![]() ![]() After Keyes was arrested, a coworker told the true-crime channel Oxygen that he’d been just a regular guy, “a loving dad, a doting father” who would “come in to work and brag about” his child. I say “project” because DeAngelo et al only adhered to this normative ideal to a degree. Bundy, DeAngelo, Keyes, and others are oddly suited canvases on which to project our ideas of normality-and what it looks like when that concept of normality is utterly betrayed. Yet, we’re never as fascinated as when they have lived a double life, one side of which looked a lot like ours. There is a chasm in the way we think of serial killers and many violent criminals: we like to describe them as inhuman monsters, almost a separate species, cunning and unfeeling and incapable of accessing the same emotions the rest of us do. Within days, the FBI got involved: Keyes, it turned out, had murdered Koenig and multiple other people throughout his life, including a couple whose disappearance the previous year from Vermont had stumped investigators. It happened again, when, in 2012, police officers in Lufkin, Texas, pulled over a man called Israel Keyes, who was wanted in connection with the recent disappearance of 18-year-old barista Samantha Koenig in Anchorage, Alaska, where Keyes resided. ![]() He made my bed, my daughter’s bed, cleaned, cooked, and did laundry up until the day of his arrest at age 72. After his arrest, his eldest daughter told the court in a letter: “I could never tell you all the things my father did for me … there are far too many. It’s the same story we revisited when Joseph DeAngelo, a veteran, former police officer, and retired truck mechanic, was arrested and revealed to have been the Golden State Killer, who in 2020 admitted to murdering 13 victims and raping 50 between the 1970s and 80s. It’s the same story we’ve seen unfold since Ted Bundy was first arrested in 1975, when the nice law student who had made early forays into politics and built a multi-year relationship with his live-in partner Elizabeth Kloepfer turned out to have murdered at least 30 women and girls across seven states. According to a 2005 FBI symposium on serial murder, serial killers accounted for “less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year,” and the number of active serial killers is estimated to have decreased since. Statistically, this is a rare story serial murderers do not commit the vast majority of violent crimes in the U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |