Tag: serial killers

Miami cops arrest ‘serial killer’ estate agent, 25, accused of murdering two homeless men and injuring a third in drive-by shootings: Police believe there may be other victims

Miami police suspect a 25-year-old, Cuban-born real estate agent of being a ‘serial killer’ after he was arrested in the killings of two homeless men and for critically wounding a third in a series of drive-by shootings from his Dodge Charger.

Willy Suarez Maceo allegedly shot a homeless man in the head near downtown Miami at 400 SW 2nd Avenue around 8 pm on Tuesday then pulled up alongside Jerome Antonio Price, 56,  two hours later and shot him dead as he slept on the sidewalk at Miami Avenue and 21st Street in Wynwood. The first victim survived.

He’s also suspected in the unsolved murder of another homeless man, 59-year-old Manuel Perez, at 27 SE 1st Street on October 16. 

A man pictured in surveillance footage at the scene closely resembles Maceo, and the vehicle seen driving away matches a black Dodge Charger caught in surveillance footage of the Tuesday shootings, police said. 

Maceo was arrested Thursday after he refused to drive away from an area with visible ‘no trespassing’ signs at 445 Northwest 4th Street, according to police reports. 

A rapid ballistics test of the firearm in his vehicle, which he had a permit to carry and conceal, linked him to Tuesday’s shootings, police said.

Miami Police Interim Chief Manuel A. Morales called Maceo a ‘ruthless killer’ who ‘brutally targeted’ the homeless in a press conference and suspects that ‘there may be other victims that suffered at the hands of this ruthless individual.’ 

Keep reading

THE MOST DANGEROUS ACTIVE SERIAL KILLERS IN 2021

Watch almost any crime drama on TV today, and it might seem like cops always get the bad guy within the hour. But we all know that’s not true, and the scale on which it isn’t true is a little mind-blowing.

According to the US Department of Justice, the closure rate on 2017 murder cases was only at 62 percent. The rest went unsolved, and that’s all contributing to an ever-growing number of cold cases. They estimate that across the US, there’s somewhere around 250,000 unsolved murder cases that are still open. That’s going up all the time, and law enforcement estimates there’s going to be about another 6,000 added to that number every year. It’s a huge deal: according to Tom McAndrew, a former Pennsylvania State Trooper, “… all unsolved homicides potentially have offenders who have never been apprehended. History and research show that a violent offender will likely repeat.”

Advances in DNA technology mean that there is a chance that some of these offenders will be caught. Take the Golden State Killer, a serial killer linked to crimes that spanned decades. He started killing in 1976, and was only identified and arrested in 2018. The good news is that there is hope we’ll see justice for the victims and their families, so let’s talk about some of the most prolific serial killers still out there.

Keep reading

‘Dating Game Killer’ Rodney Alcala dies at 77

Convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala, known as the ‘Dating Game Killer’ because of his appearance on the TV show as a contestant in 1978, has died of natural causes, California prison officials said Saturday.

Alcala, 77, was condemned to death row for murdering five people, including 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in 1979.

He died at 1:43 a.m. Saturday at a hospital, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.

He was twice granted a new trial in the Orange County kidnapping and killing of Samsoe but was convicted of her murder, as well as that of four women, by an Orange County jury in 2010. He was sentenced to death.

Keep reading

Did Police Corruption Derail the Long Island Serial Killer Investigation?

In December 2010, law enforcement found four bodies along a scrub-covered stretch of highway on the south coast of Long Island. The following spring, six more sets of human remains were found in the same area. Six of the victims have been identified as young women who were sex workers. Four, including a toddler and a person with male anatomy remain unidentified. In late 2011, authorities announced they were looking for one murderer responsible for all of the deaths. A decade later, the mystery, which became known as the Long Island serial killer case, remains unsolved.

A new podcast looks at why. Hosted by crime podcast veterans Billy Jensen (The Murder Squad) and Alexis Linkletter (The First Degree), Unraveled: Long Island Serial Killer — and its accompanying TV special premiering March 9th on Discovery+ — examines how corruption in the Suffolk County Police Department may have stymied the investigation of one of the biggest homicide cases in Long Island history and questions what police were trying to hide.

Keep reading

Jack the Ripper unmasked: How amateur sleuth used DNA breakthrough to identify Britain’s most notorious criminal 126 years after string of terrible murders

It is the greatest murder mystery of all time, a puzzle that has perplexed criminologists for more than a century and spawned books, films and myriad theories ranging from the plausible to the utterly bizarre.

But now, thanks to modern forensic science, The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for  at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888.

DNA evidence has now  shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.

A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer.

Keep reading

Why Were There So Many Serial Killers Between 1970 and 2000 — and Where Did They Go?

When Gil Carrillo joined the homicide division at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in the early Eighties, his future partner Frank Salerno was already something of a celebrity. He had recently collared the so-called Hillside Strangler, a.k.a. cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., a serial killer duo who terrorized the L.A. area in the late Seventies, raping, torturing, and killing 10 women.

“When I met Frank; he was going through the trial for the Hillside Strangler,” Carrillo tells Rolling Stone. “I asked him about it and he said, ‘Well, that’s a once-in-a-career case.’ Then, two weeks later, we’re head-long into this.” “This” being the hunt for a serial killer the media had dubbed the Night Stalker — a home invader, rapist, and murderer who whipped Los Angeles and San Francisco into a terror that lasted from June 1984 to August 1985, when Carrillo and Salerno apprehended Richard Ramirez.

The veteran cops appear in the new Netflix documentary Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, directed by Tiller Russell. A grisly, gripping four-episode look into just how Ramirez was captured, the series highlights the popular corner of true-crime dedicated to serial killers, a much-investigated U.S. phenomenon that seems to be relegated to a period between the Seventies and early 2000s. Over those 30 years, Americans who previously left their doors unlocked and hitchhiked with abandon were suddenly caught in the sites of predators like Ramirez and the “Cannibal Killer” Jeffrey Dahmer, who did much of their hunting during the Eighties; and Keith Hunter Jesperson, a.k.a. the Happy Face Killer, a trucker who murdered at least eight women in the early Nineties. But by the early 2000s, the spate of serial killer stories seemed to peter out.

Keep reading

Zodiac’s cipher codebreaker speaks out: Killer was his own self-defeating “publicist”

Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, first learned of the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved ciphers — a series of encrypted messages — from a documentary in the 1990s. His interest marginally increased in 2007 after the release of David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” but it wasn’t until last year that it completely was cemented while watching code-breaking expert David Oranchak’s “Let’s Crack Zodiac” YouTube series. 

The series was dedicated to solving the codes the Northern California serial killer sent in letters to newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the ciphers, called the 408 cipher, was solved in 1969 by a schoolteacher and his wife, but it did not reveal the killer’s identity; the additional three puzzles remained unsolved for over 51 years, despite advances in computer technology. 

Keep reading

What a Mathematician Learned From Cracking the Zodiac Killer’s Code

A group of three hobbyist cryptographers last week cracked one of the most infamous ciphers created by the Zodiac Killer, more than half-a-century after the murderer claimed their first confirmed victim.

The unnamed Zodiac killed at least five people in Northern California between the late 1960s and early 1970s, and derived their pseudonym from a series of taunting letters sent to the San Francisco Bay Area press up until 1974. Those letters included four cryptic messages, known as “ciphers.” Up until a few days ago, only one of those ciphers had ever been convincingly decoded.

Cryptologist David Oranchak, who has been trying to crack the notorious “340 cipher” (it contains 340 characters) for more than a decade, made a crucial breakthrough earlier this year when applied mathematician Sam Blake came up with about 650,000 different possible ways in which the code could be read. From there, using code-breaking software designed by Jarl Van Eycke, the team’s third member, they came up with a small number of valuable clues that helped them piece together a message in the cipher:

“I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME 

THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW 

WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME 

I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER 

BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER 

BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME 

WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE 

SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH 

I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS

LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH”

Keep reading

Genius! These codebreakers just cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous 340 cipher, 51 YEARS after it was first published.

On December 5th, 2020 Sam Blake, Jarl Van Eycke, David Oranchak finally cracked the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved 340-character cipher.

The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who was active in Northern California in the 1960s and ’70s. His name came from the taunting letters he would send to the San Francisco Bay Area press which included a total of four ciphers. It was confirmed that he killed at least five people, though he claimed to have murdered 37.

Police still don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, though they’ve long hoped that solving his ciphers would reveal more details about him.

Keep reading