How Police Failed to Find America's First Serial Killer

Esquire ^ | APRIL 5, 2016 | SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

[Boogieman]

“the number of serial murders has gone through the roof”

The number of documented serial murders has gone through the roof. I don’t think we have any real idea if the actual number is increasing or not.

I mean, we didn’t even know about the phenomenon until the last century or so, so before that they could have been just as common and we just did not realize what was happening. Our capabilities to detect such things have also increased steadily since we started tracking these killers, as we developed fingerprinting, criminal psychology, different kinds of forensic analysis, and DNA testing. So who knows if the increase is actually an increase, or an artifact of our increased ability to detect the patterns in these crimes?

[Axenolith]

I saw the Cereal Killers with Void and Dove at a dive in DC back in the early 80’s...

[Boogieman]

My favorite candidate for the Ripper is one you can find hiding in plain sight in the case files. He was the first person known to be at the scene of the first murder, a man named Charles Cross.

I suspect him because:

* A police constable passed the scene of the crime not 30 minutes before he “found the body” and there was nothing there, so we know Cross was at the scene within a short frame of time as when the Ripper was there.
* He didn’t immediate report the body to police upon finding it. Instead, another man was coming down the street, and Cross called him over and said “look at this, there’s a woman over here”. Had Cross just discovered the body? Or was he the killer who came up with this “discovered the body” story when he was surprised by a passerby?
* This victim was not mutilated much at all compared to the other victims. This could be due to the killer progressively getting more brutal, or it could be because the killer was interrupted, for example, when a passerby turned on to the street and surprised him.
* He left the scene, apparently he “didn’t want to be late for work”. Him and the passerby did report the body to police after they ran into a constable. But I’m not so sure he would have done that if the passerby hadn’t been walking along with him. At that point, if he had been the killer, he had no choice but to go along with the ruse.
* Another constable discovered the body on his own before those two reported it. Because of this, there was confusion about who actually discovered the body, because a lot of newspapers reported that it was first discovered by a constable. Thus, in the confusion, not a lot of attention was paid by researchers to Cross until recently.

There are other interesting points about the guy too if you delve into his background. For example, he regularly walked to and from work late at night or early in the morning through the neighborhoods where the murders happened, right at the times when they were happening. He also wore an apron, and many witnesses who reported seeing the presumed killer said he wore an apron.

[packrat35]

Actually, The Harpe brothers were one of the first in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpe_brothers

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***..detectives in London would speculate that the Midnight Assassin had traveled to England and become Jack the Ripper.***

From there to Vienna?

[Carthego delenda est]

“The number of documented serial murders has gone through the roof. I don’t think we have any real idea if the actual number is increasing or not.”

I’ve theorized that there’s probably at least one out there, who hasn’t even made his way onto the radar yet, who has so many kills that he makes all others seem small.

[PLMerite]

‘Mr. X’

So good that, not only is his identity not known, his existence isn’t even suspected because he’s so good that law enforcement hasn’t connected the dots between missing/dead people to realize that there even is a serial killer operating.

[Bratch]

From there to Vienna?

And then he drifted for a long period of time, eventually winding up on Argelius II, where Captain James T. Kirk and his crew finally defeated him in 2267.

[onedoug]

Once Dixie fell....

[publius911]

Bookmail

[kalee]

Interesting, thank you for posting.

[cynwoody]

I’ve read up on our current crime trends in this century, and although the number of murders fluctuates from slight to nearly steady throughout the years, the number of serial murders has gone through the roof.

If the notion of serial murderer has any validity, there must have been many of them long predating 1884.

It would defy credulity that serial murdering suddenly became possible in 1884.

[cynwoody]

Interesting. I thought that the first serial killer was in Chicago during the World’s Fair, as detailed in “Devil in the White City”.

What about Vlad Tepes (1431-1477, aka the Impaler, or Count Drakoola)?

Of course, he had the power of the state behind him. So, to be fair, if officially sanctioned, even democratically elected, serial murderers are to get due credit, looking at the 20th century, you'd have to include the wide mustache (Dzhugashvili) and the narrow mustache (Schicklgruber). Between them, they put all other serial murderers in the shade!