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Basebf555 posted:The article pointed out that part of the reason it didn't get attention is because right around that time there were a few other serial killers who were caught and ended up on television and having very public trials(Bundy, Berkowitz). Corll was dead and there weren't even very many pictures of him, so it wasn't as good a story for the media to run with as a guy like Bundy who was a complete ham. There's a pretty interesting book called Serial Killers by Peter Vronsky that gets into this. It's actually pretty common for a serial killer to be ignored if he operates in an area not covered by its own regional media. There was a guy in Poughkeepsie, New York who killed something like ten people, but there was never any news about it because Poughkeepsie is between major media markets. Even the guy who made the pretty lovely Poughkeepsie Tapes film seemingly had no idea there was a real serial killer at large there when he was making his movie.
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Nov 19, 2014 19:44
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Centripetal Horse posted:I think this has probably made at least one appearance in this thread, already, but I've been looking into the West Memphis Three. I tried to watch There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, but it wouldn't load (Amazon Prime), so I clicked on a related video called Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost 1, 2, and 3 are a series of documentaries about the West Memphis Three. The whole case is definitely unnerving, but it's more disgusting than anything else. That Michael Carson kid, holy poo poo. They're insane from grief and the police told them that these weird kids hostile to their way of life did it. The pain of not only having your child die but be killed in such a horrible and degrading way must be unimaginable, and then the cops tell you these kids did it and are trying to worm out of taking responsibility.
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Dec 3, 2014 20:29
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True story: many Americans believe that it's impossible for a false conviction to happen. My father believes that exoneration is a "technicality" that lets guilty people go free and that even if a person was mistakenly arrested they are still probably guilty of something because otherwise the police wouldn't have gone after them. Like, he doesn't believe a trial can wrongly convict someone, though he does think guilty people can go free. It's all really quite terrifying when the Protestant work ethic meets the just world fallacy.
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Dec 7, 2014 15:52
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Good News Everyone posted:I'm gonna go ahead and play devil's advocate here -- what if the West Memphis Three are guilty of the crime?
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Dec 10, 2014 23:52
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Good News Everyone posted:Misskelley was not retarded (not smart, either -- his IQ was borderline), but I feel he was not treated properly at the police station at all. He asked for his father, asked to go home; he was interrogated for hours but only a few minutes are recorded. The only thing that makes me wonder about Misskelley is that he repeatedly confessed. He has an IQ of 70: 69 or below qualifies for disability services and qualifies as an exemption from the death penalty. I have no problem believing he was led to say everything in his confession and that he was incapable of understanding what he was saying.
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Dec 11, 2014 07:41
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A Spider Covets posted:can we talk about scary ghost poo poo and murder mysteries and stuff some more. or maybe accidents involving caves, as i find caves unnerving and unpleasant Well, there's the Devil's Kettle, which features a vertical shaft into which a river flows. And nobody has any idea where the water goes or what geologic processes could have formed a pothole that conducts water away laterally to someplace or other:  That's the mystery hole there on the left. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_C._R._Magney_State_Park#The_Devil.27s_Kettle quote:The park is best known for an unusual waterfall located on the Brule River 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from its mouth.[4] The river splits in two to flow around a mass of rhyolite rock. The eastern flow goes over a two-step, 50 foot waterfall and continues downstream.[2] The western flow surges into a pothole, falling at least 10 feet (3.0 m), and disappears underground.[11] It is believed the water rejoins the main channel of the river or has a separate outlet into Lake Superior, but it has never been located.[6][8] Researchers have dropped brightly colored dyes, ping pong balls, and other objects into the Devil's Kettle without result.[12] There is even a legend that someone pushed a car into the fissure, but given that the Devil's Kettle is wholly inaccessible by road, most commentators dismiss this as hyperbole.[5] I'm pretty sure I read about it in a previous iteration of this thread, but it's still plenty scary to me. I guess there are no confirmed cases of people falling in, but there's a thought for you to consider tonight as you're trying to drift off to sleep.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:20
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Wedemeyer posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inokashira_Park_dismemberment_incident Jesus Christ. It's like an actual version of the poo poo in Japanese horror movies.
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Dec 18, 2014 22:33
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EZipperelli posted:I heard about this, and because I'm a curious and horrible person, looked for the video. Supposedly there is no copy available anywhere on the internets. Confirm/deny? It's been shown on television up to the moment she pulls the trigger. I saw it on some E! (the channel that used to do Talk Soup) special when I was a kid. I remember she pulled the gun out of a blue plastic bag.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:59
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WickedHate posted:Fine, the nuclear football stays as it is, but using it activates a device in the aide's heart that kills him anyway. The president has a black box with a single button on the top. If he presses the button, the Soviet Union is destroyed by atomic hellfire but someone he doesn't know will die (who is not one of the millions incinerated by Soviet or American missiles).
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Jan 3, 2015 07:51
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stickyfngrdboy posted:Ive just watched the pbs documentary of the Willingham case on Netflix, and if there's one thing that and the wm3 case have taught me, it's that people in charge will go out of their way to avoid admitting mistakes and apologising. There was a development in the Columbine High School spree shooting case where the mother of a kid who had known the killers started complaining that she'd filed police reports about them before for threatening and attacking her son, and the chief of police made public statements that she was crazy and no files existed and that he pitied her for being so far gone that she couldn't tell reality from fantasy. Then when Dave Cullen interviewed the guy for his book 10 years later, he admitted that the first thing he did after the killers had been identified was meet with all his cops and destroy all the reports that lady and others had filed about the killers. He called it "one of those cover-you-rear end meetings--you know," in a way that make it clear that he considered them a pretty normal part of being a police officer, even in a ritzy suburb in the middle of nowhere.
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Jan 9, 2015 04:18
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It has some hallmarks of fraud, like going the media route before establishing a business to make or sell the stuff and never letting anyone do more than some initial testing, plus being a huckster showman about it. Plus, it really plays into the lone maverick genius myth that Americans love so much, but what could some guy do in his garage that dupont couldn't? It's not like there aren't lots of people trying to make heat shielding. Plus, why wouldn't his family use the stuff to make money now that he's dead? Or sell what's left of his notes?
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Jan 10, 2015 20:58
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And how does the son of somebody's murder victim contact, hire, and pay the dude without arousing anyone's suspicion? He just starts popping into visitation hours and nobody notices? Do they even have visitation on death row?
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Jan 15, 2015 19:03
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CrotchDropJeans posted:Why does it seem like there were a disproportionate number of serial killers active in the 70s? Were there really more active back then or was it just a combination of improved investigating/media attention? There's a pretty good book that covers the belief that there were a lot of serial killers in the 70s: Peter Vronsky's Serial Killers. The short answer is that there weren't that many more serial killers than in the surrounding decades, but that the category of "serial killer" really only started to form, so lots of killers just weren't seen that way even though they were clearly serial killers. He says it's also an artifact of the way news markets started to work in that time--and that once people started saying that it seemed like there were a lot of serial killers all of a sudden, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy where reporters went out of their way to find as many as they could. He also says that the behaviors we think of as typical of serial killers really only become components of recorded killings in the nineteenth century, partially because people need a lot of leisure time to first develop the fantasies that drive the killing and then especially to stalk and kill. So modern capitalism is basically a prerequisite for serial killers.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:18
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Random Stranger posted:But the agrarian lifestyles that preceded the industrial revolution had massive amounts of down time. Like whole months where the people would only work a couple of hours a day (this is offset by working twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week, for a few months straight during the busy seasons). It doesn't really add up. But without the anonymity of urban life and ease of travel enabled by the industrial revolution, which are also things he mentions.
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Jan 16, 2015 02:55
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Angry Salami posted:I don't know, you've got Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory as pre-modern serial killers just off the top of my head - you could argue maybe you had to be an aristocrat of some sort to be a serial killer before the industrial era, but I suspect it's just the noble killers are remembered because they were nobles and got proper trials and were public figures. Vronsky gives a chapter to each, actually, and speculates in a pretty half-assed way about folklore creatures like werewolves and vampires that were normal people who transformed into monsters, saying they could have historical origins with premodern people driven to kill. He also writes about HH Holmes and that lady in New Orleans who did crazy mutilation sex stuff to her slaves. He says of her and the others that they could do it because they had near-total aristocratic power, and that once they were found out the community did go after them. He mentions Sawney Bean too, and says the story was probably embellished.
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Jan 16, 2015 05:49
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Rand also idolized a psychopathic serial killer, planning to use him as the model for the hero of a novel she left unfinished when she died. Her notes suggest that she believed he was the nietzschean superman but that she'd have to clean up his character before starting the book. He was hanged for killing and mutilating a 12-year-old girl: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman
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Jan 17, 2015 04:30
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As an aside, my favorite Rand joke is in the first season of Mad Men, when Don Draper's boss gives him a bonus because the boss has been reading a lot of Rand and sees Don as embodying her ethical system. At this Don, who himself qualified as a remorseless psychopath more or less, gets really worried about what the gift says about his moral character.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:34
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And addicted to speed, like all brilliant übermenschen.
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Jan 17, 2015 04:45
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OR WAS IT? The only incident in Orillia seems to be a groping at the grocery store: http://www.orilliapacket.com/2014/09/24/police-seeking-info-on-incident Though I would prefer to believe that the mystery here is why user Steampunk iPhone had a list of gay slurs on his clipboard ready to paste.
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Jan 19, 2015 03:53
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Billmac posted:Dunno if this has been posted yet in this thread, it's sort of a different idea of ~unnerving~, but it did creep me out a little bit somehow? Yeah, this was maybe plausible prior to the election of George Bush Jr. in the United States. Plus we're going to run out of zinc and probably aluminum in the next 30 years in addition to dying for somebody's water profits. Really, life on earth is just going to get more and more interesting.
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Jan 20, 2015 10:27
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Yeah, it's really too soon to tell what will happen next. Capitalism is a pretty lousy messiah, though, and that's Fukuyama's big theme. Neoliberalism causes all kinds of bullshit nobody really predicted, like ISIS, and requires serious modification of it's to continue. I expect that environmental catastrophe will spur the next change in how people organize themselves, as capitalism is really good at making people think of global warming as nobody's problem.
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Jan 20, 2015 14:19
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Why? That doesn't seem like their usual MO.
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Jan 22, 2015 03:42
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It's about time somebody lays the groundwork for silksteel sentinels. How else are we going to get the xenoempathy dome before Yang?
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Jan 22, 2015 15:21
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mr. mephistopheles posted:I was a vegetarian for 22 years for ethical reasons and I feel bad when I kill bugs and I still agree with you. Human life is always more valuable. It's not always a zero-sum game. I don't want people beaten to death in prison, but I can also try to prevent Unilever from killing rabbits to test deodorant while advocating for prison reform.
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Jan 26, 2015 03:23
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Yes yes let's all interrogate her about every detail of her reproductive health as a prerequisite to believing that a doctor was rude to her one time. Prediction: you'll never believe her no matter what she tells you.
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Feb 1, 2015 05:23
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You know what's fresh and rad? You can make one url look like another one. It will never get old and everyone will love you.
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Feb 5, 2015 14:19
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ozza posted:What a horrendous person. I'd always heard that in the case of the Beaumont kids, though, it was generally acknowledged that Bevan Spencer von Einem was most likely the perpetrator. From Wiki (and spoiler texted because it is graphic language describing child murder): The related stories about a conspiracy of child rapists made up of judges and establishment types is kind of unsettling too, as before the Jimmy Saville thing in the UK and that US billionaire who got off with a fine for having sex slaves I'd just laugh it off--but now I'm not so sure.
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Feb 16, 2015 03:23
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Dyatlov Pass has always fascinated me. I assume the podcast you listened to was Skeptoid? (It hasn't been the same since Brian Dunning sold it Brian Dunning didn't sell Skeptoid. He just can't host it right now because he's in federal prison for massive fraud: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dunning_%28author%29#Wire_fraud_case He bilked amazon out of millions with malware he hid in banner ads.
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Feb 22, 2015 04:18
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) I've always thought it was avalanche, possibly caused by jet or weapons testing. There are some odd features about it. I'll also check out the book.
b&w not detailed gore pics):
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:thats weird in and of itself Yeah, nobody donate to Skeptoid because its donation system is very likely at least partially a scam. And Dunning currently has like a million-plus dollars he scammed amazon out of. They only prosecuted him for the first $300,000 because that was all they needed. He still has the rest waiting for him when he gets out. Brian Dunning is criminal poo poo, is what I'm saying.
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Feb 22, 2015 05:20
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What reason would they have for killing their kid? They act crazy in the documentary because they're insane from grief and a crazy thing is happening to them. If they really killed their kid, the last thing they would want to do is invite an obvious imposter into their family, because he will reinvigorate curiosity about the disappearance and because they will have to keep their guards up 24/7 with a stranger in the house who they know is not their son. They'd be signing up to live a lie for every waking moment of their lives.
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Feb 22, 2015 19:20
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Leon Einstein posted:What is it about Everest that generates such terrible opinions? Yeah, let's close off anything that might result in death and cover the world in bubble wrap too. The kind of turds driven to do it for no particular reason would be furious, and that would be delicious. Sane people don't give a poo poo if they can't climb a mountain.
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Feb 26, 2015 19:24
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Centripetal Horse posted:Surprisingly, it's not obvious which group is more evil, either. And if you mention any of that he probably accuses you of trying to make him feel guilty for things he didn't do, right? That's a telltale failure in reasoning that a lot of right-wingers share: they can only think of the universe in terms of a personal failure to follow the rules. Everything is personal responsibility to them.
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Mar 2, 2015 21:14
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AlbieQuirky posted:Which atrocities do liberals pretend didn't happen? I'm not trying to get in your face here, I am honestly bewildered. There's this weird marxist fascination with medieval villages, where nobody was alienated from the products of their labor and everyone was a meaningful, fully integrated part of the community and lived fully satisfied with tons of free time right up until they died of a burst appendix or plague.
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Mar 5, 2015 06:02
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p-hop posted:A long-rear end time ago (early in this thread, or maybe a previous one?) somebody recommended My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf. I was really interested but forgot about the whole thing. The other day my eyes caught a copy at the local library. After leafing through it I brought it home and devoured the whole book in a couple hours. This is really great for the way it links the low-stakes silliness of high school with the completely hosed-up poo poo going on with Dahmer. I found it especially haunting for its thesis that the bare-bones rigidity of high-school life, with its emphasis on attendance and completing simplistic work and the forced, surface-level social interaction that comes with it kept Dahmer in check because it imposed some kind of basic order onto his life. I read it around the same time I read Dave Cullen's Columbine, which also stayed with me for similar reasons.
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Mar 6, 2015 14:17
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canyoneer posted:Well, Alfred Nobel's endowment and prize really did a great switcheroo on his legacy. Somebody hasn't read enough political cartoons (not enough is just the right amount though. Enough is too many): 
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Mar 7, 2015 01:37
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Re Columbine: JG, would you recommend the Cullen book? I looked at the reviews and I was curious. It seems that he largely rejects the idea that bullying was a motivating factor and that the killers were actually relatively popular and successful socially. That seems to contradict a lot of testimony. There seems to be a big divide between Cullen and Larkin ( http://www.amazon.com/Comprehending...nding+columbine ), (or at least a division between their supporters) with Larkin suggesting social factors were stronger than Cullen makes out. So, Cullen - psychological motivation, Larkin - social motivation. I'm just going from the online reviews, so it may be an over simplification or even a misrepresentation. Has anyone here read both books and can give a balanced view of them? It's been a while since I've read Cullen, but the killers only account for maybe 1/3 of it. Cullen's account seems thoroughly researched and matches the FBI's report. There's plenty of testimony that describes the killers as bullies themselves, and Cullen draws not only on testimony from their parents and people who knew them, but their diaries, transcripts of their interrogations, and interviews with their court-mandated therapists. It seems solidly researched to me.
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Mar 7, 2015 11:48
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Your side needs fewer people because it has the machine guns. Drone warfare in the service of modern imperialism are kind of the end-state for that kind of thinking. Still, the countermeasure for it is terrorism, which is kind of a different philosophy.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:00
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Well, they only prosecuted the first 500 thousand, but he probably got something closer to 5 million. That seems like a pretty massive fraud for a single smug libertarian to pull off. And I thought part of the original story involved amazon referrals getting hijacked, but that seems totally wrong.
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Mar 18, 2015 01:49
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Also they think they have superpowers. Watch this one defeat a local news reporter with mind powers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9uXd_71yrM
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Mar 30, 2015 14:55
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I would love to know HR's reasons for bankrolling something that ridiculous. "It's actually cheaper for accounts payable to soak up as many bullets as possible so that the servers upstairs with customer data are less likely to get damaged."
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Apr 1, 2015 19:17
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