Now I can’t help but imagine a 60 year old seriel killer at a millenials door waiting, mad as fuck, checking his watch , and leaving out of frustration and writes a blog post about how millenials are ruining this country
Are Millennials Killing The Serial Killer Industry?
So, hopefully, yes.
I watch a lot of true-crime, and specifically murder stuff – what I’m interested in is actually the investigation and the closure, not LURID DETAILS OF THE CRIME or whatever – and I have got to tell you: the pre-mid-2000s world was fucking weird with this shit in ways that absolutely, absolutely enabled murders and undermined investigations.
Eight year old children would go missing, unexpectedly and with no possible reasonable explanation, and their families would still get told by the police, “oh they just ran away, kids run away sometimes”, and no investigation would happen for over a week.
And that’s eight year old kids with zero actual Active Horrible Reasons for police indifference: these were often white, middle-class kids with good grades, no physical disabilities, etc. The ones you’d think society would value. It was assumed, culturally/by those who worked in the law/etc that even kids like that would Just Run Away For Days Sometimes.
Forget if it’s a teenager, forget if they’re not white or if they’re poor or if they ever even so much as yelled at their mom in public or smoked a cigarette where someone could see.
As for adults, if you didn’t find a huge pool of blood and/or the actual mangled body, clearly they’d just decided to go missing! Adults were allowed to do that, your daughter/sister/friend just probably got tired of her husband and ran off, your son/brother/friend just couldn’t hack being married anymore and took off!
There’s a gradual change in that over the decades but honestly not much, as far as I can tell: the Amber Alert stuff started in 1996 but the criteria for it were really stringent and specific, for example. Until suddenly mid-2000s it’s a huge change.
Obviously the ubiquity of mobile technology is part of it: we’re no longer a society where it is in any way normal for someone to be unreachable. Indeed, total cessation of all communication was recently used as proof of someone’s death in absence of their corpse in a murder trial in Ontario. But I also feel like someone in the 2000s was doing some hard-core number crunching.
Because one of the things we do know now (and it’s taught to law-enforcement/etc) is that almost nobody goes Completely Missing unless Bad Shit Is Happening. Even people who cut contact with a certain set of people are almost always in contact with others and if you have police level resources you can track some kind of contact down. Kids who “run away” …go to friends’ houses, go to relatives’ houses, go to some pretty predictable places within urban areas and so on.
So if someone’s actually unfindable, it basically means Something Really Bad Happened, and if it’s not treated accordingly it’s because the actual specific law-enforcement response to that one is Particularly Shite, rather than just being … how we assume the universe works means we don’t even look, like it was back then.
These days, almost nobody goes missing for very long: within a few days to a few weeks we either find them or their body and while the latter is really damn sad it’s, you know. Not missing. And they especially don’t go missing without someone having seriously fucked the dog on the investigation somewhere along the line.*
It is SO WEIRD to watch stuff on Older Cases, and the absolute seeming unconcern about people disappearing, though. SO WEIRD.
*there are a number of examples of these, ngl, but the thing about them now is that they really are an obvious case of “you didn’t care about these people so you didn’t bother following up”.
Mooncustafer 