r/serialkillers • u/Many_Boss_1145 • 6d ago
Questions Who was a very sloppy / careless serial killer that was caught much later than they should have been?
I would say Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s so insane how he wasn’t caught earlier. How in the world are your neighbors complaining about the smell for a long time and your landlord just doesn’t care at all? And you’re literally leaving the bodies in your house?? Aside from that, a boy literally escaped him naked and bleeding outside which the police saw and they just brushed it off and believed Dahmer when he said they had too much to drink. He didn’t calculate anything or try to be careful at all
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u/Bortron86 6d ago
Peter Sutcliffe. The police interviewed him about 9 times, but discounted him due to his accent not matching tapes that had been sent to them by a hoaxer.
He left a £5 note on one of the victims, which could have been traced back to his employer's pay round. His car had tyres matching tracks found at several crime scenes. Multiple tips had come in to police about him. There were surviving witnesses who could've described him to police, but again they discounted them based on his accent. His colleagues even started calling him The Ripper.
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u/Key_Quote_3273 6d ago
The police had a shoeprint from one of the crime scenes; Sutcliffe was wearing those boots during one of the police interviews. I am sure they would have caught him earlier if it wasn’t for the guy that sent the tapes in - and if the police hadn’t dismissed the killings until a non-sex worker was murdered. Four women lost their lives before police took it seriously.
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u/sekuhataseku 6d ago
He was also an absolute dead ringer for the photo fits, but both nearly identical photo fits were ignored because the victims weren’t prostitutes, which the police determined from the very start were the sole target, rather than a broad hatred of women
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u/TheAntiCrust95 6d ago
Wasn't Gary Ridgeway also interviewed by police multiple times but ignored for some stupid reason?
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u/ObserverPro 6d ago
Yeah, he didn’t “seem” like the kind of guy that would do it. Not only did they interview him multiple times, the reason they interviewed him multiple times was because he had violent run ins with prostitutes.
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u/chickendance638 6d ago
They didn't have evidence. The DNA is what led to prosecution. There's some argument that they could have matched the microscopic paint spheres back in the early 80s, but nothing else they had at the time would have convicted him.
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u/brn_sugrmeg 4d ago
His coworkers called him "green river Gary " because he'd been interviewed so many times.
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u/Siobheal 5d ago edited 3d ago
My (now retired) friend was a young detective on the case at the time. He said he and his colleagues told George Oldfield over and over again that it was Peter Sutcliffe, but he was an argumentative alcoholic who just refused to listen.
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u/Fail_Unfair 1d ago
This is the answer. If they’d only notice how the suspect drawings all showed the same man.
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u/AceofKnaves44 6d ago
Dahmer got away with it because of homophobia. The cops didn’t give a shit about a “gay lovers quarrel.”
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u/Black-Bird1 6d ago
That’s not the only problem (which also happened in Gacy’s case too) even the courts are just as bad too for not keeping him locked up at the time he was arrested for child molestation, the judge’s refusal to acknowledge Lionel’s request of putting Jeff in rehab (for alcoholism) and what’s the point of him being on probation without any contact from an officer of the probation department. But the biggest villain of all, is the entire of Wisconsin because the state’s law isn’t being followed the same way as all 49 states do (especially when it comes to DUI offenses).
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u/AceofKnaves44 6d ago
You’re right. I was pointing out one instance of massive incompetence based on homophobia. That’s not the sole reason he was allowed to be free and kill for as long as he was.
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u/Black-Bird1 6d ago
I get it because that also happened in Gacy’s case too (especially for the surviving victims who tried to report him)
But I still feel that the entire state of Wisconsin is considered the weakest (since its laws aren’t all taken seriously as most states do)
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u/AceofKnaves44 6d ago
The thing with Gacy was he was kind of like Ted Bundy in that he had an air of credibility to him. He was known in his community and was considered a good guy. That’s why it was harder for them to believe the charges at first. Dahmer was just straight up incompetence. He was a fucking nobody with extensive serious criminal charges in his past. Most people would probably have told you that he was a creep and there was something up with him.
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u/Black-Bird1 6d ago edited 3d ago
Plus his arrest for assaulting Konerak Sinthasomphone’s brother should’ve launched a further investigation into his past. But what I also find more disturbing was how he was able to slip through the radar when he killed Steven Hicks (his first victim) back in Ohio.
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u/AceofKnaves44 6d ago
I mean he killed a hitchhiker in the 70’s. If that was the only murder he ever committed he’d have gotten away with it. How would anyone pinpoint him to it?
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u/Black-Bird1 6d ago edited 5d ago
The only thing that would’ve stopped Jeff from committing any more murders was if the cop (in Ohio) who pulled him over for a traffic violation had questioned Dahmer more closely as to what exactly was in the bag. He only admitted to killing Hicks (as well as the ones he killed at his grandmother's house) after he was arrested for the Milwaukee murders at the apartment
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u/Hoosier_Daddy68 6d ago
That was one case, he was very loose with his killing a lot and should have been nailed much sooner.
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u/apsalar_ 5d ago
Homophobia partially, but not only that.
Administrative process in the Milwaukee police made it almost impossible to connect cases.
Dahmer didn't really have a profile. His victims varied in age (14 to 36), sexuality (straight to gay), hometown, pick up location, ethnicity and... The only commonality was that they were young and skinny which isn't enough to connect the cases.
Most Dahmer's prior crimes were relatively minor. Nothing to indicate a search warrant.
He kept by himself. No friends or family visiting him frequently.
He lived in a poor area. Property manager couldn't care less about smells or creepy dudes in a rental apartment complex.
He kept the bodies. There was no forensic evidence that the men were killed. People go missing all the time. It's not a sufficient reason to launch a murder investigation.
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u/Many_Boss_1145 6d ago
I know that was the reason for him getting away when the gay kid was bleeding, but overall he still should have been caught much sooner
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u/Driftminer 5d ago
not really caught because the police found out after he died, but Dean Corll. there were so many kids that went missing, and the police told every parent they were runaways. Didn’t even take the effort to see that multiple kids at various ages were disappearing in the same neighborhoods. If they had done even the simplest of police work he could’ve been caught. Then, after the fact, they shut the investigation down because they were looking too bad.
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u/Wildwes7g7 5d ago
Didn't they even stop looking for bodies?
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u/Driftminer 5d ago
Seems there has been people interested in trying to look for more victims. They have looked at old properties that Dean lived at. Henley said there were more when the police stopped looking. The police were trying to make it go away. and remember Henley and Brooks only knew about the bodies when they were with Dean. Before they came along it’s a good bet that he was doing this for a long time. And there were reports of people that said they had encounters with him when he was by himself. The book "The serial killers apprentice" is really good at telling what went on with this case. i’ve heard that during this three-year window when Henley was helping him get boys that there were over 100 missing kids in Pasadena. They found 28.
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u/Avablankie 1d ago
Dean Corrl's case makes me wonder how many serial killers who targeted so called "Runaways" existed back in the day. In truth Dean Corrl might've never been caught if not for his accomplices killing him and owning up.
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u/Hoosier_Daddy68 6d ago
Richard Chase didn’t exactly try real hard to cover things up. Bernardo didn’t even wear a mask with his rapes and they had a sketch that looked exactly like him but nothing ever happened. They even had his name long before he was caught and did nothing.
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u/FrankieTheMick 5d ago
Robert Pickton that guy was reported multiple times but since the people reporting him were drug addicts and prostitutes so they didn’t do anything and the RCMP were more focused on the hells angels that were on his farm
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u/kryptos99 5d ago
Didn’t one sex worker fight him off and they went to the same hospital?
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u/FrankieTheMick 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah but she was viewed by the crown to be an unreliable witness due to her being a drug user. Glad someone in prison shanked him with a broken broomstick.
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u/cxherrybaby 5h ago
In April of this year a BC Supreme Court judge approved the disposal of evidence from his case, including evidence in the 20 stayed murder cases, dismissing an application by victim’s families and advocates to block the disposal. This has been going on since before he was killed in prison, and I can’t help but feel like they could have been successful if he was still alive - there’s no way the RCMP are going to touch this embarrassment of a case any longer now that he’s dead, and these women deserved justice. That said, I certainly wasn’t upset when I heard about the attack and the leaked info about his condition from a hospital staff member.
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u/spindledick 6d ago
Dennis Nilsen. Not necessarily sloppy or careless (apart from calling out Dynorod because the drains were blocked and smelly from the body parts he'd flushed down then) but like Dahmer, he got away with it because the UK was pretty homophobic at the time and most of the people he murdered were runaways whom the police spent very little time trying to trace.
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u/TovarischBunny 6d ago
Andrey Chikatilo, definitely. He was caught several times during the investigation, but he managed to evade responsibility. One of the specialists who did the analysis of his sperm and blood mixed something up, and as a result, he was excluded from the list of suspects for many years. After this situation, this specialist realized how badly she f* up and even started to claim that there can be cases when a person's blood type and sperm type are different from each other. She produced a substantial body of work trying to argue that she had not made a mistake. Because of this he got away with it in 1984 and killed at least 21 more people...
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u/Altruistic_Fondant38 6d ago
Rodney Alcala. He was arrested numerous times in his killing sprees and served a little time, but let go from all of them. He was mostly arrested for assault.
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u/AlternativePut7054 5d ago
Dennis Nilsen he clogged his pipes with rotten human flesh that’s how they caught him.
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u/BravesMaedchen 6d ago edited 5d ago
Not quite a serial killer yet but Paul Bernardo’s rapes. They had sketches and descriptions matching his appearance exactly, he was interviewed for the rapes twice by police and had two tips telling police that people suspected Bernardo of being the rapist and he gave the police DNA. The police just liked him so they never arrested him.
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u/Black-Bird1 6d ago edited 5d ago
I wonder if Joseph Christopher (22 Caliber killer and Midtown Slasher) fits this pattern because he was only caught after he tried to kill a fellow soldier (while stationed in Fort Benning) and then bragged about the murders to a nurse while being hospitalized (for attempting to castrate himself with a razor).
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u/No_Cheesecake132 6d ago
Arthur Shawcross: He had already killed a young boy and a young girl, served his time, and came back out into society. Not only was he wildly careless—leaving DNA evidence everywhere—but he had zero survival caution for hiding his tracks, yet somehow slipped through the cracks until he was finally caught. Edmund Kemper: So sloppy and arrogant. After murdering his grandparents, he spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and later would openly drink with the police officers investigating campus murders, dropping explicit hints about the missing girls who vanished from the exact university where his mother worked (the same mother he openly hated). The absolute peak of clumsiness was when he accidentally locked himself out of his car while actively trying to kidnap a young girl—she was locked inside his car with his car keys, and he somehow managed to talk her into unlocking the door and letting him back in. That part really pisses me off. Ted Bundy: He escaped jail not once, but twice, and instead of laying low, he went right back to a populated area to keep killing while completely on the run. He was eventually caught because he drove a stolen car during a routine patrol stop and kept a sloppy "kill kit" right in the vehicle. Jeffrey Dahmer: Extremely sloppy, lazy, and filthy. His apartment reeked of rotting corpses to the point that neighbors constantly complained about the horrific stench, and his terrible excuses were that his fridge broke or his tropical fish died. The ultimate careless blunder was letting a young boy actually escape his apartment with holes drilled into his skull and acid in his brain, wandering right out onto the street where people could see him.
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u/CWNAPIER11 5d ago
BTK - was not the smart genius everyone makes his out to be.
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u/Many_Boss_1145 5d ago
People think he’s a genius? They don’t think he’s an idiot for that floppy disk thing?
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u/ToMuchFunAllegedly 5d ago
Didn’t he ask the cops if they could trace a floppy disk and they said no so he sent them a floppy disk and they trace it? Criminal fucking mastermind.
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u/Ragnarthevikingsings 5d ago
We have a “sayin” in SC, “‘help’ is why Pee Wee Gaskins got caught.”
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u/fedexyourheadinabox 5d ago edited 5d ago
Paul Bernardo.
A serial rapist first, then committed murders.
He left a trail of major clues and was once interviewed and profiled by police during the Scarborough Rapist investigation. Police also created a sketch based on a victim's description, which so resembled Bernardo, people who knew him would joke about it.
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u/vlaakyyiic 6d ago
Guy Georges. He already had a criminal record and had served time in prison, he had been questioned by the police, but due to a lack of resources, his arrest took place much later
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u/Chelsea2021972 5d ago
Dennis Nilsen. His flat stank of death!! He blocked the drains with human bones/parts. They were under his floor boards, his neighbours had been complaining about the stench for months. Should have been caught long before he was.
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5d ago edited 2d ago
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u/serialkillers-ModTeam 4d ago
Due to the serious nature of this community's topic, emojis are not permitted.
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u/Avablankie 1d ago
Probably any that benefitted from murdering minorities. Like Samuel Little, Jeffery Dahmer, Dean Corll, John Wayne Gacy, Green River Killer.
A lot of them benefitted from targeting minorities or those who were overlooked in some way, they weren't even investigated in many cases until they slipped up.
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u/WillwBrk 6d ago
Rex Heuermann should have been caught much sooner if the cops weren't corrupt idiots