[Pxtl]

Jesus, it just goes on and on and on... and in the end, there's no heroic manhunt, no great victory. He was caught driving drunk with a corpse in the passenger seat, so used to murder that he'd gotten lazy about it.

You can't help but feel outrage that nobody stopped him... that the public wasn't sufficiently warned that any of these boys, these kids could have known there was a serial-killer stalking them.

[JabavuAdams]

Reading about Jeffrey Dahmer left me similarly shaken. One of his victims -- Konerak Sinthasomphone -- managed to escape out onto the street and contact some women who called the police.

When the police officers (John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish) arrived, Dahmer managed to convince the them that it was a gay lovers' quarrel and the officers let Dahmer take Sinthasomphone home again.

Can you imagine the horror of escaping torment and certain death, only to be handed right back to your tormenter by the police?

[tempestn]

Holy shit. This victim, who 31 year old Dahmer claimed was his lover, was also 14 years old at the time, and the police returned him (naked and bleeding) despite his protests. (Sinthasomphone was disoriented at the time, having been drugged, but apparently still did protest.) At least the officer was fired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Balcerzak

[kevindication]

He was reinstated apparently upon appeal.

[ekianjo]

How is that even possible after such misconduct? Words fail me. Don't they even feel ashamed of appealing ?

[tempestn]

Wow. Missed that part.

[allochthon]

That's distressing.

[Pxtl]

> having been drugged

... reading the other wikipedia article, Dahmer had also performed an experiment on him that would've also impared his cognition pretty severely. I'm not going to write the details since it was NSFL, but I'm surprised people didn't notice it.

[pudakai]

When you dig into it, nobody really knows how many victims there were. His cryptic tally sheet seemed to indicate 67 or so, but some investigators believe he may have killed 100 or more.

For instance, when they caught him, the front passenger seat of his car was apparently bloodsoaked, but was never matched to any known/suspected victim. A fair amount of evidence suggests that he had at least a part-time accomplice as well. All sorts of unknowns, as he still maintains complete innocence to this day.

He had been killing people in Oregon, on business trips up there and the folks up there theorized that something like this was happening and had been working credit card gas purchase, car rental, and airline ticket info and from what I read, right around the time he got arrested in Ca. his name was coming to the top in Oregon.

[girvo]

I suppose a case could be made that the lack of media frenzy and nickname had something to do with society's approach to homosexuality and the "targets" being masculinity defined.

[__david__]

Yeah, I've lived in this area my whole life and I'd never heard of Randy Kraft. Granted I was a kid during the time so perhaps I just had been kept in the dark (though I was keenly aware of the Night Stalker as a kid). So I just asked my dad and he'd never heard of him either. Crazy that something that large was happening under our noses and nobody knew...