Yes, I stumbled over this as well some time ago.

The 70s/80s in the USA seemed to be a very prolific time for serial killers.

I imagine things have also become harder for serial killers now with cell phones.

Yes, in general way more observation obviously, but of course the most significant blow was the DNA forensics in the 90s.

There are still psychopaths around, but now luckily most of the time they got stopped after 1-2 victims these days (in Western society at least).

Still, there will be a lot of cold cases from the 70s/80s that maybe will never be solved.

By the way, this coincidentally taken picture (allegedly) shows Ted Bundy sitting in his VW Beetle just before he killed two young women at Lake Sammamish in 1974:



Nowadays, you would probably have dozens of pictures from public spaces.

There is actually a movie from the early 80's that looks into this, which I discovered because it was sampled by The Berzerker, and went to track it down. It's called The Killing of America and chronicles the rapid downturn in the United States over the 70's, from the peace-entric 60's to the utter violence-addled meltdown of the 70's. Interestingly, as the movie was made in 1981, it predates the horrifying drug cartel violence that turned 80's Miami into a war zone, and the spread of inner-city gang violence of the 90's. The US didn't seem to finally calm down until the mid-90's (the reasoning for that curiously analyzed in the film Freakonomics).


In general, for people looking for a rather fun Unsolved Crimes/Mysteries show (sorry if this has been mentioned), there is a show that can be found on Amazon Prime (and probably Buzzfeed) from Buzzfeed called Unsolved. The first season is pretty slight, episodes run around 7-20 minutes. Episodes for the second and third seasons run 20-40 minutes each. The show is actually quite entertaining, with a level of silliness to it, and an almost innocent whimsy that the hosts have entering into the stories makes it lively. But there is dedication and fascination from the hosts that is infectious, and the stories, while many are familiar, look into various theories that are quite surprising. Even for crimes I'm familiar with (and I enjoy a good crime story), I've found some fascinating new information. I know, you probably have the same raised eyebrow and "ehhhhh...." notion about Buzzfeed that I generally do, but this was pretty damn good.

As a note, the YouTube link I put up there for Buzzfeed Unsolved includes their Supernatural episodes as well. I haven't watched those yet, just the crime ones thus far.

That picture is fucked if there's any truth to what it claims to be.

If it's the beatle next to the corvette, I can't make out anyone in that picture.

It's not really proven from what I understand:

https://wildbluepress.com/bundy-secrets ... sammamish/

But still, I mean he was quite probably SOMEWHERE in this picture, maybe in the background. What I find fascinating is how he was a complete human chameleon/shapeshifter and apparently it also applied to the appearance of his car.

I read a lot about Bundy's case, especially from main investigator Bob Keppel. Those interviews with Bundy are indeed fucked up on a level of its own. Not sure if I would recommend it to others.

@ Resident Hazard: Thanks for that The Killing of America documentary recommendation, sounds very interesting. Will check out!

Why do you not recommend reading interviews by Bob Keppel.

Also, did you happen to read the book from the author of that website you linked to?

Because exploring Bundy's mind and the details of his crimes can be pretty depressing.

No, but this one here I read as well:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205661.Ted_Bundy

I agree about the depressing part. Also, it scares the shit out of me.

Why do I obsessively read this garbage?

So, who's heard of Emilie Sagée, the French teacher who had a ghostly twin sister/doppelgänger mimicking her moves? The story may very well be completely fabricated, but it's a nice one notwithstanding.

Isn't she known as Madame Sage? And I thought she was russian. But I don't think her doppelgänger mimicked her moves, I think it did different things, for example it would be in the garden outside the classroom while her other self was teaching class. *shrugs*

Watched it, it was quite interesting. I like that "Faces of Death" touch, also the soundtrack could be from "Dawn of the Dead", it captures that grim late 70s/early 80s Deathwish/Warriors street crime vibe very well. Of course Kennedy and John Lennon had to be in there as well, but still watchable. The loose narrative is totally biased moralist propaganda, but I like that, I mean it's about the "Killing of America" and nothing else, surely better than anything Michael Moore has manipulated, I mean documented.

The bit about the serial killers was nasty, especially the case of Dean "Candyman" Corll, a full-blown sexual sadist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll

This photo shows another still unidentified victim of the "Candyman" (maybe digging his own grave?):



Interesting that the movie predates Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole, they would have fit well. And I can't stand Edmund Kemper, such a narcissistic asshole that likes to hear himself talk.

I can't make out what's going on in that picture, but I read through most of that Wikipedia link on Dean Corill and that whole story is over the top, bat shit crazy.

It is completely insane, also the great "police work", I mean it almost sounds like they were in on it. The whole case got probably a bit overshadowed by John Wayne Gacy later. Maybe because a clown is more creepy than a candyman and Corll wasn't on a picture with the first lady, I don't know. For sure, Corll was the bigger sadist, these poor boys must have suffered incredible torture.

By the way, I always found these Macabre pix somehow hilarious, but on the other hand also completely sick (in an uncool way). I mean, why the hell you want to be friends with Gacy? He quite probably thought of strangling and sodomizing them while they took these pictures with him. Never been a fan of Macabre's music, anyway.

Jesus Christ.

I don't know where I stand on anything ever, but taking band photos with John Wayne Gacy is fucked.

Corill is the worst story I think I've read. It just went on and on and on and on. Piles of dead boys buried all over the place.

Then his accessory brings in a girl and that was somehow the biggest sin of all, so he tried to kill him?

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html

Looks like the party's over with that.

Its very close to Hybristophilia, which is someone who receives sexual pleasure from killers or their acts. Macabre is right there with the people who share the belief that the teenagers that shot up Columbine High School were heroes. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez had many admirers. Male and female. There are lots of theories as to the whys. One theory is that deep in their psyche, these individuals lacked a masculine male figure in their life. With a serial killer who is incarcerated its very easy to get attention from them.

Or maybe Macabre just wants to rock out to a subject that's Metal and wasn't explored back when they started and in a tongue-in-cheek, comical way, and they're doing it for the kicks and the shock.

Y'know, this is Heavy fuckin' Metal. Leave the psychological explanations to some other snobbier subject.

Another favorite of mine is the disappearance of Lars Mittank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Lars_Mittank


Directly quoted from Wikipedia:

On June 30, 2014, 28-year-old Lars Mittank traveled to the seaside resort of Golden Sands, Bulgaria to spend a few days relaxing with a group of friends.[4][5] On July 6, 2014, Mittank got into a fight with four other men after a disagreement over football: Mittank, a fan of the football club Werder Bremen, had differences with fans of Bayern Munich. The fight resulted in Mittank suffering from a ruptured ear drum. At the end of his trip, due to the ruptured ear drum, a doctor advised him not to fly and prescribed an antibiotic named Cefuroxime (500 mg) and later referred him to a hospital. His friends wanted to stay with him, but Mittank insisted he was fine on his own.

Mittank stayed in Bulgaria without his friends and checked into a cheap hotel. However, a day after his friends left, Mittank began to act oddly, and his erratic behavior was recorded by the hotel's security cameras. He spent only one night in the hotel but he was paranoid and frightened. Mittank sent a text message to his mother stating that he did not feel safe, that she should cancel his credit card and that he was hiding from four men who were supposedly following him and asked him where some pills were. Mittank was last seen in Varna Airport, the airport that serves Golden Sands in the nearby city of Varna. He was captured by airport security cameras running away. Once outside the airport, he was seen climbing a fence, running into a meadow and disappearing into the woods. He has not been seen since.

According to these pictures, it looks more like they actively befriended Gacy (and even his family), for whatever reasons. That goes far beyond a "tongue-in-cheek" approach, if you ask me. Because there was really nothing likeable about Gacy, in the end he was just an unrepentant lying scumbag and pervert. Period.

http://www.mindmelt.com/macabre/macgacyphotos.htm

Studying Gacy from a psychological view is actually very interesting. He kept his cover for many years by being the "perfect citizen." Volunteering and acting as an all around good guy in the community.

What amazed me about him is he admitted to everything, drew out a detailed map where the bodies were buried, then denied everything later. Even going so far as to say the smell in his house was from cat piss, or something along those lines. This was in interviews AFTER he gave detailed confessions.

If you are an American and old enough to remember "In Search Of..." from the late 70s and early 80s, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, History channel has a treat. It's reviving the show, with Zachary Quinto as the host. It was announced in January but I only heard of it today because of a promo on History tonight, so it's coming soon.

https://deadline.com/2018/01/history-in ... 202273461/

I remember this story about a couple from the Twin Cities (Minnesota) that thought they were receiving "signals" from aliens and drove up to the Superior National Forest to await a UFO. It was like January or February--dead of winter at any rate--and they froze to death waiting for it. But I can't for the life of me find the fucking story anywhere online. Where the hell did I read about this? It happened in the early 80s as I recall.

Maybe, what was left behind was just shells of their bodies and they actually boarded the UFO?

Sadly, I cannot help you as I've never heard of that one. But if anyone knows more and has something to post, please do so. Sounds interesting.

Ha right. I just wish I could remember where I read it.

That is a very interesting and macabre story all the same. Never heard of this but wow....

In Search Of was great. It used to scar the living shit out of me as a kid.

One of them survived. Not sure why you couldn't find it as this was the 2nd result of my Google search: https://ironghost.wordpress.com/2006/03/13/killer-ufos/

Here's a newspaper article from the time: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid= ... 15,2949627

I'd say probably because I remembered it wrong. I thought they both died, so that was always in my Google searches. Thanks for finding this!

One unsolved mystery that always fascinated me was the disappearance of Asha Degree. In the middle the night she had gotten up, got dressed and snuck out the window of her room with a packed bookbag. A motorist saw her on the side of the rode and turned around to ask if she was ok. She ran into the woods before he could speak with her. Her backpack was later found buried and wrapped in plastic. A lot of the signs point to her case being an abduction, but what really happened to her is a mystery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Asha_Degree

This is creepy too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamison_family_deaths

Below is the last picture of the daughter found on the father's phone:

https://cdn2.newsok.biz/cache/r960-3ccf ... ad5791.jpg

Something is definitively wrong here.

That one really disturbs me. The ones with children always bother me the most. Do you think the girl in the picture is crying/upset?

"better to necrobump this thread, than post in the TV one..." ~cryptic quote, author unknown

I started watching Netflix's Alcàsser Murders docu-series... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8035424/

so far it looks very pro, would love if similar unsolved cases were given the same treatment...

I just "offline-Netflix'd" the whole season to my cellphone. Gonna check the series and comment.

That reminded me I still gotta watch those two documentaries about the Johnny Gosch case. Anybody seen them?

So... I finished watching this Aclasser Murders series last night... Talk about WTF-ness. The whole deal was a media circus, but hell, I wouldn't even have guessed to WHAT extent until now. Dunno what to make about the theories Fernando and Blanco had about Ricart... And now I wonder what the hell happened to Anglés.

After centuries of sightings and an ever-growing body of legend, some genius finally suggests the Loch Ness Monster could be a giant eel. Talk about a big-ass anti-climax! It took this long to come up with “giant eel”?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9866566/l ... l-real/amp

My favorite Loch Ness theory is that the monster is a catfish because it implies that the Loch Ness Monster is delicious.

Well, plenty of people also consider eels to be delicious - a statement which belongs in the Unsolved Mysteries Thread itself, if you ask me