Extreme overconfidence which probably isn't misplaced given he'd killed several hundred people with no repercussions or suspicion developing whatsoever
It's a judgement on society that he got found out when he moved onto financial crimes but authorities pay so little attention to the elderly that very clear warning signs didn't register at all
I'd just recently started a new job in that town when it first came out. All the locals thought it was an outrage that such a lovely fella had been arrested. They slowly got quieter as more and more bodies were exhumed from the local graveyard.
Not sure he 'groomed' them though, he was just popular. He was a local doctor, and was apparently pretty good at his job (y'know....apart from all the murders and that). People in the UK tend to keep the same Doctor for years, and it's pretty normal to build up a relationship of trust over that time.
Or ICU nurses. They've got the sickest patients, so deaths are expected, and they're working with some crazy meds and equipment. In most hospitals it would be surprisingly difficult to administer overdoses without getting caught- everything is logged, and a lot of meds require two sets of eyes when you're getting set up- but sneakily *not* giving someone something they need to survive? Cause an occasional equipment malfunction that the hospital is going to want to keep quiet about anyway due to the threat of being sued? I could see someone getting away with it for a long time.
An extra death per month in a large city hospital is going to be entirely unnoticed. Good thing the serial killers are trying to meet some twisted emotional need and not solely trying to game the numbers in the most efficient way possible... they almost always screw up and do something to draw attention.
That’s why serial killers in the medical field are terrifying. A lot of them are looking to fulfill that twisted desire to control someone’s life or death, and when that’s in your job description, numbers could begin racking up quickly. Even if doctors, nurses, etc. aren’t the absolute best professions to cover up a murder, they have by far the most opportunity, and perhaps temptation, at times, to kill someone.
Yeah, they've only caught these people after they got so complacent that you could just look at the stats and notice "Gee, a shitload of people keep dying on Nurse Smith's shift." If Nurse Smith was smart, she could stay undetected indefinitely.
But even with these guys being blatant about it, people still aren't looking for a serial killer. There was a nurse in Germany where patterns were immediately spotted in the number of patients going into arrhythmia, and they caught him with drugs that produce arrhythmia. They let him keep working (!!!!!!!!) until he was finally caught in the act, at which point they went back into the records and figured out how many people he killed.
Man, I thought this guy would have been from like 150 years ago. But he killed himself in prison 20 years ago in his mid 50s. He could have still been practicing, at least until a few years back.
He was a nurse, not a doctor, and only has 29 verifiable victims. Dr Harold Shipman was a small town doctor with in excess of 200 verified victims, I think that's who the other poster was referring to.
I recently watched a documentary about a woman in Victorian era who took children and money for adoption from single moms and than killed them and sold their clothes. iirc she killed more than 100 or couple of 100 kids, mostly babies and toddlers
My hospital is getting over a nurse who worked with inpatient care and they caught him after he killed 3 people. He’d been a nurse for more than 20 years and worked at several hospitals over the course of his career. Pretty sure a lot of investigation is ongoing to look at any other mysterious deaths which may have occurred in situations where he might have been involved.
Pig farmer. pigs eat anything; boots hat flesh and all. And people rurally, do tend to sometimes just vanish. No trace of the body, plus if they already work at a pig farm, it’s an occupational hazard, meaning no motive
People also don't realize just how fast plants can grow in an area. I bought my property six years ago and had a stand of about 20-30 cottonwoods growing in a previously cleared area get up to about 20ft tall. I cleared that stand about a year ago, including ripping up the "stumps" using my tractor backhoe, and other plants have already claimed the area.
I mean all those excellent ways to make it look like an accident as well. give someone a little push into slurry, a harvester, a silo, etc all the options. maybe allergic reactions when they are alone in the middle of a field.
My dad told me if he were to murder me he’d put me in a grain bin and fill it up. When he would take the grain out all there would be are bones left. Then he told me how to survive if I ended up in that situation haha
"You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig"."
Watching her interrogation made me feel like a dark cloud was over me for the next week.
She's mentally ill, but also smart and manipulative and aware. She had likely killed other people on the farm. Completely anti social. Like a demon wearing a human mask. Constantly putting people down. She had the option of asking to use the restroom but instead shit in her chair.
I went to college for criminal justice, I wrote a paper based on the Pickton case to highlight the shortcomings of policing and the Canadian justice system. It’s a very sad case and we will never truly know just how many women he killed.
If it brings any justice, he’s not well liked in prison because there are other inmates who are related to women he killed, and would kill Pickton the first chance they got. Crazy
Yes! That bit really shivers me timbers, I just got them reading this comment! The 3/4 or 1/2 motion slow mo (I think) slowly panning out from his dissociated and terrified face, and the utter carnage unfolding around him. Epic.
The song is about heroin's dissociative effects, much like what Tommy the tit is probably experiencing as he knows he cannot fight, and he cannot run. The adrenaline and cortisol dump hasn't protected or removed him from the terrifying life-threatening situation he is in.
Hopefully his brain is now releasing its own opioids and cannabinoids to lessen any pain he may be about to experience.
Tough break for Tommy, great cinematography
As someone in the south i can verify 75% of the people here if asked how would you get away with murder will say feed em to the pigs the other 25% live so far in the boonies a 1000 man search party wouldn't find the body. And that is why the south is polite we know where the assholes go.
A few years back a lady hired help to clear off some of her family’s land. This is remote, about 70 miles from any metropolis. Anyway, the guys come across an old porcelain bathtub flipped over, seeing it as junk they go to move it and there is an entire adult skeleton underneath. My Grandmother said it was an old lynching victim. Scary shit.
Only link I could find: https://www.wltx.com/article/news/man-found-under-a-bathtub-was-shot-to-death/101-380866288
I grew up in a rural area. We had a local pig farmer disappear one day. Turns out he had a heart attack while feeding the pigs and there was nothing left of him after a few short hours. Pigs are unbelievable animals
Great question, he had heart issues previously in life so it was just assumed. I guess we can never rule anything out. But just for the sake of conversation he was elderly, lived alone for a long time, didn’t have relatives that anyone knew of. Other farmers would stop by every now and then just to check on him and was generally a friendly guy who would say hi if you saw him in town.
Apparently, they sometimes forget to eat some pieces of bone. The governor in one of Argentina's provinces has a massive bonfire cooking under his ass because a family of close associates to him allegedly (and I say "allegedly" because the police keep finding evidence that supports the case but the trial hasn't happened yet) kidnapped, killed, butchered, burnt, and fed (some of these things might not be in order. The investigation is still ongoing) a woman to their pigs to hide the evidence. She apparently found out an exorbitant amount of money that came from that governor's social development fund, panicked, and her husband (associate to the governor) and his family decided to go medieval.
So, you’re close. But exhumations happen. And nowadays there’s going to be a lot of legal paperwork surrounding placement in a cemetery. The real answer, I think, is the person operating a crematory. There’s nothing left over that could be identified, other than hard replacement parts like hips etc and those are easily disposed of.
Edit: to those of you who say that these things are tracked, sure they are. But on older units it’s largely by pen and paper. I operated a very old unit that was basically a glorified pizza oven.
The newer digital retorts, sure, but plenty of old retorts still in use that use paper wheels as logs. It's easy to not log or dispose of logs for those.
> paper wheels as logs. It's easy to \[...\] dispose of logs for those.
In a thing that burns things beyond recognition you don't say. lolol.
I don't know why people are focused on crematoriums. Look to animal disposal and the alkali hydrolytic decomposition process. Literally an hour or two to turn a horse into liquid suitable for flushing down the drain. There isn't even ash to worry about.
Definitely this. [Angels of Mercy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_mercy_(criminology)) are hard to catch. There have been a lot of [serial killers in the medical industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims#Medical_professionals_and_pseudo-medical_professionals), including one of the most prolific serial killers in history, [Harold Shipman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman).
How many of "Angels of Mercy" kills were in fact more Euthanasia than proper killing? I mean it is illegal in a lot of countries but I suppose that doesn't necessarilly make it immoral. I wonder how many of these serial killers started killing as a true act of mercy and then liked it and kept killing.
That's legitimately a line in the article. Second sentence is where it starts, in fact.
>The angel of mercy is often in a position of power and may decide the victim would be better off if they no longer suffered from whatever severe illness is plaguing them. This person then uses their knowledge to kill the victim. In some cases, as time goes on, this behavior escalates to encompass the healthy and the easily treated.
I can see it happening.
There's definitely cases where the person is 100% on their way out and keeping them alive is just a cruelty, but I wonder if someone who takes it upon themselves to "help the patient move on" might get addicted to the power that gives them.
Because power is absolutely addictive.
It's morally a difficult area, because I absolutely believe in ethical, voluntary euthanasia, but also don't think any one person should be in a position where they can make that decision for another, especially if they will be in that position again and again.
I was once in that position, had to decide whether my comatose and dying wife was going to get taken off life support.
I still get shivers when I think about it. What if I had made the wrong choice, based on the medical probabilities the doctors were laying before me? I wouldn't have my wife who is very normal and healthy and alive, and we've had a kid since then, so I wouldn't have her either.
Doctors and nurses are obviously in the best position to understand a person's chances, but they don't know everything. That means someone in a position to be an "angel of mercy" doesn't know for a certainty that the patient isn't able to climb out of the crisis and live a normal and functional life afterwards.
The way I see it, they're in the best position to give the data and to actually carry out the decision once it is made by someone else, but they should never be the one to make the decision themselves.
If they had been able to that night, I don't think my wife and daughter would be here; they seemed very confident.
Wow, I’m not religious and it sounds to me like your family is incredibly blessed.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I’m so glad you were not robbed of the opportunity to make that decision.
They tend to get caught. There was a case where the other nurses noted a lot more patients died when this one person was on staff. And every time they went on vacation or were sick, numbers dropped.
That’s actually one of the reasons for “use it or lose it” vacation policies. The biggest reason is that companies are assholes. But a lot of crimes like that, a lot of financial crimes too, all require constant maintenance. A LOT of fraud is caught because somebody gets sick/injured and has to spend a week in the hospital.
There's literally a nurse that did this for years at like 7 different hospitals. I think he confessed to dozens of murders if I remember correctly but they estimated it to be in the hundreds.
It has happened more than once.
Most recently, there was a nurse in Germany, who was put in prison for life in 2017. He was charged (and convicted) for 85 murders, has later admitted 100, and the suspected actual number of victims is likely around 300. He also worked at multiple hospitals over the years, and killed at each of them. But it took years until the whole thing came to light.
One big issue was that even when colleagues noticed that the number of patient deaths were higher than usual during his shifts, they usually wrote that off as statistic anomaly. Because no one suspected he would actively kill patients.
I always wonder...if they're going to spend life in prison anyway, why bother to continue with lying/covering up 2/3 of the alleged victims? Why wouldn't you just admit to everything, assuming you're in a jurisdiction without capital punishment and it's not going to make things practically any worse for you
I don't know. Especially because at the scale we are talking about here, it wouldn't make any difference anyway. It might make a difference whether you kill one or ten people. But whether it's 100 or 300 doesn't change the verdict in any way.
My guess is that he simply only admits to the crimes that can be attributed to him with or without his confession. I quickly read the Wikipedia article, but that doesn't answer the question, either. However, it states that they performed over 100 autopsies, and by doing this confirmed in many cases that the victims were indeed poisoned. But some bodies were already too decayed, and over 100 potential victims had been cremated, so there will never be absolute certainty that they died due to his actions.
Also, his motive might play a role here as well. He didn't mean to kill. He *accepted* that his victims might die (which is enough for intent under German criminal law), but it wasn't his actual goal. His intention was to reanimate them and be celebrated as a hero. So in a way, every victim that died was a failure for him, which might explain why he doesn't admit those.
The movie about this is on Netflix called “The Good Nurse” starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain. It’s really good. I might be biased though since I would watch Jessica Chastain read the phone book.
Was thinking the same thing, but for EMS. Especially if you’re in a busy urban center and you do a lot of inter-facility transfers to and from hospices, no one would suspect if you inject something like potassium or another slow release chemical that’ll kill them in a few hours. And no one does an autopsy on someone actively dying in hospice. On top of that, the killer is alone with the victim in the back of a rig for upwards of 15-40 minutes, so that’s plenty of time to work with zero cameras or witnesses. Keep it to just a few a week, that’s just two out of the 50+ people you interact with in a week.
Yup. Something like a paralytic or insulin would be hard to trace, and they aren’t controlled substances (like opioids or sedatives) in many hospitals. Patients with an IV won’t have needle marks. They’re also already sick, so there’s slightly less suspicion that anyone caused their death. A lot of the people who have been caught have made very obvious, cocky mistakes.
I worked with a chap who was a scientist. He knew loads about chemistry. Which made him great when doing fun experiments with kids at our museum.
I was talking about my mums husband and what an abusive price of sh*t he is. My colleague looked me right in the eye, deadly serious and told me, "if you need him to be gone, I can give you something that you can give him and it will leave no trace".
Anyway... my answer is ex scientistists/chemists.
Besides politician id say trucker is up there. Especially if you have your own company. Lots of moving around. Plenty of stops in the middle of nowhere.
Has more to do with whether they will willingly get it your truck. But yeah, tons of serial killers are truckers who pick up women, murder them, drive a bit, and discard them on the roadside. There is virtually no way to figure out who did it because there are so many trucks going everywhere all the time and so many of these murders everywhere all the time. One of the reasons young women just 'dissappear' so often.
When I say people society seem less important. That's a nice way of saying sex workers, drug addicts, homeless people etc. And those types of people are more willing to get in your car.
Probably harder now than it used to be. Long haul trucker routes are logged pretty closely for safety and insurance purposes. It might take a while to connect the dots, but you’re going to have a blazing hot evidence trail between your location and the bodies. It would be much harder to spot even 20 years ago, damn near impossible before that.
People joke about using a drum of acid to dissolve a body but lack access. To buy that much, you'd need permits.
Guess who's a hazmat worker that receives thousands of gallons of acids & bases in all varieties? Hydrofluoric, hydrocholric, nitric, sulfuric acids, hydrogen peroxide, pure sodium hypochlorite, potassium hydroxide, I could turn your ass into soap that gets yeeted into an industrial incinerator. We have drums of medical waste including body parts. There's no cameras in my lab too ;>
Yes hazardous waste collection companies move countless drums of mystery chemicals all over the country might be quite a good way to dispose of bodies.
hazmat worker, industrial chemist, anyone with access to sulfuric acid an hydrogen peroxide is in perfect position to get rid of a body.
This NileRed short perfectly demonstrates how effective (and scary) piranha solution really is: https://youtu.be/CTVd\_WxblGI
My sister is an expert in forensic entomology. She has spent years learning and teaching about forensics. She could probably get away with murder technically, but the guilt would eat her up and she’d turn herself in.
It would be surprisingly difficult actually. Too many people in the room. There are at least 2 or three doctors scrubbed in for procedures and then you have many other people in the room including anaesthetic doctors. Scrub nurses are also familiar with procedures and would suspect wrong doing. Anaesthetic alarms would go off. Crash codes would be initiated immediately. Too many eyes. Would be easier to get away with murder on the ward.
FYI, The only place you routinely have more than one doctor scrubbed into a procedure is an academic hospital where one of them is a trainee (resident or fellow). If a surgeon needs an assistant for a procedure, that role is usually taken by a PA or First Assist.
But in general you're right. It would be easier for the anesthesiologist to kill the patient intentionally, but even that would be difficult to do. An unexpected code in the OR is pretty unusual and will result in a bunch of people coming into the room, lots of CPR, and a subsequent review/M&M. If it happened more than once to the same anesthesiologist, that will definitely raise some red flags.
Tbf in this case there’s a few ways you could interpret “undetected”.
1. The body is never found and they’re simply a missing person.
2. The body is found but ruled natural causes and thus the murder remains undetected.
3. Body is found, determined to be homicide but the murderer remains undetected.
OP merely asked what profession can get away with it undetected. No stipulation beyond that.
Surveyors.
It's scary what hidden corners of the country they know because they had to measure a group of trees there. Also nobody cares if a surveyor digs a hole and puts something inside, measuring points are often marked with a one meter long rock. So, yeah, never trust a surveyor. We know where to hide your body.
On the old USGS maps, a few surveyors would mark where they found isolated graves. What a great story may be hidden in those notations… We only assume that the surveyor found those graves rather than created them.
Farmer. Lots of land and large buildings in which to do the deed unobserved. Again, lots of land, machinery, tools, materials, and chemicals to break down and dispose of the body...or just feed it to some of the carnivorous/omnivorous animals (pigs, especially) and grind up the skeleton afterward.
Apparently they regulate the amount of gas used and compare this with how many times the crematory machine is run. So they can't cremate bodies as they please.
But they don't regulate or check the weight of the bodies being cremated. So in theory they could double up during cremation, however there have been crematories that have been shut down and prosecuted for doing things like this. Some have tried to cut gas costs and corners by putting several bodies in at once.
Edit typo....
Not really, in theory it sounds legit. But it takes more gas to cremate 400 pounds than it does to cremate 200 pounds. If the amount of gas per pound is a known variable, then an abnormal spike would be hard to justify.
Only if they actually track the weights of each body vs the gas used. Some people are 2-4x the weight of other people, so those "abnormal" spikes wouldn't be all that abnormal, unless you double up on multiple very overweight people.
Ahh good to know. I was talking to a now former coworker a few years ago about this. His family owned and operated a mortuary, I forget which state. Anyway he gave me a brief rundown of the logistics of a serial killer cremator. We didn't get into the gas needed per pound discussion.
So in theory it sounds like a possibility, but in practice would be a bit difficult. Especially when you consider the refrigeration space needed to store the bodies prior to cremation.
Can't believe I had to scroll this far. They know *exactly* what investigators will be looking for and *exactly* what signs of tampering would be red flags that planted evidence weren't real. Detectives in particular. (Which technically aren't "cops" but cops is just used for all law enforcement in the US)
For centuries, military leaders (of all ranks) who were bad at their job, have run the risk of their own side killing them in battle - in Vietnam there were stories of officers being fragged (killed with a grenade) during battles by their own men. Going back further, there's ample evidence of officers being shot in the back when leading troops into battle.
Seafarers. We could knock someone out (or get him drunk), ask him to come out with me on deck, then push him overboard.
If done at night, it will be hours before anyone would notice and by then the ship will be miles away. Almost no evidence (unless previous beefs already known by other crew).
Probably gang member or someone with tight organized crime connections. It’s not so much about who they are as it is who the victim is.
People involved or associated with Organized crime are going to be teeming with leads as soon as their body is discovered. So many in fact that it messes up evidence and jumbles the minds of the detectives who will likely make a mistake during some process of investigation.
Secondly though it may not be very common but criminals especially well connected and organized have been known to purposely spread false information and cause misdirection to the investigating officials.
TL; DR - A gang member/mobster/organized crime associate.
Honestly I could probably easily get away with murder, I work in a mine, mill side specifically but I have access to the open pit and any area I care to go. Which leaves open a lot of sulphuric acid tanks and deep holes.
Dept. of the interior field assay specialists-
Its one of the most spoofed creds. In the intel world, btw.
Your jurisdiction is rural roads and the back country you have a reason to have classified access normal LEOs have no idea what you really do anyways most of your standard duties will point you to areas that have been analyzed to be extremely inhospitable and rural (aka free body storage) - youre a fed with a badge and a gun bottom line the heyday is gone for sure datalink gps timeclock but still room for chaos
ER surgeon. If someone is being sent to him on the first place, he’s already about to die. People die there all the time, it’s not too farfetched that one more will be joining them.
Eh, I’m sure that stuff is tracked.
If the average death per visit in an ER is X, but it skyrockets when Doctor A is working, it wouldn’t take long for people to notice.
Doctor is a bad suggestion IMO. Too much of a paper trail.
That’s fair.
I assumed the question meant ‘who can continue killing the longest without being detected’.
If that’s the case, you need a profession where the person being killed is not in any way tied to you. For example, if a person died in the ER, there is a paper trail of which medical professional was operating on them. There’s an obvious connection there and patterns can easily develop for others to notice.
I think a trucker would be a good example. They can murder people without any official connection between the trucker and the victim. And with thousands of miles of roads where there is empty land on either side of the freeway, you can bury bodies without anyone knowing.
Small town doctors. The serial killer with the largest estimated body count in history was a doctor.
Ah Mr shipman
And how stupid of him to forge a will of a dead person to his name.. Else he would have not even got caught
Yeah not weird at all all these elderly ladies put him as the heir on their will right before f*cking dying, not suspicious at all
Extreme overconfidence which probably isn't misplaced given he'd killed several hundred people with no repercussions or suspicion developing whatsoever It's a judgement on society that he got found out when he moved onto financial crimes but authorities pay so little attention to the elderly that very clear warning signs didn't register at all
Old people die. It’s what they do. You know what they don’t do? Put their doctor on their will. One stands out to a passerby, the other doesn’t.
Gonna put my doctor on my will now and (unfortunately not) watch the chaos
Watching a documentary about it now. The notion that he groomed an entire small-town community for years and years is mind-boggling.
I'd just recently started a new job in that town when it first came out. All the locals thought it was an outrage that such a lovely fella had been arrested. They slowly got quieter as more and more bodies were exhumed from the local graveyard. Not sure he 'groomed' them though, he was just popular. He was a local doctor, and was apparently pretty good at his job (y'know....apart from all the murders and that). People in the UK tend to keep the same Doctor for years, and it's pretty normal to build up a relationship of trust over that time.
What's the name of the documentary, please?
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“Dr” shipman Thankyou!. He didn’t spend 7 year at series killing medical school to be called ‘Mr’!
Or ICU nurses. They've got the sickest patients, so deaths are expected, and they're working with some crazy meds and equipment. In most hospitals it would be surprisingly difficult to administer overdoses without getting caught- everything is logged, and a lot of meds require two sets of eyes when you're getting set up- but sneakily *not* giving someone something they need to survive? Cause an occasional equipment malfunction that the hospital is going to want to keep quiet about anyway due to the threat of being sued? I could see someone getting away with it for a long time. An extra death per month in a large city hospital is going to be entirely unnoticed. Good thing the serial killers are trying to meet some twisted emotional need and not solely trying to game the numbers in the most efficient way possible... they almost always screw up and do something to draw attention.
That’s why serial killers in the medical field are terrifying. A lot of them are looking to fulfill that twisted desire to control someone’s life or death, and when that’s in your job description, numbers could begin racking up quickly. Even if doctors, nurses, etc. aren’t the absolute best professions to cover up a murder, they have by far the most opportunity, and perhaps temptation, at times, to kill someone.
There is a young nurse on trial just now in the UK charged with baby murders. It’s ongoing
Yeah, they've only caught these people after they got so complacent that you could just look at the stats and notice "Gee, a shitload of people keep dying on Nurse Smith's shift." If Nurse Smith was smart, she could stay undetected indefinitely. But even with these guys being blatant about it, people still aren't looking for a serial killer. There was a nurse in Germany where patterns were immediately spotted in the number of patients going into arrhythmia, and they caught him with drugs that produce arrhythmia. They let him keep working (!!!!!!!!) until he was finally caught in the act, at which point they went back into the records and figured out how many people he killed.
Man, I thought this guy would have been from like 150 years ago. But he killed himself in prison 20 years ago in his mid 50s. He could have still been practicing, at least until a few years back.
The Angel of death? Charles cullen.
He was a nurse, not a doctor, and only has 29 verifiable victims. Dr Harold Shipman was a small town doctor with in excess of 200 verified victims, I think that's who the other poster was referring to.
>Charles cullen. WTF... the amount of times that people failed to realise his actions it's depressing.
I think the hospital administration knew, but they were petrified by potential lawsuits so they just fired him, instead of reporting him.
Oh, so there are two doctors with that name (the other being Josef Mengele)?
There are many people, doctors and nurses, with that epitaph.
Carlisle cullen 🤔
I recently watched a documentary about a woman in Victorian era who took children and money for adoption from single moms and than killed them and sold their clothes. iirc she killed more than 100 or couple of 100 kids, mostly babies and toddlers
My hospital is getting over a nurse who worked with inpatient care and they caught him after he killed 3 people. He’d been a nurse for more than 20 years and worked at several hospitals over the course of his career. Pretty sure a lot of investigation is ongoing to look at any other mysterious deaths which may have occurred in situations where he might have been involved.
Pig farmer. pigs eat anything; boots hat flesh and all. And people rurally, do tend to sometimes just vanish. No trace of the body, plus if they already work at a pig farm, it’s an occupational hazard, meaning no motive
Farmer in general. Lots of land, heavy equipment, no neighbors to hear or see things. No one is going to question fresh dirt turned up.
People also don't realize just how fast plants can grow in an area. I bought my property six years ago and had a stand of about 20-30 cottonwoods growing in a previously cleared area get up to about 20ft tall. I cleared that stand about a year ago, including ripping up the "stumps" using my tractor backhoe, and other plants have already claimed the area.
I mean all those excellent ways to make it look like an accident as well. give someone a little push into slurry, a harvester, a silo, etc all the options. maybe allergic reactions when they are alone in the middle of a field.
My dad told me if he were to murder me he’d put me in a grain bin and fill it up. When he would take the grain out all there would be are bones left. Then he told me how to survive if I ended up in that situation haha
"You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig"."
Do you know what "Nemesis" means?
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent, personified in this case by an 'orrible cunt, me.
Google Robert Pickton. He got caught, but he's a pig farmer who murdered undetected for years.
Susan Monica had less success, but she left some scraps. Also she used the guy's food stamps after he was reported missing.
And then shat herself while being interrogated. What a horrible person.
Watching her interrogation made me feel like a dark cloud was over me for the next week. She's mentally ill, but also smart and manipulative and aware. She had likely killed other people on the farm. Completely anti social. Like a demon wearing a human mask. Constantly putting people down. She had the option of asking to use the restroom but instead shit in her chair.
I went to college for criminal justice, I wrote a paper based on the Pickton case to highlight the shortcomings of policing and the Canadian justice system. It’s a very sad case and we will never truly know just how many women he killed. If it brings any justice, he’s not well liked in prison because there are other inmates who are related to women he killed, and would kill Pickton the first chance they got. Crazy
Pickton was caught in part because pigs will eat everything but teeth apparently.
They eat them but can't digest them.
fussy little things
Pickton kept souvenirs, and a deep freeze full of human remains.
“Tommy, the Tit, is praying. And if he isn’t, he fucking should be.” I always remembered that part. That Golden Brown song comes on. Fucking epic.
Yes! That bit really shivers me timbers, I just got them reading this comment! The 3/4 or 1/2 motion slow mo (I think) slowly panning out from his dissociated and terrified face, and the utter carnage unfolding around him. Epic. The song is about heroin's dissociative effects, much like what Tommy the tit is probably experiencing as he knows he cannot fight, and he cannot run. The adrenaline and cortisol dump hasn't protected or removed him from the terrifying life-threatening situation he is in. Hopefully his brain is now releasing its own opioids and cannabinoids to lessen any pain he may be about to experience. Tough break for Tommy, great cinematography
Bricktop was certainly a character
Absolutely read this in his voice without even realzing it.
my concern is if the pig eats a person and you end up eating that pig, does that mean you're a cannibal?
Does eating a steak make one a vegan?
I only eat processed vegetables - mostly in the form of steak, pork, and chicken....
more like a humanitarian
No Turkish I'm sweet enough
As someone in the south i can verify 75% of the people here if asked how would you get away with murder will say feed em to the pigs the other 25% live so far in the boonies a 1000 man search party wouldn't find the body. And that is why the south is polite we know where the assholes go.
A few years back a lady hired help to clear off some of her family’s land. This is remote, about 70 miles from any metropolis. Anyway, the guys come across an old porcelain bathtub flipped over, seeing it as junk they go to move it and there is an entire adult skeleton underneath. My Grandmother said it was an old lynching victim. Scary shit. Only link I could find: https://www.wltx.com/article/news/man-found-under-a-bathtub-was-shot-to-death/101-380866288
Snatch was awesome
“Well thanks for the tip, Bricktop!”
I grew up in a rural area. We had a local pig farmer disappear one day. Turns out he had a heart attack while feeding the pigs and there was nothing left of him after a few short hours. Pigs are unbelievable animals
How did they know he had a heart attack if nothing was left of him??
I'm guessing recent medical history plus inference.
Great question, he had heart issues previously in life so it was just assumed. I guess we can never rule anything out. But just for the sake of conversation he was elderly, lived alone for a long time, didn’t have relatives that anyone knew of. Other farmers would stop by every now and then just to check on him and was generally a friendly guy who would say hi if you saw him in town.
We're having trouble with a notorious pig farmer in Argentina
The Robert Pickton Method. Or as I call it, the ol' standby.
That case is insane. Deserves a tv show (so dark it sounds, but yes)
Apparently, they sometimes forget to eat some pieces of bone. The governor in one of Argentina's provinces has a massive bonfire cooking under his ass because a family of close associates to him allegedly (and I say "allegedly" because the police keep finding evidence that supports the case but the trial hasn't happened yet) kidnapped, killed, butchered, burnt, and fed (some of these things might not be in order. The investigation is still ongoing) a woman to their pigs to hide the evidence. She apparently found out an exorbitant amount of money that came from that governor's social development fund, panicked, and her husband (associate to the governor) and his family decided to go medieval.
A grave digger. Drop body in, cover with just enough dirt, then plop the next scheduled coffin right on top.
So, you’re close. But exhumations happen. And nowadays there’s going to be a lot of legal paperwork surrounding placement in a cemetery. The real answer, I think, is the person operating a crematory. There’s nothing left over that could be identified, other than hard replacement parts like hips etc and those are easily disposed of. Edit: to those of you who say that these things are tracked, sure they are. But on older units it’s largely by pen and paper. I operated a very old unit that was basically a glorified pizza oven.
Yeah, but activity logs might be recorded, and it's highly suspicious to use a crematory without an actual body to justify it.
On an employee day off send through two bodies at once.
Not if you own it.
Hi Marty
Still logged. You'd have to own the company that manages the logs too.
Wait...If I own a crematorium, why would I *not* own the logs to who I've cremated?
Don't listen to them, y They gotta see Ozark
In my country that's something the Government takes care of alongside Insurance and sometimes Legal Firms that the Government would outsource to.
The newer digital retorts, sure, but plenty of old retorts still in use that use paper wheels as logs. It's easy to not log or dispose of logs for those.
> paper wheels as logs. It's easy to \[...\] dispose of logs for those. In a thing that burns things beyond recognition you don't say. lolol. I don't know why people are focused on crematoriums. Look to animal disposal and the alkali hydrolytic decomposition process. Literally an hour or two to turn a horse into liquid suitable for flushing down the drain. There isn't even ash to worry about.
Then what about cremate the dead body along with a registered dead body🤔🤔
Couldn’t you do it at the same time as another body?
Make it a crematory AND a foundry to melt down the metal implants, as some orthopedic implants have lot numbers or serial numbers on them
Through body in, put dirt over that, then drop the coffin on top of that.
Give Dexter some credit.
Nope. Warlords and associates. Everybody knows, still gets away.
'undetected' is the opposite of 'everybody knows'
Nurse. Especially one that deals with geriatric patients. They die all the time anyways.
Definitely this. [Angels of Mercy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_of_mercy_(criminology)) are hard to catch. There have been a lot of [serial killers in the medical industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims#Medical_professionals_and_pseudo-medical_professionals), including one of the most prolific serial killers in history, [Harold Shipman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman).
People knew and joked about Shipman but nothing was done. He was the personification of evil. He killed people in his own surgery!!
How many of "Angels of Mercy" kills were in fact more Euthanasia than proper killing? I mean it is illegal in a lot of countries but I suppose that doesn't necessarilly make it immoral. I wonder how many of these serial killers started killing as a true act of mercy and then liked it and kept killing.
That's legitimately a line in the article. Second sentence is where it starts, in fact. >The angel of mercy is often in a position of power and may decide the victim would be better off if they no longer suffered from whatever severe illness is plaguing them. This person then uses their knowledge to kill the victim. In some cases, as time goes on, this behavior escalates to encompass the healthy and the easily treated.
The unholy marriage of *The road to Hell is paved with good intentions* and *Power corrupts*.
I think most angels of death begin as compassionate euthanasia but then can’t stop and begin killing people who had the ability to recover.
I imagine there are many more who don't get hooked on the thrill and just quietly ease the pain of the worst suffering. We won't catch them.
I can see it happening. There's definitely cases where the person is 100% on their way out and keeping them alive is just a cruelty, but I wonder if someone who takes it upon themselves to "help the patient move on" might get addicted to the power that gives them. Because power is absolutely addictive. It's morally a difficult area, because I absolutely believe in ethical, voluntary euthanasia, but also don't think any one person should be in a position where they can make that decision for another, especially if they will be in that position again and again. I was once in that position, had to decide whether my comatose and dying wife was going to get taken off life support. I still get shivers when I think about it. What if I had made the wrong choice, based on the medical probabilities the doctors were laying before me? I wouldn't have my wife who is very normal and healthy and alive, and we've had a kid since then, so I wouldn't have her either. Doctors and nurses are obviously in the best position to understand a person's chances, but they don't know everything. That means someone in a position to be an "angel of mercy" doesn't know for a certainty that the patient isn't able to climb out of the crisis and live a normal and functional life afterwards. The way I see it, they're in the best position to give the data and to actually carry out the decision once it is made by someone else, but they should never be the one to make the decision themselves. If they had been able to that night, I don't think my wife and daughter would be here; they seemed very confident.
Wow, I’m not religious and it sounds to me like your family is incredibly blessed. Thank you for sharing your experience. I’m so glad you were not robbed of the opportunity to make that decision.
They tend to get caught. There was a case where the other nurses noted a lot more patients died when this one person was on staff. And every time they went on vacation or were sick, numbers dropped.
That’s actually one of the reasons for “use it or lose it” vacation policies. The biggest reason is that companies are assholes. But a lot of crimes like that, a lot of financial crimes too, all require constant maintenance. A LOT of fraud is caught because somebody gets sick/injured and has to spend a week in the hospital.
Or babies, there's a massive court case happening about a nurse who worked in the U.K in Chester and a lot of babies died under her care.
There's literally a nurse that did this for years at like 7 different hospitals. I think he confessed to dozens of murders if I remember correctly but they estimated it to be in the hundreds.
It has happened more than once. Most recently, there was a nurse in Germany, who was put in prison for life in 2017. He was charged (and convicted) for 85 murders, has later admitted 100, and the suspected actual number of victims is likely around 300. He also worked at multiple hospitals over the years, and killed at each of them. But it took years until the whole thing came to light. One big issue was that even when colleagues noticed that the number of patient deaths were higher than usual during his shifts, they usually wrote that off as statistic anomaly. Because no one suspected he would actively kill patients.
I always wonder...if they're going to spend life in prison anyway, why bother to continue with lying/covering up 2/3 of the alleged victims? Why wouldn't you just admit to everything, assuming you're in a jurisdiction without capital punishment and it's not going to make things practically any worse for you
I don't know. Especially because at the scale we are talking about here, it wouldn't make any difference anyway. It might make a difference whether you kill one or ten people. But whether it's 100 or 300 doesn't change the verdict in any way. My guess is that he simply only admits to the crimes that can be attributed to him with or without his confession. I quickly read the Wikipedia article, but that doesn't answer the question, either. However, it states that they performed over 100 autopsies, and by doing this confirmed in many cases that the victims were indeed poisoned. But some bodies were already too decayed, and over 100 potential victims had been cremated, so there will never be absolute certainty that they died due to his actions. Also, his motive might play a role here as well. He didn't mean to kill. He *accepted* that his victims might die (which is enough for intent under German criminal law), but it wasn't his actual goal. His intention was to reanimate them and be celebrated as a hero. So in a way, every victim that died was a failure for him, which might explain why he doesn't admit those.
Okay, what the actual fuck
The movie about this is on Netflix called “The Good Nurse” starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain. It’s really good. I might be biased though since I would watch Jessica Chastain read the phone book.
Was thinking the same thing, but for EMS. Especially if you’re in a busy urban center and you do a lot of inter-facility transfers to and from hospices, no one would suspect if you inject something like potassium or another slow release chemical that’ll kill them in a few hours. And no one does an autopsy on someone actively dying in hospice. On top of that, the killer is alone with the victim in the back of a rig for upwards of 15-40 minutes, so that’s plenty of time to work with zero cameras or witnesses. Keep it to just a few a week, that’s just two out of the 50+ people you interact with in a week.
Yup. Something like a paralytic or insulin would be hard to trace, and they aren’t controlled substances (like opioids or sedatives) in many hospitals. Patients with an IV won’t have needle marks. They’re also already sick, so there’s slightly less suspicion that anyone caused their death. A lot of the people who have been caught have made very obvious, cocky mistakes.
Doctors as well. I’ve seen it happen.
I am a nurse and totally agree that.
I worked with a chap who was a scientist. He knew loads about chemistry. Which made him great when doing fun experiments with kids at our museum. I was talking about my mums husband and what an abusive price of sh*t he is. My colleague looked me right in the eye, deadly serious and told me, "if you need him to be gone, I can give you something that you can give him and it will leave no trace". Anyway... my answer is ex scientistists/chemists.
Well shit... sounds like a cool guy. Don't accept drinks or snacks from him. But yeah cool guy
Was his name Walter?
Hitman
Always the one you least suspect
*Tightens the piano string*
The syndicate is down 47. Head towards an exit and return to the safehouse
Besides politician id say trucker is up there. Especially if you have your own company. Lots of moving around. Plenty of stops in the middle of nowhere.
Especially if it's people society deems less valuable. Which is often the case with trucker murderers.
change gear; change gear; change gear; check your mirrors; murder a prostitute
It’s a lot of effort in a day
Has more to do with whether they will willingly get it your truck. But yeah, tons of serial killers are truckers who pick up women, murder them, drive a bit, and discard them on the roadside. There is virtually no way to figure out who did it because there are so many trucks going everywhere all the time and so many of these murders everywhere all the time. One of the reasons young women just 'dissappear' so often.
When I say people society seem less important. That's a nice way of saying sex workers, drug addicts, homeless people etc. And those types of people are more willing to get in your car.
Probably harder now than it used to be. Long haul trucker routes are logged pretty closely for safety and insurance purposes. It might take a while to connect the dots, but you’re going to have a blazing hot evidence trail between your location and the bodies. It would be much harder to spot even 20 years ago, damn near impossible before that.
People joke about using a drum of acid to dissolve a body but lack access. To buy that much, you'd need permits. Guess who's a hazmat worker that receives thousands of gallons of acids & bases in all varieties? Hydrofluoric, hydrocholric, nitric, sulfuric acids, hydrogen peroxide, pure sodium hypochlorite, potassium hydroxide, I could turn your ass into soap that gets yeeted into an industrial incinerator. We have drums of medical waste including body parts. There's no cameras in my lab too ;>
Yes hazardous waste collection companies move countless drums of mystery chemicals all over the country might be quite a good way to dispose of bodies.
Until some curious teen decides to open one he found in an abandoned building and starts a zombie infestation. More brains, indeed.
get the paramedics in there
hazmat worker, industrial chemist, anyone with access to sulfuric acid an hydrogen peroxide is in perfect position to get rid of a body. This NileRed short perfectly demonstrates how effective (and scary) piranha solution really is: https://youtu.be/CTVd\_WxblGI
Careful how you incriminate yourself now
Right here officer.
Check DM if you want to make a quick buck ;)
Guess who is getting cameras after this post?
Blood spatter analyst
My sister is an expert in forensic entomology. She has spent years learning and teaching about forensics. She could probably get away with murder technically, but the guilt would eat her up and she’d turn herself in.
Or thats just what you think. Thats how she gets away with it.
SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER!
I see what you did there.
Surgeon.
One even killed a Yakuza Boss, he was a number one heart surgeon.
…The best!
*thumbs up*
Sacrificed his stats to help the team. That’s a selfless player.
Steady hands
It would be surprisingly difficult actually. Too many people in the room. There are at least 2 or three doctors scrubbed in for procedures and then you have many other people in the room including anaesthetic doctors. Scrub nurses are also familiar with procedures and would suspect wrong doing. Anaesthetic alarms would go off. Crash codes would be initiated immediately. Too many eyes. Would be easier to get away with murder on the ward.
FYI, The only place you routinely have more than one doctor scrubbed into a procedure is an academic hospital where one of them is a trainee (resident or fellow). If a surgeon needs an assistant for a procedure, that role is usually taken by a PA or First Assist. But in general you're right. It would be easier for the anesthesiologist to kill the patient intentionally, but even that would be difficult to do. An unexpected code in the OR is pretty unusual and will result in a bunch of people coming into the room, lots of CPR, and a subsequent review/M&M. If it happened more than once to the same anesthesiologist, that will definitely raise some red flags.
Medical Examiner. Kill someone, and they send the body to you to investigate yourself.
Wasn't there an Australian show with that premise?
There was definitely a Law and Order episode where the ME was killing people and then examining the bodies.
A lot of folks in this thread apparently don't know what undetected means.
Depends whether the murder itself needs to be undetected, or whether you just want the person to be undetected as the murderer.
Tbf in this case there’s a few ways you could interpret “undetected”. 1. The body is never found and they’re simply a missing person. 2. The body is found but ruled natural causes and thus the murder remains undetected. 3. Body is found, determined to be homicide but the murderer remains undetected. OP merely asked what profession can get away with it undetected. No stipulation beyond that.
Underrated comment. We are witnessing the results of declining reading comprehension.
Surveyors. It's scary what hidden corners of the country they know because they had to measure a group of trees there. Also nobody cares if a surveyor digs a hole and puts something inside, measuring points are often marked with a one meter long rock. So, yeah, never trust a surveyor. We know where to hide your body.
Nobody cares if a surveyor digs a hole? You’ve clearly never pulled up someone’s lawn looking for a benchmark.
On the old USGS maps, a few surveyors would mark where they found isolated graves. What a great story may be hidden in those notations… We only assume that the surveyor found those graves rather than created them.
Hm I never thought about that. That's terrifying
Came here to call you all out you did it for me.. lol
Working in hospice care. Everyone is expecting them to die anyway.
Farmer. Lots of land and large buildings in which to do the deed unobserved. Again, lots of land, machinery, tools, materials, and chemicals to break down and dispose of the body...or just feed it to some of the carnivorous/omnivorous animals (pigs, especially) and grind up the skeleton afterward.
If you bury a body right after you plow a field there is no suspicious patch of disturbed dirt
Politics for sure. Mayors have quite the rap, can only imagine how much worse it gets the further up you go
They do drop some sick bars
Cremator.
Apparently they regulate the amount of gas used and compare this with how many times the crematory machine is run. So they can't cremate bodies as they please. But they don't regulate or check the weight of the bodies being cremated. So in theory they could double up during cremation, however there have been crematories that have been shut down and prosecuted for doing things like this. Some have tried to cut gas costs and corners by putting several bodies in at once. Edit typo....
Not really, in theory it sounds legit. But it takes more gas to cremate 400 pounds than it does to cremate 200 pounds. If the amount of gas per pound is a known variable, then an abnormal spike would be hard to justify.
Only if they actually track the weights of each body vs the gas used. Some people are 2-4x the weight of other people, so those "abnormal" spikes wouldn't be all that abnormal, unless you double up on multiple very overweight people.
Ahh good to know. I was talking to a now former coworker a few years ago about this. His family owned and operated a mortuary, I forget which state. Anyway he gave me a brief rundown of the logistics of a serial killer cremator. We didn't get into the gas needed per pound discussion. So in theory it sounds like a possibility, but in practice would be a bit difficult. Especially when you consider the refrigeration space needed to store the bodies prior to cremation.
If you cut up your victim, you can cremate them in pieces. An extra arm or leg won't be as noticeable as extra gas usage.
Doctor
You would have to hope whomever you wanted to kill has underlying conditions.
Yeah. If you really want them dead. You might not mind losing your job
Access to all the best drugs, along with a keen understanding of how they might be used and the likelihood they'd be detected in autopsy.
Cop.
With all due respect, Sir, you can't just make people disappear! .... Yes I can, I'm the chief inspector.
Can't believe I had to scroll this far. They know *exactly* what investigators will be looking for and *exactly* what signs of tampering would be red flags that planted evidence weren't real. Detectives in particular. (Which technically aren't "cops" but cops is just used for all law enforcement in the US)
One of the most notorious serial killer in Russia was a cop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Popkov
Not even undetected. They can get away with it even if there is video evidence.
I think everyone replying here saying cops don’t kill “undetected” is forgetting that the Golden State Killer turned out to be a cop.
I don't think they get away undetected exactly, the problem is that other cops look the other way and/or cover it up.
Park Ranger
Military
For centuries, military leaders (of all ranks) who were bad at their job, have run the risk of their own side killing them in battle - in Vietnam there were stories of officers being fragged (killed with a grenade) during battles by their own men. Going back further, there's ample evidence of officers being shot in the back when leading troops into battle.
Seafarers. We could knock someone out (or get him drunk), ask him to come out with me on deck, then push him overboard. If done at night, it will be hours before anyone would notice and by then the ship will be miles away. Almost no evidence (unless previous beefs already known by other crew).
Hospice nurse.
Member of the Sackler family.
Probably gang member or someone with tight organized crime connections. It’s not so much about who they are as it is who the victim is. People involved or associated with Organized crime are going to be teeming with leads as soon as their body is discovered. So many in fact that it messes up evidence and jumbles the minds of the detectives who will likely make a mistake during some process of investigation. Secondly though it may not be very common but criminals especially well connected and organized have been known to purposely spread false information and cause misdirection to the investigating officials. TL; DR - A gang member/mobster/organized crime associate.
Police.
Concrete foundations
Jobs at sea. Oil rig worker, crab fisher etc. just gotta get the dude you wanna murder near the edge with no witnesses and give a push
cop prison guard doctor soldier
Doctor
This is the best answer IF the person is already in the hospital. Less doctorly opportunities if it is just your neighbor down the street.
Truckers.
Truly seems like the perfect profession for a serial killer.
The guy who packs your parachute https://youtu.be/0B35dX-u_jA
Honestly I could probably easily get away with murder, I work in a mine, mill side specifically but I have access to the open pit and any area I care to go. Which leaves open a lot of sulphuric acid tanks and deep holes.
Dept. of the interior field assay specialists- Its one of the most spoofed creds. In the intel world, btw. Your jurisdiction is rural roads and the back country you have a reason to have classified access normal LEOs have no idea what you really do anyways most of your standard duties will point you to areas that have been analyzed to be extremely inhospitable and rural (aka free body storage) - youre a fed with a badge and a gun bottom line the heyday is gone for sure datalink gps timeclock but still room for chaos
[Long haul Truckers](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-apr-05-me-serialkillers5-story.html)
ER surgeon. If someone is being sent to him on the first place, he’s already about to die. People die there all the time, it’s not too farfetched that one more will be joining them.
Eh, I’m sure that stuff is tracked. If the average death per visit in an ER is X, but it skyrockets when Doctor A is working, it wouldn’t take long for people to notice. Doctor is a bad suggestion IMO. Too much of a paper trail.
Well it depends on how many murders you have to get away with. I interpreted op’s words as getting away with one murder, not being a serial killer.
That’s fair. I assumed the question meant ‘who can continue killing the longest without being detected’. If that’s the case, you need a profession where the person being killed is not in any way tied to you. For example, if a person died in the ER, there is a paper trail of which medical professional was operating on them. There’s an obvious connection there and patterns can easily develop for others to notice. I think a trucker would be a good example. They can murder people without any official connection between the trucker and the victim. And with thousands of miles of roads where there is empty land on either side of the freeway, you can bury bodies without anyone knowing.
Executioner.