Comment by Spivak
12 hours ago
To add to this, even the government isn't sure they can get the case that he intentionally / maliciously started the fire to stick which is why their official complaint is going for recklessness / negligence.
The case for malicious intent is extremely flimsy and based entirely on circumstantial evidence. The strongest piece of evidence they have for arson is that he threatened to burn down his sister's house but here's the thing, it would be extremely unusual for an arsonist to switch from targeted arson based on anger or revenge to thrill seeking arson setting unmotivated fires.
>it would be extremely unusual for an arsonist to switch from targeted arson based on anger or revenge to thrill seeking arson setting unmotivated fires
This is all pet theories and silliness for purposes of discussion. I freely admit that I haven't built a case here that's strong enough to withstand even a gentle poking by an opponent.
I don't know as much about arson but I did go through the same serial killer phase as every morose teen and one of the things that stuck with me is the way that some offenders escalate from simple peeping and stalking all the way up to murder. Another thing that stuck with me is how in some cases when there is an intended victim, esp for revenge, an obsessed mind will often hone in on a single characteristic of the intended victim then transfer victimhood to strangers based on that characteristic. The woman who "wronged" you is a skinny blonde who smokes cigarettes so you go out looking for skinny blondes who smoke cigarettes to victimize in her stead because in your unconscious brain that matches the pattern of behavior that would soothe the wounded entitlement of the offender. Given these facts about the nature of obsessive, vengeance-oriented crime and the fact that the serial killer/arsonist crossover is so common that arson is one of the mcdonald triad of behaviors common to serial killers there's a non-zero possibility that we're seeing a revenge fantasy transferred to another victim. There's also the fact that obsessed criminals tend to want to roleplay or practice and a lot of times their first "serious" crime is one of these roleplay/practice sessions getting out of control. This feels like that to me though I can't prove it. It's like he wanted to see what starting a fire would be like, assumed that the local VFD would get it under control and in doing so would also give him an idea of what the response looked like so he could optimize for escape, then either it got out of control or he tried to inject himself into the emergency response (another common thing among obsessed criminals, many like to relive the crime by being part of the investigation, like to tease investigators by being right under their nose or believe that by injecting themselves into the investigation they can steer it away from them).
Again, does any of this hold up in a court of law? Of course not. Does it hold up in a court of a thread on a post on HN? Maybe, we're here to talk and I'm of a mind that we didn't do anything to fix w/e it was that made people serial killers but there aren't really any serial killers anymore so something must have happened to that behavior. Perhaps stranger arson is a way that the same drivers that led to serial murder before the ~~panopticon~~internet are driving new behaviors now. Intuitively I'm highly confident that the stranger spree killings we see now are driven by those same pressures in a lot of perpetrators and the change in MO is about taking advantage of lag time in law enforcement's ability to correlate facts. Before the internet you could drive a few hours' down the road and start using a new name and unless your old name was already in the system there was basically no way for anyone to know. Obsessed criminals could offend, disappear and wait it out. Nowadays we're really good at ID'ing an offender so obsessive murders have to be one and done, but another strategy could be crimes that are small enough that they don't trigger the kind of dragnet response that involves things like checking all the CCTV cameras in a ten mile circle around the crime and things like that.
edit: everyone seems focused on the "serial killer phase" line that was really intended to be a throwaway. I just mean that I read a lot about them and thought it was shocking and cool to have a "favorite". Gross shit, but I assure you no one was ever in any amount of physical or psychic danger beyond declaring me a pizza cutter (all edge and no real point).
> I'm of a mind that we didn't do anything to fix w/e it was that made people serial killers
The end of leaded gasoline may play a significant role. And/or a reduction in other chemical hazards. Violence was already declining pre-panopticon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that lead has caused a lot of issues in our society including some amount of criminality, but it's worth noting that Bentham coined the idea of the panopticon in the 18th century, and Focault and Deleuze were both talking about it as though it already existed by the 1970s. The panopticon has certainly grown into its paws since then, but the idea of a society where anyone could be under surveillance and therefore where everyone would always act as though they're under surveillance is older than the lead ban. The article you link to even references Levitt and Donohoe attributing some of the crime drop to increased police presence, which is the kind of surveillance that a lower tech society could use to implement the panopticon. You'll get no argument from me that it's several orders of magnitude more efficient now than it was in the 90s, but it was developing before the ban on lead in gasoline if we use that as our arbitrary line in the sand between pre- and post-lead eras.
You did, however, allude to one of my favorite facts about violent crime in America: far from being a cause of violent crime, the rise of violent video games has been correlated with the most dramatic drop in crime in all of recorded history. That's right y'all, it's at least arguable that not only did Doom not inspire violence, it may have actually made us safer.
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> I did go through the same serial killer phase as every morose teen
I had unmedicated bipolar 1 as a teenager. If anyone was going to go through a serial killer phase I would have.
Even as an adult I had some pretty bad episodes prior to being diagnosed early thirties. My brain went some pretty bad, dark places but it never went to serial killer.
I can only hope that you're mistaken on what a serial killer actually is. Mass murderer and spree killing, depraved as they are, have motives that are recognizable by the average person. Serial killer is a special kind of insanity.
I think they meant "interested in serial killers," not "likely to become a serial killer."
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> I did go through the same serial killer phase as every morose teen
I’m sorry, what? As a former morose teen, I can assure you that a “serial killer phase” is not a universal experience
That line read weird to me too, but I think GP meant an interest in true crime documentaries.
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Isn't lighting any fire in the woods during dry conditions inherently malicious?
A hot exhaust could cause a fire in the woods during dry conditions. Would you consider this malicious behavior if you idled your car to take a photo and something smoldered you didn't notice? Negligent perhaps, but malicious?