Interesting. I hadn't known about Elaine O'Hara, and I see from Wikipedia that she had begged him repeatedly not to hurt her, poor thing.
Many things are clearly involved here, not least the complicated motivations of true crime readers, who presumably tend like mystery readers toward both liking logical puzzles and respect for authority. But as implied by the writer's emphasis on the high-tech investigative tools that enabled both the Golden State Killer and O'Hara's killer to be identified, we don't know how many serial killers operated in previous eras and were not identified. Have you read The Man from the Train? If the authors are right, one man is responsible for the stereotype of the ax murderer, and got away with a huge number of murders, in many cases of entire families; some almost certainly innocent people were put to death for his murders. Even those who were discovered are often forgotten in the focus on the modern American spree and serial killers, like Paul Ogorzow, a rapist and murderer in Nazi-era Berlin.
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Many things are clearly involved here, not least the complicated motivations of true crime readers, who presumably tend like mystery readers toward both liking logical puzzles and respect for authority. But as implied by the writer's emphasis on the high-tech investigative tools that enabled both the Golden State Killer and O'Hara's killer to be identified, we don't know how many serial killers operated in previous eras and were not identified. Have you read The Man from the Train? If the authors are right, one man is responsible for the stereotype of the ax murderer, and got away with a huge number of murders, in many cases of entire families; some almost certainly innocent people were put to death for his murders. Even those who were discovered are often forgotten in the focus on the modern American spree and serial killers, like Paul Ogorzow, a rapist and murderer in Nazi-era Berlin.
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