Let's face it: Some people are just stupid

This post at Strange in San Antonio reminded me of this story from Italy that I heard mentioned on the news this morning.

The 26 year old, who has not been named, was traced by detectives after the owner of the house reported the crime.

Officers noticed the computer was still on and when the 52 year old owner touched the keyboard, the social network site's homepage flashed up.

The man, from Albano Laziale near Rome told police he was not a member, and they quickly realised the last person to use the computer had been the burglar.

He had written several messages on his wall - but not revealed he was carrying out a crime - and police were quickly able to trace him and recover cash and jewellery that had been taken.

Major Ivo Di Blasio, of the carabinieri paramilitary police, said:"He was tempted to log on during the break in and it led to his arrest - it was a silly mistake to make and we were onto him very quickly.

"The owner of the house had left the computer on and when the Facebook site flashed up on the screen we had the name of the burglar and we simply went to his house and arrested him, as well as recovering the goods.

"He did not expect us at all and was very surprised when we told him how we had tracked him down. He has a history of break-ins and will now go before a judge."

Top 10 Evil Clown Stories of 2008

As listed by Loren Coleman at The Copycat Effect.

P.S.  I may have mentioned it before--I don't remember for sure--but I don't like clowns.

The serial killer database

A professor of psychology has begun compiling a serial killer database:

Radford University psychology professor Mike Aamodt has spent years compiling a list of serial killers, and, after subtracting competent hitmen and bloodthirsty pirates, he reckons there have been at least 1,900 since the beginning of the 14th century.

[...]

Aamodt said he is only now beginning to analyze the information his students have gathered and hopes to one day make the database publicly available. But already, he said, certain stereotypes are crumbling beneath the weight of the data.

For instance, think serial killers are super-intelligent schemers along the lines of the fictional Hannibal Lecter? Think again: The median IQ is 102, or about average. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was an exception, with an IQ once measured at 165. In general, according to Aamodt's data, the smartest serial killers are the ones who use bombs: Their median IQ is 126.

Buy into the conventional wisdom that serial killers are usually white males in their midto late-20s? They're not: Only 18 percent fit that profile. (The FBI released a report this month debunking the stereotype; the report also noted that the racial diversification of U.S. serial killers generally mirrors the national population.)

Interesting. I hope he follows through and makes it publicly accessible.

via Dead Silence

Practicing for humans

Horrific mass animal killing at Australian zoo:

SYDNEY, Australia - A 7-year-old boy broke into a popular Outback zoo, fed a string of animals to the resident crocodile and bashed several lizards to death with a rock, the zoo's director said today.

The 30-minute rampage, caught on the zoo's security camera, happened early Wednesday after the boy jumped a security fence at the Alice Springs Reptile Center in central Australia, said zoo director Rex Neindorf.

The child then went on a killing spree, bashing three lizards to death with a rock, including the zoo's beloved, 20-year-old goanna, which he then fed to "Terry," an 11-foot, 440-pound saltwater crocodile, said Neindorf.

The boy also fed several live animals to Terry by throwing them over the two fences surrounding the crocodile's enclosure, at one point climbing over the outer fence to get closer to the giant reptile.

In the footage, the boy's face remains largely blank, Neindorf said, adding: "It was like he was playing a game."

By the time he was done, 13 animals worth around $5,500 had been killed, including a turtle, bearded dragon and thorny devil lizards, Neindorf said. Although none were considered rare, some are difficult to replace, he said.

"We're horrified that anyone can do this and saddened by the age of the child," Neindorf said.

Alice Springs police said they are unable to press charges against the boy because of his age. Children under age 10 can't be charged with criminal offenses in the Northern Territory. His name was not released because of his age.

Neindorf said he plans to sue the boy's parents.

The boy's small size is probably the reason he didn't trip the zoo's security system, which relies on sensors to detect intruders, Neindorf said.

"I just want people to learn that they can't let their children go and run amok," Neindorf said. "If we can't put the blame onto the child, then someone has to accept the responsibility."

Society is to blame. Or global warming. Or Bush. Watch his parents try to pass the blame on to someone else.

That kid needs to be taken out of that family immediately, but it's probably too late. I will be surprised if he isn't killing humans--or at least trying to--within 5 years.

More at The Copycat Effect.

Location, location, location

Meet God Lucky Thompson. Yes, that's his first name. Arrested for selling cocaine. His charges will be further increased because:

1. He was within 1,000 feet of a school.
2. He was within 1,000 feet of public housing.
3. He was within 1,000 feet of a church building.

Location!

Review: The Strange Case of Patty Hearst

Is there, then, an antidote to the escalation in political terrorism that the case of Patty Hearst seems to foreshadow? Opinion varies...The bomb and the bullet do not work. Violence invites, indeed demands, an over-kill reaction...In their ongoing quest fo a better America, [radical activist leaders] have concluded that rather than kill the mosquito with a cannon it is better to work slowly to drain the swamp. Yet the aberrant Cinques and Symbionese Liberation Armies survive, and the sheer drama of their operations could shift us from sane and systematic avenues of social progress to violent and ultimately meaningless bloodshed.

A concluding, and perhaps prophetic, paragraph from The Strange Case of Patty Hearst. Published in 1974, after the most of the SLA was killed in a bloody shootout with Los Angeles police but before Hearst and the two surviving members were captured and imprisoned. Some may consider this book obsolete, since it was written before the story was really concluded. I do not. A book like this is in effect a snapshot of the time that was, produced by the urgency of trying to understand a new phenomenon. The Stockholm Syndrome was only beginning to be understood, but the Hearst case was different. The phenomenon named the Stockholm Syndrome was a case in which captives came to sympathize with and defend their captors; in the Hearst Syndrome she not only came to sympathize with and defend them, but to actively participate in their crimes until she was forcibly stopped.

The Strange Case of Patty Hearst briefly details the life of Patricia Hearst and continues on to cover the kidnapping itself, communiques from the SLA, and the thoughts and actions of those close to her at the time. It describes an America that felt betrayed by a pretty young college student, unassuming in spite of being an heiress. It was a time, years before the Murrah Federal Building and 9/11, when the people of America only thought they knew what terrorism was. America in general, and perhaps the authors, specifically, attempted to answer for themselves how and why this could have happened, but ultimately admit failure:

A nation's soul is at stake, its vulnerability laid bare.
"Patty come home" was the futile outcry. And the answer was a mocking silence.

Patty Hearst's prison sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1976; President Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon on his last day in office. One must wonder if she would have received such leniency if she had been unattractive and poor rather than pretty and wealthy. I think this may be only one of many unanswered questions.

Another murder at a school

In China. Details at The Copycat Effect: China: Fatal School Attack.

The murderer killed two and injured four more before killing himself--which always happens in these kinds of attacks.

With a knife.

Good thing guns are banned in China. Somebody could get really hurt.

UPDATE: And Mr. Coleman follows up with a rundown of recent mass murder school stabbings in places where legal gun ownership is not allowed.

An interesting comment regarding NIU

From Playing the Odds by David Calderwood:

I’ve been to NIU’s campus many times over the past six years. One notable fact was the ubiquity of armed campus police officers. For a person who attended a small Midwestern university thirty years ago where the three campus policemen didn’t even carry guns during the school year, it took some getting used to, having armed cops hanging around in every dorm and seemingly on half the street corners I drove past.

The head of NIU’s Campus Police stated that officers arrived at the lecture hall within two minutes of the shooting. By then the shooter had killed himself, leaving an obvious tragedy in his wake (six dead victims as of this writing). As Greg Perry noted in an earlier LRC column, "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away."

Emphasis mine. So on this campus where armed campus police officers are "ubiquitous," someone was able to sneak onto campus and into a lecture hall with a shotgun. The shotgun is famous for many things, but being easily concealed is not one of them.

What a bunch of useless squibs.

Sometimes you should look under the bed

Here's an article about a man in Greensboro, NC, who caught an intruder underneath his own bed.

"(When) I looked underneath there, I saw these eyes staring back at me. I was like 'what the crap! This ain't normal,'" said Lynn. "So I start(ed) slinging him around. I was upper cutting him, beating him left and right."

Not quite the same reaction I would have had, I don't think. I'm reminded of the phrase, "shooting fish in a barrel."

An important thing about this article is this:

Zabedra-Ilario told police it was the first time he's broken into
anyone's home, but it was not the first time he's been peeping.

"It was almost something he was proud of, like someone would covet a trophy," said GPD detective David Lyndrup.

This guy was working himself up to bigger and worse things, like rape. Fortunately his first attempt at something bigger than mere peeping was thwarted by a good thrashing. I doubt if it will stop him in the long run, though.

via Lest Darkness Fall

A sad first

Loren Coleman at The Copycat Effect points out that the recent Louisiana Tech shooting has broken a gender barrier: the first time a female has committed mass murder against classmates.

The Copycat Effect: Shootings Shatter Gender Barrier

There have been females who committed mass murder in a school setting before, but they were "outsiders," not a student or member of the faculty there herself.

These mass murders that keep coming more and more frequently at what seems more and more critical times are not just random acts of insanity, in my opinion. Feel free to call me a paranoid nutjob if you want, but something is going on here.

As Mr. Coleman says, "Be aware. Be alert. Be safe."

I would add, "Be prepared," if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Suspiciously normal

From Florida's Local6.com:

"This killer is one of us," Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood said. "He is our next-door neighbor. He is somebody we go to church with. It is somebody who is a respectable, decent human being on the outside. But on the inside, they are out there preying on women. He is dehumanizing women."

[...]

In fact, Chitwood asked women involved with someone with qualities likened to the serial killer to contact the police immediately. He said they may be in danger themselves.

Nice guys in Florida are now being cautioned to wear dark sunglasses and leer a lot, just to be safe.

via The Agitator

911 Nightmare

Fortunately, no one was hurt. Unfortunately, that includes the would-be burglars.

I Wish The Police Had Caught The Man Who Came to My House Today at Gun Owners Against Violence:

I want to know whether it was 5 minutes or 6 minutes or 3 minutes that passed between the moment when I was asking the operator to please send the squad car back because the guy was just now running along the side of the house ... and the length of time that this operator was taking to explain to me that she was not the dispatcher and how they functioned there and that it was like email (?!) ... and the amount of time, following that, when she was telling me that she had still not yet contacted the dispatcher ... and the passage of time that was allowing my expletive-enunciating doorbell-ringing certainly-running possible-would-be-burglar to what? Calmly choose a direction in which to amble and mingle with the off-to-work crowd? Nod amiably to a passerby while leisurely getting into his car? Take a bus? Choose another house?

The cyber cold war

At Times Online:

Today’s report, commissioned by McAfee, one of the largest security firms, identifies China as the country most active in internet-enabled spying operations and attacks but says 120 other countries are using the same techniques.

Defence departments across the globe are already rewriting manuals for a future of digital warfare. The US alone has recorded 37,000 attempted breaches of government and private systems in 2007 , and a new unit at the US Air Force, staffed by 40,000 people, has been set up to prepare for 'cyber-war'.

On Tuesday, Andrew Palowitch, a senior adviser to the Pentagon, said that military officials had conceded that attacks had reduced the US military’s operational capability.

NATO said that all 26 of its member countries have been targeted by some form of cyber-attack, and that the threat posed to national infrastructure was now so serious that more than 10 of its own agencies were working to protect against further incidents.

Officials were reluctant to point the finger at individual Governments, but said "state parties" were suspected.

"The definition of security is changing," a NATO official said. "National infrastructure is critical - politically, economically and commercially, and now that we know these kinds of attacks are happening, there is an increasingly push to give the issue a higher profile on the political level."

The UK Government has been criticised for not paying sufficient attention to computer-based threats since merging the National Hi Tech Crime Unit with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

James Brokenshire, MP, the Conservatives' spokesman on e-crime, said: "The Government remains in denial over the seriousness of the situation. Specific funding for computer crime teams was cut off by the Home Office earlier this year, and the Government’s latest crime law doesn’t even define computer misuse offences as serious, when salmon poaching apparently is."

So busy has the "UK Government" been in turning their people into cattle to be herded that they can't see where the real threats are. One could change "salmon poaching" to "banning toys that look like guns" or "outlawing knives" and it would mean the same thing.

Arrogance: 'twas ever thus.

Omaha and the Copycat Effect

Loren Coleman has a new article up on the copycat effect and the recent Omaha mall shooting.

As I point out on this blog on December 6th, the Omaha mall shooting came exactly one calendar month after the school shooting in Finland, which was exactly one calendar month after the school shooting in Cleveland, Ohio. The last three months, remarkably, therefore, have had precisely four weeks to the day between each of these dangerous Wednesdays.

Lots more at the link.

A good neighbor

From The Modesto Bee:

While in the hospital, Lucas was handcuffed to his bed and wore leg irons, Singh said. Around 4 a.m. Thursday, the deputy watching Lucas stepped away from the room. The reason he left remains under investigation and his name has not been released [naturally! --ed.], Singh said. When the deputy returned, he found an empty bed.

Lucas, who was naked, had slipped out of his handcuffs and pulled out his intravenous line. A small blood trail showed the door through which he left, but officers were unable to find him, Singh said.

Modesto police received several calls from residents about the escapee, who briefly gained access to a home in the 400 block of West Orangeburg Avenue, said Modesto police Sgt. Ray Coyle. As Lucas left, a neighbor tackled him. He sat on Lucas in a front yard until police arrived.

The "neighbor" is 80 years old.

"It's worthless as a forensic tool."

For 40 years, the FBI used a "forensic" technique which has now been discredited as completely worthless.

Evidence of Injustice:

Aside from eyewitness testimony, some of the most believable evidence presented in criminal cases in the United States comes from the FBI crime laboratory in Quantico, Va. Part of its job is to test and analyze everything from ballistics to DNA for state and local prosecutors around the country, introducing scientific credibility to often murky cases.

But a six-month investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post shows that there are hundreds of defendants imprisoned around the country who were convicted with the help of a now discredited forensic tool, and that the FBI never notified them, their lawyers, or the courts, that the their cases may have been affected by faulty testimony.

The science, called bullet lead analysis, was used by the FBI for 40 years in thousands of cases, and some of the people it helped put in jail may be innocent.

[...]

For years, the FBI believed that lead in bullets had unique chemical signatures, and that by breaking them down and analyzing them, it was possible to match bullets, not only to a single batch of ammunition coming out of a factory, but to a single box of bullets. And that is what the FBI did in the case of Lee Wayne Hunt, tying a bullet fragment found where the murders took place to a box of bullets the prosecutors linked to Hunt.

Emphasis mine. And this is pure fantasy.

It's a long article, but worth reading the whole thing.

Via The Real Gun Guys.

So much for Japan's low murder rate

This is one we hear about occasionally from the forced disarmament crowd. Cases like this may explain why (use BugMeNot):

Photos of the teenager's corpse show a deep cut on his right arm, horrific bruising on his neck and chest. His face is swollen and covered with cuts. A silhouette of violence runs from the corner of his left eye over the cheekbone to his jaw, and his legs are pocked with small burns the size of a lighted cigarette.

But police in Japan's Aichi prefecture saw something else when they looked at the body of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old sumo wrestler who arrived at a hospital in June. The cause of death was "heart disease," police declared.

As is common in Japan, Aichi police reached their verdict on how Saito died without an autopsy. No need for a coroner, they said. No crime involved. Only 6.3% of the unnatural deaths in Aichi are investigated by a medical examiner, a minuscule rate even by nationwide standards in Japan, where an autopsy is performed in 11.2% of cases.

Forensic scientists say there are many reasons for the low rate, including inadequate budgets and a desperate shortage of pathologists outside the biggest urban areas. There is also a cultural resistance in Japan to handling the dead, with families often reluctant to insist upon a procedure that invades the body of a loved one.

But Saito's case has given credence to complaints by a group of frustrated doctors, former pathologists and ex-cops who argue that Japan's police culture is the main obstacle.

Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher homicide rate in their jurisdiction, and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, the group alleges. Odds are, it says, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the lowest per capita homicide rates in the world.

"You can commit a perfect murder in Japan because the body is not likely to be examined," says Hiromasa Saikawa, a former member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police security and intelligence division. He says senior police officers are "obsessed with statistics because that's how you get promotions," and strive to reduce the number of criminal cases as much as possible to keep their almost perfect solution rate.

Via Reformed Chicks Blabbing.

The Copycat Effect

Those of you who faithfully--or even agnostically--read this blog probably recall me linking to Cryptomundo on occasion. The blogger there, Loren Coleman, is a foremost authority on one of my sub-hobbies, cryptozoology. What you may not know is that Mr. Coleman has published a book (at least one that I know of) and has another blog on an entirely different matter.

The Copycat Effect keeps track of exactly what it says: the copycat effect in serial killings and mass murder. His observations on the most recent school shooting in Cleveland is here.