Ex-detective accuses police of ignoring Pickton

The Vancouver police could have stopped serial killer Robert Pickton more than two years before he was finally caught if the force had taken the case more seriously and devoted the resources such a massive investigation would require, a public inquiry has heard.

Former detective Kim Rossmo, who was a geographic profiler with the force, said Mr. Pickton wasn’t caught sooner because senior police management resisted the theory that the women were being murdered by a serial killer.

“I think there was a good chance it could have been solved by the end of 1999 if the appropriate resources were deployed and the Vancouver police department was properly engaged in this and had accepted the serial killer theory,” Mr. Rossmo told the inquiry on Wednesday, stressing it was a rough estimate.

“I don’t want to give overemphasis to my estimate of the end of ‘99, but it certainly should have been solved much sooner. ... I believe my evidence from the other day was I think this case could have been solved one to two years earlier than it was.”

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Why America Loves Serial Killers

Long Island again. Serial killer(s) again. The media have—a little too overeagerly—been conjuring up the specter of "the Long Island serial killer," even though those five words compress at least two unproven assumptions: There's no proof that the remains of up to 10 victims (so far) found on the sandy barrier island that parallels Long Island's South Shore were killed by a Long Islander, or even by a single individual. Or that they were killed on Long Island. For all we know, they were killed by a Yale comp lit professor, who deconstructed them in Connecticut and carried them to Long Island where he "unpacked" them from the trunk of his Prius.

But even if the perp or perps came from elsewhere, at least one of the presumed murdered prostitutes, Amber Lynn Costello, operated out of a seedy home in Long Island's West Babylon. It was she who was the subject of murderous speculation in a chat room that made the front page of the New York Daily News: "HOOKER SLAY EXCLUSIVE, WEB OF L.I. SICKOS, Inside secret site where johns plotted revenge." It's indisputable that these "sickos" did come from Long Island and apparently patronized the murdered hooker from West Babylon. (There's a name to deconstruct!)

But it's evident that in tab world, Long Island and serial killer seem to go together. I feel a certain responsibility for that, having thrown a spotlight on the L.I./serial killer connection back in the '90s in a lengthy essay for the Times magazine, when my "Guyland" homeland—as I fondly called it in tribute to the way the L.I. accent rendered it: "Lawn Guyland"—had begun sprouting corpses (20 or so) from serial killers like Joel Rifkin. It was a time when Long Island also had to endure the embarrassingly seedy Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco scandal—and the three made-for-TV movies based on the case of Fisher, the "Long Island Lolita."

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Blood Loss

The Decline of the Serial Killer

By Christopher BeamPosted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2011, at 6:32 PM ET

Jeffrey Dahmer

When it came to serial killing, Stephen Griffiths did everything by the book. He targeted prostitutes in the slums of Bradford, a city in Northern England. He chose a unique murder weapon: a crossbow. He claimed to have eaten parts of his victims—two of them cooked, one of them raw. "I'm misanthropic," he told police investigators when he was finally caught in 2010. "I don't have much time for the human race." When he appeared in court, he gave his name as the "crossbow cannibal." It was as if he'd studied up on the art of serial murder. (In fact, he had: Griffiths was a part-time Ph.D. student at Bradford University, where he was studying criminology.) And yet, for all his efforts, he got only one short blurb in the New York Times when he was sentenced last month.

Serial killers just aren't the sensation they used to be. They haven't disappeared, of course. Last month, Suffolk County, N.Y., police found the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Philadelphia police have attributed the murders of three women in the city's Kensington neighborhood to one "Kensington Strangler." On Tuesday, an accused serial stabber in Flint, Mich., filed an insanity plea.

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Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer

Her works treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, Ayn Rand found early inspiration 1920s murderer William Hickman.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons

here's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

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