Serial Killers

Washington D.C. is the American nation’s capital, a paradise of security and armed forces presence and command. Yet in 2002, two men held the city captive while arresting pedestrian traffic with random sniper shots killing random victims with no warning. Indiscriminate selection of victims on the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. area roads. The random activities of the victims made for serious concern along all social strata.

Local and Interstate 95 kept beltway commuters looking over their shoulder and scattering at the slightest sound. A manhunt failed to catch the killers for several days when the nation watched as gunplay entered into the public domain. The arrest and sentencing of two African American men would once again polarize racial tensions in the area. These would be later classified by some criminologist as hate crimes.

There was no religious affiliation, no gender bias in the killings. People sitting outside the post office or mowing their lawn are equally vulnerable to the sniper. The sniper’s rampage of death was happening in the city, not isolated riverbeds or backwoods roads. “Stealth” poses at the gas pumps become normal to see in the forty mile area centralized in Montgomery County.

John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo kept the people in the nation’s capital watching their rear view mirrors and indoors for three weeks even in an age of media and satellite radar. Amazed Americans watched their news reports every night and marveled that a sniper existed in this day and age without being caught. Authorities desperately sought a way to end this beltway rampage holding so many in fear.
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The so-called “Angel of Death” killer was an inside man, a hospital employee and orderly whose access to unattended hospital patients and means to extinguish their lives proved fatal in double digits for American patients in the Midwest and Southeast. Donald Harvey started his criminal career simply by strangling patients too weak to struggle or using drugs to subdue them when nobody else was near. True to the nature of every serial killer, Harvey continued killing for little or no material gain, and even falsified job information for employment where he could kill again.

Born in Ohio in 1952, Harvey was part of a normal family. Growing up a ‘nice boy”, Donald Harvey won the praise and notice of teachers but not friends. Harvey was not happy to be a factory worker and when nuns noticed his adeptness around the building they suggested instead he train to be a medical orderly. At this time, many religious orders governed medical care in hospitals and medical wards. Harvey enjoyed an advantage to be trained without earning his vocation or showing moral turpitude before being considered for medical training. Soon Harvey would be charged with full care of patients on an unsupervised basis.

A homosexual man, this serial killer came by his moniker of murder because he always seemed to be around when death struck a patient. Yet to the inside atmosphere and world of the nurse or orderly, death was a constant enough attendant to the work life that few made connections until it was much too late for the victims. By using alternate methods in varying deaths converging with patient illnesses and symptoms, much of the initial activity of Donald Harvey passed relatively unnoticed. As medical equipment changed, Harvey disconnected ventilators and poisoned food. Despite discharges from hospitals, Harvey utilized a common trait among serial killers and obtained employment in the same field he would otherwise have been disqualified from.
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The Zodiac Killer was never caught because the law enforcement people in power at the time had used secondary means of catching a first rate criminal. The systems then in place were thought by many to be acceptable to the norms of the time, but criminal minds get away with crimes because their etymology of hate and lust for blood evades the thoughts and behavioral experience of the average policeman from that area in that era. Such law enforcement personnel cannot be expected to grapple with the serial killer type of threat.

The Zodiac Killer is the type of crime that specialized law enforcement agencies were formed to solve. Yet even after decades of forensic evidence and new theoretical modeling systems the Zodiac Killer has never been identified. Yet the improvement of data systems and the records access enjoyed by federal law enforcement today is unparalleled. By changing the approach used to evaluate the Zodiac Killer, a solution may present itself. [Here is an analysis that can clear up why that is].

The Zodiac Killer is thought to have a problem with water. The water comments in the notes indicate there may have been a problem with the killer living in an area that became flooded with water or the ground rose somehow preventing the killer from committing crimes. The Zodiac Killer was operating in a somewhat rural area during an era when options for personal transportation were limited. This could have been an important clue to follow up. Was the water clue a hidden one because in fact the serial killer was not ready to be caught yet?
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