Serial killers' occupations

[miss marple]

Doctor Serial killers seem to kill with drugs or poisoning, [Palmer, Shipman, Cream] rather than knife butchery. If its easy to get your hands on drugs, why use a knife? I ve never gone with ripper as doctor theory either. Most of us know approximately where our vital organs are, with no medical training.
Miss Marple

[DarkPassenger]

Ripper wasn't a doctor, nah. Closest you'll get is Cream, who enjoyed his victims suffering with poison.

Ben Geen, Beverley Allit, Ann Grigg Booth, Colin Norris, you name it, all those serial killers used drugs to kill.

[DarkPassenger]

Hi Stan,

That doesn't invalidate Pinkerton's obsevation that the vast majority of serial killers are employed in blue-collar professions.

Best,
Ben

Different types of serial killers are blue collar. Prostitute killers are mostly, nearly always blue-collar while serial murderers who target old people are nearly always doctors.

[Paul O'Henry]

Hi Mr. DarkPassenger,

Not only some doctors are/had been serial killers of elderly people - nurses as well like the "Lainz Angels of Death" - nurses of the hospital in Lainz (Vienna/Austria), who in the 1980s killed 40+ elderly patients! The leading figure was Waltraud Wagner who as a 23year old nurse killed - "for mercy" - a 77year old patient as her first victim.

kind regards

Paul O'Henry

[DarkPassenger]

Good point -Geen, Allit and Norris were nurses.

[Sherlock]

It is interesting that both John Christie and Denis Nilsen served as police officers - Christie in the Metropolitan War Reserve Police between 1939 and 1944 and Nilsen as a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police for a year during the 1970s.

Possibly there are other instances of killers who have served as policemen, or perhaps suspects relating to unsolved crimes who were policemen.

regards
SHERLOCK

[evabaruk]

Marcel Petiot was a doctor as well.

[Graham]

I guess that the most prolific medically-qualified serial-killer of them all must be Dr Josef Mengele, but his motives (if indeed he had any) would seem to be political rather than personal.

Cheers,

Graham

[bolo]

I guess that the most prolific medically-qualified serial-killer of them all must be Dr Josef Mengele, but his motives (if indeed he had any) would seem to be political rather than personal.

Cheers,

Graham

Political? Not really, that was just a façade. He was a medical man who lost touch with reality and had already dropped or lost his humanity, dignity and the principles of the Hippocratic oath before 30 January 1933. Hitler and the Nazis opened doors for him and he always was a good little doggy who never bit the hands of those who fed him, but when he closed the doors of his concentration camp surgery, Doc Jekyll turned into a sadistic mass-murdering Hide.

As for the East End murderer, I don't think that he was a doctor, in my opinion he had a normal or even menial job. The type of his victims, timing and methods don't give me the impression of a serial-killing medic who had had more efficient and safer (and most probably more "creative") options at his disposal for selecting and killing of his victims than the Ripper.

[DarkPassenger]

Mengela wasn't a serial killer.

[zenith]

Speculation from a relative newbie here, but does anyone know much about military doctors/medics circa fin de siecle England? In the states there's historically quite a difference between army medics and doctors per se (not the least of the distinctions being that one goes through military training and the other goes through actual medical school). I'm not sure if there was a similar divide in the late Victorian era, but I wonder--if Jack had been a military medic of some kind it might account for the blue-collar/white-collar divide we've been talking about here in this post. A field medic (or whatever such an occupation might be called in the context) wouldn't entirely be "blue collar" but he certainly wouldn't be bourgeoisie (he might be something, actually, quite like "shabby genteel").

I'm not asserting this to be true or even a real possibility, obviously. It's all speculative. I've never thought about the class-lines of convicted serial killers before and you guys point out some interesting trends.

[caz]

Hi All,

Maybe we're missing something here. If people who kill strangers for the hell of it generally pick on victims they feel confident they can 'handle', their handling experience may in some cases come from what they do for a living - Dr Shipman being an obvious example. But in other cases it could come from some other aspect of their lives, eg something they are used to doing in their spare time, that would not necessarily be known about, or at least not single them out from the crowd. Bundy, for instance, used the charm offensive he knew he could adapt from his personal experience of being able to chat up the girls. Wright took advantage of his familiarity with the habits of the local prostitutes in Ipswich. So I do feel that Jack would have had some prior knowledge or experience of the type of victim he selected, either as a result of his occupation, or because of how he occupied himself when he had a few hours to kill (pun intended) and money in his pocket.

Oh and I'm beginning to think Hitler would not have been happy at all at the prospect of no Jews left in the world for his henchmen to seek out and destroy. He had the blessing of so many people around him to start the process, and if nobody had stopped him I suspect he would have simply done a 'Sutcliffe' and found excuses galore to start exercising his power over the next section of society (and the next and the next), regarded by large numbers of his fellow man as inferior, or the 'enemy', for whatever reason.

Love,

Caz
X

[Mitch Rowe]

It is interesting that both John Christie and Denis Nilsen served as police officers - Christie in the Metropolitan War Reserve Police between 1939 and 1944 and Nilsen as a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police for a year during the 1970s.

Possibly there are other instances of killers who have served as policemen, or perhaps suspects relating to unsolved crimes who were policemen.

regards
SHERLOCK

There seems to be an unusual amount of non criminal Police contact amognst serial killers. Too many to list in fact.

[caz]

Hi Mitch,

Seems like a common factor may be an unfulfilled desire for authority over people - or to be regarded as having authority over people.

It's scary to think how many men in the world might fall into that category.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sherlock]

I believe that the suggestion was made at one point that whoever was responsible for the "Bible John" murders in Glasgow in the early 1970s might even have been a policeman, but I do not think that any evidence has ever come to light to prove this.

It is also my understanding that the infamous Belgian killer Marc Dutroux and his associates might possibly have had contact with the police and other officials who may have helped to cover up his crimes, but once again there is no definite proof of this.

regards

SHERLOCK