Not Something To Help You Sleep
The people who try to catch them say serial killers will go through an active period where they take lives, then a rest period that can range from years to weeks, or even days. Serial killers normally do not stalk victims, but victims in some way present themselves to the attacker. Two examples might be Ted Bundy, the killer who was electrocuted in Florida, but not before he spoke to the behavioral people about his acts. Bundy said he would often pose as a man with a cast on his arm, or otherwise someone who needed help and then wait until someone came to him. The Son Of Sam killer opened fire on people who happened to be in cars in the area where he stalked. Most serial killers start when they are young. Nearly all of them are white. One thing about serial killers is there are notable exceptions to that profile.
Investigators in Georgia are now talking to law enforcement agencies in at least two states about the man they are holding in connection with the killing of a hiker in the North Georgia mountains. A couple was killed in North Carolina- her body was found- they never located his remains. Before the ink was dry on the suspect’s fingerprint card, there was already speculation that the death of the young girl, and her post-mortem decapitation was not his first killing. If he is indeed a serial killer, law officers can only hope he will give them an accurate account of his actions so they can find remains of his victims, and close the cases. But there are many serial killers who die without revealing much at all about their victims.
We are not talking about normal people with normal feelings of remorse. I watched a really creepy videotape of Jeffery Dahmer recounting some of his actions, and he seemed to be detached in some macabre way. I know of one emergency crew worker who had to clean up Dahmer’s mess, who has never recovered from the horror he saw inside that apartment.
I was acquainted with a serial killer once. His name is Wayne Williams and he is serving a life sentence in Georgia for The Atlanta Child Murders. That’s a still disputed number of killings of young,black …mostly males..found around metro Atlanta in the late 1970s and 1980. Wayne Williams was convicted of two of them, and the rest of the cases were closed. I still believe those closed cases without trial were an injustice at least to the families of the victims. They had a right to know how their loved ones died, and whether or not there was sufficient evidence to prove it to a jury.
Wayne was a television photographer who worked free-lance in the days of film, not video tape. I became familiar with him because he would often be at WSB-TV news dropping off film early in the morning when I arrived for work at WSB Radio. Sometimes, Wayne would make a photocopy of a radio news story to tape it to a film can so the morning folks at Channel Two would know what the story was. Williams drove a metallic blue Plymouth that was identical to the Atlanta Police Department’s unmarked cars. He even had the antenna like the police cars, only his was probably hooked to a police scanner so he could listen-in and head to breaking news stories to get the film.
Our shop was one of the first, if not THE first news department to connect the dots and start asking questions about why so many young black males were turning up dead. Eventually we were told by profilers there was a strong possibility the killer would be an authority figure like a law officer or someone with a uniform. Wayne did drive that cop look-alike.
I even came under scrutiny from law officers when I turned up at a number of the crime scenes. It was because I was working on-call as news director at the time, and I had the story by default as much as anything else. I learned later that police had a photo of me taken by an undercover officer, and had taken it by the station to identify me. Then, while I was coaching my son’s soccer team, another coach who was a law officer mentioned to me that he knew more about me than I thought he did…because I had been watched in the early days of the serial killer investigation. I apparently matched one of the many descriptions or profiles of people they had to rule out.
Eventually, fiber evidence convicted Wayne Williams.
Remember that general profile? Wayne Williams is black.
At any given time, there are fifty of them in the U.S. That’s nearly a bus load.
