Tag: serial killers

SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE? Cops Investigate Connection Between Deadly Attacks On Homeless In New York City, Washington D.C.

NYPD Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell and D.C. Chief of Police Robert J. Contee, III of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC, announce that several shootings that occurred in the District of Columbia and New York City have been committed by the same suspect. Both departments are investigating these offenses jointly with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Between the two cities, there have been five shootings, including two homicides. In each offense, the victims were experiencing homelessness.

The most recent shootings occurred in New York City in the early morning hours of March 12. Both incidents involve homeless men who were sleeping on the street and were shot, without provocation, by a male suspect.

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Serial killer, 83, eyed in case of dismembered body found in Brooklyn

An 83-year-old serial killer who spent the bulk of her life behind bars for killing two ex-girlfriends is being eyed in the murder of another woman whose dismembered body turned up in Brooklyn last week, The Post has learned.

Harvey Marcelin, who identifies as a transgender woman, was charged last week with concealment of a human corpse after she was allegedly caught on surveillance video dumping human remains near her apartment, according to sources and court records.

A search warrant turned up “a human head” in Marcelin’s home in Cypress Hills, according to a criminal complaint, and sources said cops also recovered electric saws she bought at Home Depot.

The grisly case unfolded last week when the torso of Susan Layden, 68, was recovered from an abandoned shopping cart at the corner of Pennsylvania and Atlantic avenues — less than a block from Marcelin’s apartment, sources said.

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‘Darkness Enveloped My Soul’: The Final Confessions of the Torso Killer

Jennifer Weiss says her life came full-circle in a massive, dreary building in Trenton, New Jersey. In May of 1978, her mother, Deedeh Goodarzi, put her up for adoption at an agency in the shadow of the New Jersey State Prison and its barbed-wire crowned fences. Decades later, she found herself at that same prison, confronting the man who had left her mother dismembered in a flaming hotel room in Times Square: Richard Cottingham, a.k.a. the Torso Killer, a man whose brutality towards his victims shocked even the most seasoned of cops.

“I wanted to find her. I didn’t want to ever have to try to find her skull,” Weiss says of her mother, whose identity she says she uncovered in 2003, when she was in her early twenties. “I was expecting to get the other half of the locket like Annie… and it was not the case.”

Weiss first met Cottingham through a sheet of glass for a window visit and was shocked to discover that she wasn’t scared of the man before her, who resembled Santa gone to seed. “I was trying to figure out pieces of my mother’s life and where her remains were,” she says. And he had the answers.

Cottingham, now 75, has spent the last four decades in relative obscurity, watching hours of police procedurals and detective shows behind bars as he slid into his seventies and his health hit a steady decline. Over the last decade or so, however, the killer — who has been convicted of eight murders  — has been slowly confessing to a series of cold cases. How these confessions came about is highly contested, though: Former Chief of Detectives for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Robert Anzilotti would say he’s responsible for wearing Cottingham down over the years, while Weiss and her friend, serial killer expert Dr. Peter Vronsky, claim it’s her unlikely, uncomfortable relationship with Cottingham that has helped grease the gears. Cottingham, who wrote to Rolling Stone from South Woods State Prison for his first published interview in more than 10 years, credits both, seeming to play his confidantes against each other even behind bars.

Credit aside, it’s not been an easy path when it comes to getting confessions out of Cottingham. Whether it’s his failing memory, the police’s interdepartmental politics, or Cottingham’s lust for manipulation, it’s become a proverbial race against time to get his alleged crimes put to paper — according to Cottingham himself, he has roughly 70 to 90 murders to go.

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FBI Confirms Zodiac Killer’s Infamous 340 Cipher Has Been Decoded, And His Message Finally Revealed

A team of codebreakers decided to try and crack the code specifically because they knew it would be a challenge. 

David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke used software to help them break the cipher, first by finding the many possible reading directions that could be used if the cipher was transpositional. By sheer luck, Oranchak found that one solution for how the cipher could be transposed revealed fragments of messages, including “hope you are,” “trying to catch me” and “or the gas chamber”.

This gave them clues that the message wasn’t transcribed in one big block as it was presented, but instead was broken into three smaller blocks of text made up of nine lines, followed by nine lines, followed by a final two.

By starting in the top left hand corner, then moving down one line and across two spaces to get the next letter, a key which could be translated into letters and then words emerged. The letter “B” for instance, was represented by “□7”, “c” by a simple “9” and “A” by a whole load of symbols unavailable on a keyboard. You can see these neatly shown in the video released by the team below. 

Through use of this method, and some slight adjustments by ignoring a few words that stood out before transposing the text, a message was revealed:

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 

“Of all the things that stood out was the line ‘that wasn’t me on the TV show’,” Oranchak explained in the video. “At this point I jumped out of my chair because I knew the cipher was received on November 8, 1969, which is about two weeks after someone calling themselves Zodiac called into a TV talk show hosted by Jim Dunbar. While the caller was on the air, he said ‘I need help, I’m sick, I don’t want to go to the gas chamber.'”

This for Oranchak made the solution seem real, as it fit with the events around the time it was received. The rest of the message also seemed quite in character for the Zodiac Killer. 

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Serial Killer Who Targeted Women Now Being Housed in Women’s Prison Because They Are ‘Transgender’

A male serial killer who targeted women, claiming to have killed nine, is now housed in a women’s prison after being transgender.

“Donna Perry,” born Douglas, has been transferred to the Washington Correctional Center for Women under new laws that allow gender self-identification.

Perry was convicted in 2017 of first degree murder for the violent slayings of prostitutes Yolanda Sapp, 26, Nicki Lowe, Nicki Lowe, 34, and Kathleen Brisbois, 38 in 1990. Though he was only prosecuted for three killings, he claims that there were nine.

The defense in Perry’s case actually had the audacity to claim that it was “Douglas Perry,” his former identity, who may have killed the women — not “Donna Perry,” his new identity.

The prosecution argued that it was likely Perry had fled to Thailand and underwent gender reassignment surgery in order to avoid suspicion for the murders.

Perry was sentenced to three life sentences without the possibility of parole.

A report from 4W explains that Perry was one of over 150 males who identify as female who were moved to the women’s prison.

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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.’ 

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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