 Originally Posted by MinionZombie
1) Aye, fair point, although it is interesting to see the comparison between policing then and now ... mind you, policing still leaves plenty to be desired sometimes ... but at least the techniques have improved greatly.
2) I suppose part of the angle was that there was an element of thinking within the police (and even society at large) that victims found to be prostitutes (to whatever degree) were somehow 'lesser' than good, clean 'normal folk'.
3) Yep - the Torso Murders. Quite gruesome. Set against the sleazy backdrop of 1980s Time Square, which was a right pit of vice at the time in the last few years before Mickey Mouse riding a wave of eminent domain with Rudy Giuliani as co-pilot swept in and washed away the scum and jizzed advertising everywhere like the grand finale of a bukkake festival.
4) Yeah, there is a dark and morbid fascination with this sort of stuff. I suppose one of the bizarre aspects of intrigue is the 'absolute freedom of the apex predator', this ghoulish beast inside a normal-looking person walking among ordinary folk, how close some have come to death, how driven by their own perversion and madness and diseased minds these people were. There's also the fascinating psychology behind it all, from the obvious stuff with the killers, to the smaller stuff - such as how one of Ted Bundy's victims, IIRC (or maybe it was Edmund Kemper - but I think Bundy), was in his car and clearly in huge trouble and their mind switched to just being super worried about a test they were going to miss at school and how they'd be in trouble ... dark, troubling, fascinating...
1. Policing is never easy, even in straightforward cases, and the Yorkshire Ripper tied up the police in knots for ages. He was no fool and when you're dealing with someone like that it can be extremely hard to nail them down. What is surprising in a lot of these cases is that these killers are often caught through their own carelessness or by chance. Dennis Nilsen successfully evaded any policing into his crimes for ages and was only caught because a Dyno Rod guy found human remains in his drain. Dahmer was caught because one of his intended victims boxed him in the face and ran out the door. Gacy was collared because he got careless too. All too often these serial killers get put away because they just slip up in the end.
2. It's certainly the case that the West Yorkshire Police used the terms "respectable" and "innocent" when Sutcliffe started to broaden his target list to non prostitutes. But, let's be honest here, prostitution is not respectable and has never been seen as such. Nor should it IMO. Although I don't think the police treated the crimes as anything less than murder, otherwise there wouldn't have been an investigation in the first place. I find that damning the police for not sanitising their language to be a bit shrill. Plus, I think the police using those types of words in their statements were probably trying to troll Sutcliffe, for want of a better word, in an effort to get him to either turn himself in or slip up. Could they have done better? Probably. But we're talking about the 1970's here and language was used quite differently back then.
3. We started looking at that Torso Murders doc last night. Grim stuff. Yeah, Times Square and 42nd Street were dens of inequity alright. But mostly only for the people who went looking for that stuff. Most people could walk down 42nd like it was any other. These days it's just another faceless area of NYC really. When I first went there in the 90's, it was after it had been cleaned up, and most New Yorkers that I knew were quite disappointed at what it had turned into. They call it Disney Land. It looked and felt nothing like the movie depiction that I grew up with...and not a grindhouse to be found. 
4. Apex predators or just sad human beings whose psychology has become messed up for whatever reason. I find that most of these serial killers are just pathetic, lonely, people who were usually never able to express themselves properly when they were younger or grew up in unusual circumstances. In the cases of Dahmer or Nilsen, gay men who when faced with the societal attitudes of the times meant they grew up with a warped sense of themselves, for instance. Of course, there are numerous "types" of serial killer and they kill for a variety of reasons. But psychological damage is always the case somewhere along the line. One wonders how much outside forces are responsible for shaping a lot of these people's minds and how much comes solely from themselves.
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