Serial Killers

It’s a good thing some serial killers to be are just plain lazy and dare we say it – stupid. Nothing says this more than the case of Geoffrey Portway. Geoffrey Portway was sentenced today to 27 years in prison for planning to kidnap, rape, torture, kill and consume child victims.

Portway is a British national and will be deported back to Britain once he finishes his time in prison. Portway was part of a macabre internet group who openly discussed and shared photos of child pornography, mutilation and death. It’s a good thing for local children that Portway and his idiot accomplices thought the internet would give them some privacy to do their thing; not knowing of course that they were being watched by law enforcement. This gets even dumber when you consider that Portway was employed in an IT department!

Portway had constructed a torture-style basement complete with a child-size coffin, torture devices, butchering equipment and a steel cage with restraints. It’s a good thing he was caught before he had a chance to start killing. It’s not often we get to write about killers before they do so.

The BTK Killer conformed to the classic serial killer profile, showing that any combination or social profiling will always yield an adaptation to the serial killer profile. The BTK killer was a man named Dennis Rader, outwardly a pillar of his community. But the mask of a law-abiding family man with children and ties to community leadership hid a deviant sadist whose lust for sexual release via strangulation and killing struck again and again. Childhood zoosadism and sexual handling of women’s underwear also flagged Rader as a serious deviant. But these signs were concealed.

Between 1974 and 1991, residents of Wichita, Kansas kept one eye out at all times. The BTK killer fascinated the public after his arrest because his “subterranean” lusts were so skillfully hidden beneath the appearance of normality. On that basis anyone might be a serial killer, a concept that both threatens society and challenges it. Rader acknowledged after arrest and sentencing that the victims were an ends to a means, and that he did not expect victims’ families to forgive him. The BTK killer is the record holder for waste of human life for the most trite and misguided of purposes.

The BTK killer tortured his victims and created a universe of pain he controlled. But nothing could stop his cyclic sexual urges that required sadistic episodes of induced terror in others to furnish the BTK killer with sexual pleasure. The first murders, as many serial killers experience, were experiments based on projected fantasies. He grew more crafty over time, changing his method of targeting likely episodes, victims, and environments of his prey to maximize pleasure and enjoyment without risking exposure unduly.
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While it is a mark of camp culture to reference sadomasochism and sexuality as a game or dungeon pursuit, David Parker Ray made this a reality. His custom built $100,000 trailer full of torture devices and S & M paraphernalia gives testimony to the deeply rooted deviancy at work in his nature. The instinct to abduct, torture, and kidnap women and maintain a level of pain and continual submission has no redeeming social value. The killing was premeditated, a lust crime, and a manipulation of control and dominance over an undeserving victim.

Unlike many profiled serial killers, David Parker Ray had a clean rap sheet and few problems with others. His disturbing sex hobbies were kept under wraps and only carelessness led to his arrest. David Parker Ray derived no monetary or other profit from his crimes, such as video earnings, internet publicity, or book royalties from memoirs or movie deals. In fact, David Parker Ray did not survive long in prison although the judge afforded him 224 years, plenty of time to get the hang of incarceration.

Most human beings will luckily not have any contact with evil such as Ray inflicted and created in his “Toy Box’. the specifics of the crime scene involved a litany of unorthodox items serving as weapons or instruments of torture for the use of by Ray and his girlfriend Jessy. At trial Ray’s daughter was charged and may have been involved in “roping” or luring victims to the Toy Box or other locations where Ray secured their persons involuntarily. Kidnapping and conspiracy were just as biting offenses to the ultimate trial as the sexual abuse, as Cynthia V. Hill had been taken across state lines from Oregon.
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