police with letters and wanted to send them a floppy disk but he wasn't sure if they had any way of tracing the disk back to him so he just asked the cops who of course lied and said no. Then he sent the disk and they restored fragments of a deleted file of his church newsletter off it. A file that had his name on under "last modified by" FreudianSlippers has a new favorite as of 16:15 on May 13, 2019 |
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 16:10
|
|
|
Where I live everyone called the old hospital Murdermount,it's name was actually Marymount. I thought it had to do with the quality of care until I found out about Donald Harvey. Dude claimed to have killed at least a dozen people in the 10 months he worked there as an orderly. He didn't use the same method to kill all his patients,or his roommate and neighbors,he'd poison some,suffocate some and at least one poor bastard got a coat hanger shoved into his catheter and that caused an abdominal puncture. He did this for 17 years at 3 different hospitals in Ky and Ohio. But the nuns at Murdermount liked him so he had that going for him. 
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 16:46
|
|
|
OutOfPrint posted:That's possible, but I think it overstates how difficult it is to be a serial killer. Any serial killer who targets any combination of a) sex workers, b) minorities, c) non-locals, d) random victims without a clear pattern, or, in the case of angels of death, e) the infirm and hospice bound, especially across multiple cities, down highways, or across state lines, means he or she would need to be caught literally red handed to be caught at all. Or, I guess, be an idiot and taunt the police like Dennis Raider. Richard Kuklinski probably wouldn't have been caught (at least not for a while) had he not been involved with the mob. He killed using a wide variety of methods in a time and location with a lot of murders, so there was no pattern to try and track. He only got caught because of a major mistake involving his method of freezing bodies to disguise the time of death when he once didn't let the body thaw completely and the coroner found ice crystals in the corpse.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 16:55
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:Richard Kuklinski probably wouldn't have been caught (at least not for a while) had he not been involved with the mob. He killed using a wide variety of methods in a time and location with a lot of murders, so there was no pattern to try and track. He only got caught because of a major mistake involving his method of freezing bodies to disguise the time of death when he once didn't let the body thaw completely and the coroner found ice crystals in the corpse. Also him confessing to a bunch of murders to an undercover cop didn't help.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 16:59
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:Yeah that was screwy, though I do hear that partially happened because Dahmer could be scarily persuasive and charismatic when he could be bothered to put the effort in Going to second that; Derf never tries to make excuses for him and doesn't try to humanize him either. It's literally just "I was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in high school before he murdered anybody. This is the story. Make of it what you will."
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 17:09
|
|
|
Solice Kirsk posted:Also him confessing to a bunch of murders to an undercover cop didn't help. And he only really got hit by an undercover cop because he was a mobster, which is basically catnip for undercover cops or weak-willed gangsters who wear a wire as soon as you put pressure on them.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2019 17:26
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:Going to second that; Derf never tries to make excuses for him and doesn't try to humanize him either. It's literally just "I was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in high school before he murdered anybody. This is the story. Make of it what you will." Kinda depends on what you mean by humanize, one of the most important things is that Derf makes it clear that he separates the Dahmer he knew and the murderer he became, he definitely humanizes the former, but is clear that he has pretty much no sympathy for the latter beyond the fact that he used to be the former
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2019 07:57
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:Kinda depends on what you mean by humanize, one of the most important things is that Derf makes it clear that he separates the Dahmer he knew and the murderer he became, he definitely humanizes the former, but is clear that he has pretty much no sympathy for the latter beyond the fact that he used to be the former That implies Dahmer changed, instead of having a public face and a private face. One that is nice and charming, and one which is a serial killer. They are the same person. But he just kept the serial killing secret.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2019 08:20
|
|
|
Tashilicious posted:That implies Dahmer changed, instead of having a public face and a private face. One that is nice and charming, and one which is a serial killer. Well I was talking about before he actually murdered anyone(and thus most of what the comic covers), prior to that he was just a disturbed weirdo
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2019 11:49
|
|
|
In 1318 Joan of Leeds decided that she didn't want to be a nun anymore, or as archbishop William Melton described it "impudently cast aside the propriety of religion and the modesty of her sex." She faked an illness and pretended to be dead by crafting a lifesize dummy in her likeness. Apparently this worked because the female anatomy is a mystery and life sometimes resembles a Monty Python sketch. The dummy was buried and Joan was free to to enjoy what the archbishop called carnal lust and wander at large to the notorious peril to her soul and to the scandal of all of her order. In other words, she hosed a lot and didn't feel guilty about it.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2019 16:19
|
|
|
Badass
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2019 16:49
|
|
|
My favourite historical figure is the woman who was an actress and a duelist and who loved to get involved with women. She dueled men who insulted her and won. She broke into a nunery to break her girlfriend out and gently caress her. quote:Eventually, she grew bored of Sérannes and became involved with a young woman. When the girl's parents put her away in the Visitandines convent in Avignon, La Maupin followed, entering the convent as a postulant. In order to run away with her new love, she stole the body of a dead nun, placed it in the bed of her lover, and set the room on fire to cover their escape.[3] Their affair lasted for three months before the young woman returned to her family. La Maupin was charged in absentia—as a male—with kidnapping, body snatching, arson, and failing to appear before the tribunal. The sentence was death by fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_d%27Aubigny
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 08:32
|
|
|
 Shih Yang quote:She is widely considered to be the most successful pirate in history, based on the fact that she commanded the largest crew ever assembled, and that she died in her own bed as a free woman. She retired at the age of thirty‐five.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 09:29
|
|
|
Duels have probably killed more nobles than the guillotine.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 12:32
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:Duels have probably killed more nobles than the guillotine. Sounds like a worthwhile trend to bring back to the mainstream.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 14:27
|
|
|
Tashilicious posted:My favourite historical figure is the woman who was an actress and a duelist and who loved to get involved with women. Seriously, this is one cool film just waiting to be made.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 15:20
|
|
|
OutOfPrint posted:Sounds like a worthwhile trend to bring back to the mainstream. England tried to ban duels because they were running out of nobles, but the king depended on the nobles to stay in power and they loving loved to duel. So the end result was that duels were frowned upon but rarely prosecuted. The introduction of pistols actually lowered the death rate. Their low accuracy meant that the duelists could fire at each other, survive and leave with their honor intact.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 16:49
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:The introduction of pistols actually lowered the death rate. Their low accuracy meant that the duelists could fire at each other, survive and leave with their honor intact. I also read somewhere that there usually was a sort of a non-spoken agreement that both will purposefully miss, to that the parties can say that the duel happened but both participants were guaranteed to escape the ordeal alive. The ones who tried to actually hit were considered assholes.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 17:41
|
|
|
Der Kyhe posted:I also read somewhere that there usually was a sort of a non-spoken agreement that both will purposefully miss, to that the parties can say that the duel happened but both participants were guaranteed to escape the ordeal alive. The ones who tried to actually hit were considered assholes. Pretty much. Nobody usually wants to murder another person or actually get killed over their honor unless it's an exceptionally honor-driven society, so it was considered polite to try and get the duel to end before any shots were fired and not to intentionally fire to kill. People who actually used a duel as a means to kill their opponent were considered bloodthirsty and people to be avoided.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 18:02
|
|
|
Yeah, duels weren't really done out of a desire for revenge or anything, but were instead a ritual to publicly restore your honour. Killing your opponent didn't really come into play in most cases. Duel fun facts! - Representatives of German student fraternities met with the German president in 1953 to personally assure him that they wouldn't use duels as a way to settle affairs of honour anymore. However, the so-called "Bestimmungsmensur" (which is basically a highly ritualistic approximation of a duel and is seen as a way to build character and display your masculinity) is still alive and well in some of those fraternities - Until 1983, the Catholic Church forbade all duels under threat of excommunication, going so far as to even excommunicat onlookers and all those knowing about the duel and not trying to stop it. The 1983 Canon Law Codex doesn't include this anymore, as duels have largely fallen out of use. In German-speaking Europe, it's still the rule that Catholic student fraternities stricly reject any form of duelling or Mensur - The Nazis initially loosened the duel ban in Germany, but after a duel between two high-ranking nazis ended with one them dying in 1937, Hitler banned all forms of duelling again - The 1908 summer olympics had pistol duelling as an associate event - The last known duel in France happend in 1967 between two rivalling members of parliament
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 18:16
|
|
|
To quote the wiki article of the ironically named Union general Jefferson Davisquote:...Nelson was quite an imposing figure over Davis. William Nelson got his nickname, "Bull," in no small part to his stature. Nelson was 300 pounds and six foot two inches, described as being "in the prime of life, in perfect health." Davis was quite small in comparison, measuring five foot nine, and reportedly only 125 pounds So General Wright sends Davis back to Louisville and quote:Davis arrived in Louisville in the afternoon on Sunday, September 28, and reported to the Galt House early the next morning at breakfast time. The Galt House continued to serve as the command's headquarters for both Buell and Nelson. This, like most mornings, was the meeting place for many of the most prominent military and civil leaders. When Davis arrived, and looked around the room, he saw many a familiar face, and joined Oliver P. Morton, Indiana's Governor....
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 18:29
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:Pretty much. Nobody usually wants to murder another person or actually get killed over their honor unless it's an exceptionally honor-driven society, so it was considered polite to try and get the duel to end before any shots were fired and not to intentionally fire to kill. People who actually used a duel as a means to kill their opponent were considered bloodthirsty and people to be avoided. In other cases there would be no honor lost if both people showed up to the duel but the servants they took with them talked them both down. A pretty significant amount of it was really just posturing. Then they could both say "well yeah I totally would have shot/stabbed the guy but Jeeves convinced me that it just wasn't worth killing somebody over."
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 19:50
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:In other cases there would be no honor lost if both people showed up to the duel but the servants they took with them talked them both down. Which was another advantage with pistols. Unlike swords they have to be loaded and reloaded which left the servants with a lot of time they could use to talk them down.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 20:44
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:In other cases there would be no honor lost if both people showed up to the duel but the servants they took with them talked them both down. A pretty significant amount of it was really just posturing. Then they could both say "well yeah I totally would have shot/stabbed the guy but Jeeves convinced me that it just wasn't worth killing somebody over." Isn't that what happened with Hamilton? He decided he had to accept for his honor but publicly claimed he would be throwing the duel? Presumably expecting Burr to do the same.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 20:48
|
|
|
Aphrodite posted:Isn't that what happened with Hamilton? What he didn't realize is that Burr was just that big of a choad
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 20:57
|
|
|
System Metternich posted:Yeah, duels weren't really done out of a desire for revenge or anything, but were instead a ritual to publicly restore your honour. Killing your opponent didn't really come into play in most cases. More fun facts: Finland abolished all leniency towards "duel-induced manslaughter" in a law revision act of 1969. Before that, it was sort-of acceptable to have duels, but you needed to have a doctor, assistants and witnesses, and the assistants were required to make "an honest effort" to try to end the dispute before the duel took place. Otherwise everyone involved went to jail along with the "winner". Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea when the last legal duel took place.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 21:04
|
|
|
Aphrodite posted:Isn't that what happened with Hamilton? There’s a strong suggestion that Hamilton was suicidal after the death of his son in a prior duel. He put on his glasses (suggesting to Burr that he was trying to aim carefully) but told his second not to bother setting the hair trigger on the pistol, then fired a shot that was a near miss. It’s possible that he was goading Burr into thinking it was a duel for his life to allow himself to be killed.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 22:36
|
|
|
There were whole books written on the etiquette of duelling. They laid out everything from the acceptable response to being accused of being an idiot vs a fool vs a buffoon, to exactly how many times a person should apologise for refusing to accept the other's offer of an apology for failing to apologise for the original incident.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2019 23:32
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:There’s a strong suggestion that Hamilton was suicidal after the death of his son in a prior duel. He put on his glasses (suggesting to Burr that he was trying to aim carefully) but told his second not to bother setting the hair trigger on the pistol, then fired a shot that was a near miss. It’s possible that he was goading Burr into thinking it was a duel for his life to allow himself to be killed. I like this theory because it suggests that this was the last "gently caress you" in a long, long relationship based around an alternating series of gently caress yous.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2019 14:38
|
|
|
System Metternich posted:Yeah, duels weren't really done out of a desire for revenge or anything, but were instead a ritual to publicly restore your honour. Killing your opponent didn't really come into play in most cases. That's actually because it was riding on a fave of faddish popularity at the time!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWlAIcwxxD0 Not quite full on dueling though. It was a trend to have mock duels with pistols that fired wax bullets in the early 1900s, totally nonlethal. There were whole leagues for it and everything.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2019 22:40
|
|
|
During the Viking Age a form of duel called Hólmganga was common in the Nordic countries. These were usually fought to first blood not to death using either a geographical feature such as a hill or island or if neither of those were available a square encircled by ropes on stakes. However this became a problem when duelists would travel around and claim ownership over land or animals or women's hand in marriage and then basically use it as a way to force those who didn't want to duel to pay them not to duel or else win the hólmganga and just take it. Which lead to it being outlawed.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2019 00:28
|
|
|
Der Kyhe posted:I also read somewhere that there usually was a sort of a non-spoken agreement that both will purposefully miss, to that the parties can say that the duel happened but both participants were guaranteed to escape the ordeal alive. The ones who tried to actually hit were considered assholes. That's called deloping, and was not a universal practice. Some codes duello even explicitly forbade it, e.g., because it it was considered dangerous to the bystanders (dueling pistols being notoriously inaccurate).
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2019 09:28
|
|
|
Ooh! We're talking about duelling? Than allow me to share one of my favorite incidents, the duel between William Adam and Charles James Fox; I added the wiki link to the latter for he is the more interesting of the two, and also it is needed to get an idea of his appearance - specifically, how goddamn fat he was. Anyway, around 1787, Fox accused Adam of supplying British forces in the war against the American colonies with inferior quality gunpowder. Adam, responded with a demand for a duel. Fox approached this very nonchalantly; on the day, he was advised to turn his body so he wouldn't be firing head-on against Adam, so as to provide a smaller target. Fox replied along the lines that, given his corpulence, frankly, it wouldn't matter if he was head-on or in profile. Shots were exchanged, Fox missed, but Adam hit; however, the wound was not fatal, the reason being, as Fox later asserted, because Adam was using the gunpowder he was supplying the British army with.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2019 09:44
|
|
|
ishikabibble posted:
Wax bullets weren't harmless though. People still were inured and it was easy to mistake real bullets for wax bullets so people decided that it just wasn't worth it.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2019 12:10
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:During the Viking Age a form of duel called Hólmganga was common in the Nordic countries. These were usually fought to first blood not to death using either a geographical feature such as a hill or island or if neither of those were available a square encircled by ropes on stakes. Also the incessant honor killings eventually led to literal fines being levied for murder.... otherwise it would be tit for tat until nobody was left. Except if you killed a thrall, that was more like a "my bad" kinda thing
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2019 12:36
|
|
|
Samovar posted:however, the wound was not fatal, the reason being, as Fox later asserted, because Adam was using the gunpowder he was supplying the British army with. 
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2019 01:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 17:02 |
|
|
Zopotantor posted:That's called deloping, and was not a universal practice. Some codes duello even explicitly forbade it, e.g., because it it was considered dangerous to the bystanders (dueling pistols being notoriously inaccurate). I don't think the assertion that dueling pistols were inaccurate would have been true. Smoothbore weapons have a notorious reputation for inaccuracy, but this comes from military firearms. Black powder creates a ton of fouling in the barrel when fired because of how inefficiently it burns, which gradually makes it harder and harder to shove bullets down the barrel of a muzzleloading weapon. Because you can't stop to clean every 3 or 4 shots in a pitched battle, soldiers were issued slightly undersized bullets (the Brown Bess was nominally .75 caliber but usually fired a ball around .69 caliber) that would easily be shoved down even a filthy barrel. This came at the cost of a ton of windage (the gap between the bullet and the barrel) that reduced accuracy until a musket could barely hit a man-sized target at 100 yards. Even without rifled barrels, you could get perfectly fine accuracy by using a bullet that was tightly fitted to the barrel and modern testing can prove this. Dueling pistols were often expensive weapons that came in cased sets with all the tools they needed to work, including individual bullet molds. I don't know of anything suggesting that they were supplied with deliberately undersized molds, as they would be kept scrupulously clean before and after the duel. Many of them (including the guns Hamilton and Burr used) had hair triggers that could be set to an extremely light pull for accuracy, which again suggests that accuracy was intended. The warning against deloping due to the risk of hitting bystanders is one that exists even today for a very practical reason: bullets have to go somewhere. It's why many professional shooters and agencies recommend against or even expressly forbid attempting to fire warning shots or trying to wound an assailant with limb shots rather than aiming for the center of mass. Every bullet that doesn't hit the target is going to hit something, which with some guns could be a mile or more away, and hits at oblique angles on hard surfaces like pavement (such as what would happen trying to shoot at someone's legs) can cause ricochets. Deliberately firing to miss when you didn't have a solid backstop behind you would risk sending a bullet God knows where hundreds of yards into the distance.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2019 16:32
|
|