• Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The thing with serial killing, is that it is very difficult to hide.
    Some of the hardest cases can be for instance a nurse at a hospital killing in a way that appear natural.
    But even that gets detected quicker than you would think, because while 1 killing can be a fluke death, already at 2 killings, it can throw off the statistics and cause an investigation. With 3 it’s almost impossible the incidents can’t be tracked back to the person who did it.
    An other situation can be a woman who kill their husband for inheritance, and then does it a second time. That second time is usually enough for alarm bells to sound for families of the deceased. Resulting in more thorough police investigations.

    Obviously it can happen they get away with it, but I’m confident, that by far the most serial killers are caught, because it’s insanely difficult to hide multiple killings.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 months ago

      because it’s insanely difficult to hide multiple killings.

      Which is why serial killers have tended to pick on the lowest members of society. Gay men and prostitutes just going off of Dahlmer and Jack the Ripper come to mind, but it’s a common theme. Less common is something like BTK going after whole families and he nearly got away with it but for a stupid mistake, I think, with metadata on a floppy disk. But we’re in agreement that it’s hard to pull off I just think the numbers would be larger than we’d expect etc etc.

    • blargerer@kbin.melroy.org
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      2 months ago

      This is just survivorship bias right? The ones that get caught are hard to hide. That’s part of why they got caught.