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I think as long as the person arrested is unnamed and we stick to the reported facts, we should be on safe ground.
 
I think as long as the person arrested is unnamed and we stick to the reported facts, we should be on safe ground.

We don't know that there is a serial killer yet. Even if there is, he/she couldn't have operated for so long without the indifference of the hospital management to incredible mortality rate amongst infants.
 
We don't know that there is a serial killer yet. Even if there is, he/she couldn't have operated for so long without the indifference of the hospital management to incredible mortality rate amongst infants.

No, we don't know. But if nobody is named and no charges are brought, there is no harm done here.

Or am I missing something?
 
The nurse has been named. I won’t repeat the name here as I agree with Ramon that it is inappropriate to demonise the individual when she hasn’t even been charged. The allegations are shocking if true.
 
The nurse has been named. I won’t repeat the name here as I agree with Ramon that it is inappropriate to demonise the individual when she hasn’t even been charged. The allegations are shocking if true.

The allegations are indeed shocking.

It's not just about demonisation either, there's also the possibility of libel or collapsing a trial. Now you might think that the FTMB being so small could ever have an effect but it's the potential audience which counts.

The FTMB has over 33,000 members, now the vast majority of them are long gone but they are still on the books. So that's quite a significant potential viewing public for any comment in the eyes of the law.

Maybe the mods could perhaps archive any accounts which haven't been active for more than two years.
 
The allegations are indeed shocking.

It's not just about demonisation either, there's also the possibility of libel or collapsing a trial. Now you might think that the FTMB being so small could ever have an effect but it's the potential audience which counts.

The FTMB has over 33,000 members, now the vast majority of them are long gone but they are still on the books. So that's quite a significant potential viewing public for any comment in the eyes of the law.

Maybe the mods could perhaps archive any accounts which haven't been active for more than two years.

Details of the arrested person are all over the major UK newspapers so I think any references on the FTMB are unlikely to be the cause of any difficulties with the trial. However the sudden appearance of the individual’s name and details of their Facebook account is reminiscent of not just of Christopher Jefferies in Bristol but another nurse - Rebecca Leighton - who was wrongly accused of murdering patients and who claimed that the police asked for her FB password before changing the privacy settings to allow all and sundry to view it.

Very unprofessional.
 
The nurse has been named. I won’t repeat the name here as I agree with Ramon that it is inappropriate to demonise the individual when she hasn’t even been charged. The allegations are shocking if true.
Yup .. the Daily Fail had her name and picture splashed on their front page today .. not charged ? .. leave her alone. .. and she's been described as geeky and, shock horror, a pole dancer enthusiast ..

I'm geeky and a video nasty enthusiast into weird Fortean crap who smokes the odd spliff when no one's looking so if any suspicious deaths happen in North Norfolk, make sure you all phone The Daily Mail about me ..
 
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Details of the arrested person are all over the major UK newspapers so I think any references on the FTMB are unlikely to be the cause of any difficulties with the trial.

Not in this case but a comment here could cause damage to the publishers way above the active membership.

Lawyers would cite a potential readership of 33,000+.
 
Yup .. the Daily Fail had her name and picture splashed on their front page today .. not charged ? .. leave her alone. ..

Yeah, not just the Mail. Pretty much every media outlet in the UK, including the BBC, has reported this. I think the Times published first thogh..
 
Yeah, not just the Mail. Pretty much every media outlet in the UK, including the BBC, has reported this. I think the Times published first thogh..
I know it's a completely different thing but this is the same thing some men have to go through, usually celebrity, when wrongly accused of rape .. trial by media .. she needs to be left alone, hopefully she'll sue if she's innocent ..
 
She actually doesn't look like a serial killer.
I know, I know, appearances can be deceptive.
The press should be applying caution right now.
 
This is a fairly grim tale from S.Carolina.

A young couple go missing, 2 months go by, their facebook page is updated but it's not them, their last mobile phone location eventually leads police to the remote house of seemingly respectable estate agent Todd Kohlhepp. They discover the missing man's car hidden under foliage then hear banging from a metal storage container. Chained up inside is the missing woman. He'd shot & killed the man.

It then transpires that he'd previously killed 6 others, maybe more, had served 14 years in prison from the age of 15 for kidnap & rape, & was a registered sex offender. He had a history of violence going back to childhood.

You'd think a registered sex offender would be a prime subject of interest but he seems to have slipped under the radar somehow. He got 7 consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole in May 2017.
 
A Japanese nurse admits to murders.

A former nurse has confessed to poisoning at least 20 patients at a Japanese hospital by injecting their intravenous drips with disinfectant.

Ayumi Kuboki, 31, was arrested on Saturday by police investigating a string of suspicious deaths at Yokohama’s Oguchi hospital in 2016.

Under questioning, she admitted poisoning 88-year-old Sozo Nishikawa by injecting his IV drip with antiseptic solution.

Traces of benzalkonium chloride, a compound used in common hospital disinfectants, were found in his body, as well as in the body of another elderly patient who died in the same hospital room two days later. The discovery sparked a police investigation focussed on the possibility that a staff member was behind the deaths.

Kuboki confessed to “repeatedly” tampering with the drip bags of around 20 patients, but investigators suspect she may have fatally poisoned dozens more.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/94965/japa...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter
 
Not serial killer stuff technically but here's a newish dramatisation of the Manson family murders narrated by Linda Kasabian ..

 
You'd think a registered sex offender would be a prime subject of interest but he seems to have slipped under the radar somehow.

A very quick search shows that in 2012, there were 747,408 registered sex offenders in the USA, and at that time the figure was increasing year on year. I'd guess there may be around a million by now. Add to that the fact that probably most sex offenders haven't been convicted and registered, and many are not even suspected. It would not be a matter of trawling though thousands in the hope of a match, but looking at the evidence in the individual case and then seeing if there was a possible match.
 
As a (possibly facetious) aside, does this mean Santa Claus in the future will be treated the same way as clowns are now?
 
There's a film called Silent Night Deadly Night that features a Santa serial killer. There was a moral outrage about it in the USA during the 80s. Seems pretty mild now.

And Tales from the Crypt is possibly the first film with a killer Santa (mentioned on the Horror Films thread recently).

So Evil Santa may be the next big thing in social (media) panics.
 
Man accused of murdering New York City nurse may be connected to six other slayings: officials

Danueal Drayton, 27, of New Haven, Conn., was accused of murdering Samantha Stewart last week. Stewart, a nurse, was found dead on July 17 inside her Queens home.


Stewart’s brother discovered her unconscious with injuries to her neck and head. She was naked and wrapped in a white sheet on the floor of her bedroom.

Her teeth were knocked out and she had injuries to her neck. Authorities pronounced her dead at the scene.

Officials believe Drayton and Stewart met on Tinder. Her family said surveillance footage from a Brooklyn restaurant the two went to before her death helped identify the suspected killer.

Investigators believe Drayton may have used the online dating site and other social media sites to prey on his victims. He allegedly confessed to six other killings, police sources told the Daily News.
 
'After 37 years I caught my brother's killer on Facebook'

Not only did Penny find Silas Boston on Facebook, she found his two sons, Russell and Vince, as well as his fifth wife. She messaged them all but got no immediate reply.

Undeterred, Penny contacted Greater Manchester Police, which contacted the Sacramento Police Department, which, it just so happened, had just reopened the case into the disappearance of Boston's third wife. Renewed hope, at last.

Astonishingly, Boston's sons had told the police that it was an open family secret that their father had killed their mother.

Even more astonishingly, they had spent the best part of three decades trying to convince the police that they had witnessed their father murdering Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton in Guatemala.

[...]

Boston had confided in Russell that he had killed 33 people. If true, that would make Boston one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He even threatened to kill Russell and his brother, immediately after killing Chris and Peta, to keep his secret safe.
 
Vronsky has a book to sell on why there were such a large number of serial killers in the 80s and it appears to cover the usual bases (Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers). The factor he's pushing as somewhat novel, however, is his charting of the 'knock-on effect' of the Second World War:

He realised that many were children during World War Two and the ensuing post-war era - a time when the psychological impact of the global conflict and its savagery was not being discussed.
It was a war that "was far more vicious and primitive than we have been able to acknowledge", Vronsky says.
Many of the killers from that period have not spoken on the record about their fathers, he said, but those that have often referred to them coming back from the war in a traumatised state.
He said there was a less pronounced but noticeable increase in serial killings from 1935 to 1950, following World War One, and hopes sociologists and criminologists look more closely at the war experiences of the fathers of these killers, and their paternal relationships.

Full Article:
The book is written from a Canadian/American perspective that I really don't think survives the Transatlantic journey. The British stereotype is of the man who has seen and perhaps done terrible things during the conflict returning to Civvy Street and simply refusing to discuss the matter with family (and being left with a lifelong scepticism towards politicians who advocate for war) because it was so common. I dare say that all middle-aged members here will have known or met one or more such men. There were certainly people--men and women--who bore the psychological scars less privately--and affected those around them directly and indirectly--but there are broken people in every generation and I cannot see how regular violence or abuse aimed at the offspring affects a child differently because of the root cause of that abuse. This which would all militate against the war being the cause of the 80s serial-killing bump.

Still, interesting stuff.
 
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The book is written from a Canadian/American perspective that I really don't think survives the Transatlantic journey. The British stereotype is of the man who has seen and perhaps done terrible things during the conflict returning to Civvy Street and simply refusing to discuss the matter with family (and remaining a lifelong scepticism towards politicians who advocate for war) because it was so common. I dare say that all middle-aged members here will have known or met one or more such men. There were certainly people--men and women--who bore the psychological scars less privately and affected those around them directly and indirectly, but there are broken people in every generation and I cannot see how regular violence or abuse aimed at the offspring affects a child differently because of the root cause of that abuse--which would militate against this being the cause of the 80s serial-killing bump.

I saw that too late to post it before heading for the treadmill. I thought it an interesting notion and it does have some supporting evidence, in that current research now supports the idea that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) can cause impulse control and violent behaviours and this can be physical damge, manifested by such things as being repeated banged around the head (e.g as a young child) and also there is some evidence that the vmPFC can be underdeveloped due to emotional abuse, whether overt or simply the emotional withdrawal of a parent or parents.

Psychopathy is typically due to under development of damage to the amygdala, usually lesions caused by infection and sometimes it 'just isn't working', but that doesn't mean violent killing will result. Although a near mute amygdala and damage to the vmPFC has produced some awful people.

Quite a lot of scanned convicted criminals' brains have borne this theory out, although I don't recall what control scans were done. BBC4's "The Mystery of Murder: A Horizon Guide" covered this quite well.

Clearly a proportion of people have the 'potential' to develop into serial killers, a wide ranging term which might apply equally to violent sociopaths, violent psychotics and empathy-less psychopaths. However, there is no 'serial killer type' per se and it turns out that the characters and behaviours of such people, barring the defining one, vary as much as anyone eases.

However, one might see that social conditions such as described could conceivably tip the balance in more potential offenders, rather than 'the norm'. Notwithstanding our innate desire to fit a reason around randomness, you might formulate a careful hypothesis, but I suspect it would be testable.

I may buy the book, but I'd say, sight unseen, I'd like to see statistics for all crimes in which violence were a factor across the periods discussed, as if there is anything in the theory, then one-off impulse violence would be similarly profiled around returning PSTD stricken fathers and/or children raised just by their mother. That would be (for my money) more compelling, but not as attention grabbing if you are selling a book.
 
I saw that too late to post it before heading for the treadmill. I thought it an interesting notion and it does have some supporting evidence, in that current research now supports the idea that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) can cause impulse control and violent behaviours and this can be physical damge, manifested by such things as being repeated banged around the head (e.g as a young child) and also there is some evidence that the vmPFC can be underdeveloped due to emotional abuse, whether overt or simply the emotional withdrawal of a parent or parents.

Psychopathy is typically due to under development of damage to the amygdala, usually lesions caused by infection and sometimes it 'just isn't working', but that doesn't mean violent killing will result. Although a near mute amygdala and damage to the vmPFC has produced some awful people.

Quite a lot of scanned convicted criminals' brains have borne this theory out, although I don't recall what control scans were done. BBC4's "The Mystery of Murder: A Horizon Guide" covered this quite well.

Clearly a proportion of people have the 'potential' to develop into serial killers, a wide ranging term which might apply equally to violent sociopaths, violent psychotics and empathy-less psychopaths. However, there is no 'serial killer type' per se and it turns out that the characters and behaviours of such people, barring the defining one, vary as much as anyone eases.

However, one might see that social conditions such as described could conceivably tip the balance in more potential offenders, rather than 'the norm'. Notwithstanding our innate desire to fit a reason around randomness, you might formulate a careful hypothesis, but I suspect it would be testable.

I may buy the book, but I'd say, sight unseen, I'd like to see statistics for all crimes in which violence were a factor across the periods discussed, as if there is anything in the theory, then one-off impulse violence would be similarly profiled around returning PSTD stricken fathers and/or children raised just by their mother. That would be (for my money) more compelling, but not as attention grabbing if you are selling a book.
My, that was long :)

If there is a connection, maybe it is due to the emotional withdrawal of the parents? Certainly by modern standards the stoic and suppressive way that most people (who would be the parents of the generation we are talking about) dealt with their war experience would be seen as abnormal.

But I think they were doing the right thing. Certainly my parents (and grandparents), insofar as they would discuss it at all, largely turned it in to a joke. But you could also see the damage - my poor Uncle Doug, who had been on tank recovery in the desert campaign, was permanently damaged mentally and I guess some of that may have been passed onto his children, my cousins.
 
My, that was long :)
Yeah, that's what they all say. :):)

Like all psychology stuff, it's about normal distributions - if 0.1% of the population were (for example) potential serial killers and in the normal run of things, a tenth of them actually developed homicidal behaviour (0.01%), that would be termed 'normal'. If such conditions described above made two-tenths (0.02%) develop said tendencies, that would be a large effect...but still a small number of serial killers (good).

Imagine though, the confounding factors you would need to take into account. Socio-economic status. Religious beliefs. Policing methods and effectiveness. Economic conditions. The effect of media. And so on...Sounds like a PhD job to me.
 
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