• unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth
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    1 hour ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wettlaufer

    For every new bit of technology, there’s someone who finds a way to do stuff that the technology would never catch because the inventors of the technology never thought of the idea in the first point. Case in point, Elizabeth Wettlaufer is one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers. They in all likelihood wouldn’t have caught her if she herself hadn’t confessed at some point. She was a nurse in a nursing home who regularly killed her patients by overdosing them on insulin. Because of the nature of her patients, those deaths never aroused enough suspicion to be investigated by police.

  • velma@sh.itjust.works
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    7 hours ago

    There’s estimated to be upwards of 50 serial killers currently active in the US today.

    It is much harder to be a serial killer now, but police are still not great at their jobs and especially communicating across state lines. Hell, even communicating across county lines have proven to be too difficult for police to manage or care to do. This is one of the reasons serial killers target sex workers, queer people, and people of color the most - the broader public care less about these victims and the police don’t work as hard to solve their murders.

  • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 hours ago

    The percentage of homicides that remained unsolved was sitting barely above 50% last I checked. That number goes up and down a bit but has overall been getting higher over time (worse) since the 1960s.

    Your chances of getting away with being a serial killer have never been better. Especially if you target a poor urbanized area and/or minorities.

    • False@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I’d guess that trend is more homicides being caught and recorded as such, even if they remain unsolved.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        4 hours ago

        Could well be, I’m sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.

        But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn’t take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable “ghost gun” to shoot someone with, don’t carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.

        • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          14 minutes ago

          They blame a lot of it on the shift to gang violence and detectives having less time allocated for crimes of that nature. Supposedly forensics and only comes into play at all in 10-15% of cases. Hard to decode everything as someone not in that world though.