True Crime
Why Do Serial Killers Target Prostitutes Overwhelmingly?
A cursory look at the serial–murders history of the United States tell us that a lot of serial killers kill prostitutes, and most of their victims are women. But why?
The story. The accounts.
This week I watched a true crime movie based on the story of Long Island, NY Serial Killer, Lost Girls, which depicted the story of Shannan Gilbert, an alleged prostitute. It is based on the book "Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery", by Robert Kolker. The movie revolves around the mysterious murders of Long Island sex workers, near Oak Beach, Long Island, commited by an unidentified serial killer who is yet to be arrested.
I've been watching, listening, and reading about serial killers from a young age, many documentaries based on the same were binged by my young self on Investigation Discovery, an American cable TV network. One thing I've noticed, which is a stark fact and a common occurrence among serial killers is that they target women overwhelmingly, and a huge number of them comes out to be prostitutes or sex workers, as young as 14 years old.
Serial killers are notorious to target and commit crimes against prostitutes, from Jack The Ripper from 1888 England, who targeted women prostitutes and killed them brutally, to Long Island Serial Killer who is an uncaught, unidentified suspect last seen to commit a murder in September 2010.
Those serial killers who have been arrested and later prosecuted, have given a detailed account of why they target sex workers. Robert Hansen, The Butcher Baker, said in an account that he perceived sex workers as evil incarnations, so he kidnapped them, and hunted down several of them in Alaska wilds. The torso killer, Richard Cottingham, confesses to have committed murders on a sociopathic sadistic sex impulse.
“I’ve probably done anything a man would want to do with a woman,” Cottingham told one interviewer.
Sex workers are targeted by serial killers because they may consider them as easy targets, who don't have families to rely upon, or who use religious or social dogmas in favour of committing crimes against sex workers, or the social stigma attached to prostitution as a justification for killing them.
Peter Sutcliffe (known as the Yorkshire Ripper) believed to have murdered 13 women, some of whom were sex workers, from 1975 to 1980 in Northern England.
Gary Ridgway (known as the Green River Killer) believed to have confessed killing 48 sex workers from 1982 to 1998, making him one of the most notorious and evil serial killers in U.S. history.
Robert Hansen confessed to have murdered between 15 and 21 sex workers, near Anchorage, Alaska, between 1980 and 1983.
Joel Rifkin had confessed to have killled 17 sex workers in the New York area between 1989 and 1993, without there having been a missing persons police complaint report filed on any of the women during that time of crimes.
Serial killer Robert Pickton, a Canadian who lived near Vancouver, made news headlines after some remains of numerous missing sex workers were found on his family farm house. He has been convicted of the murders of six women who went missing from Vancouver's east of Downtown, and is suspected by police of killing at least twenty more. In December 2007 he was sentenced to life in prison, with no legality of parole for 25 years.
In December 2006, serial killer Steve Wright murdered five sex workers in Ipswich, England.
Believed to have begun in 1996, the Long Island Serial Killer killed between 10 and 16 women who were prostitutes. Though the killings seemed to have stopped between 2010 and 2013, the perpetrator is still unidentified.
And make no mistake, the prostitute serial killer murders isn't just a stereotype, but a fact based on reality. More so a dominant demographic reality, according to a U.S. study, 22 percent of confirmed serial murders were known sex workers and prostitutes between the years of 1970 and 2009. And these numbers are increasing, over the next decade after 2009, 43 percent victims of serial murders were known prostitutes. Now you know the facts. It's more problematic when you account that only 0.3% of the population of United States is involved in prostitution work. It's a staggering data. And India is not as different, more so because of abysmal police records, where 99% of the crimes against women aren't reported to the police. Google it.
“It’s such a dangerous profession to get into,” says Eric Hickey, a social psychologist and the author of Serial Murderers and their Victims. “Being a prostitute increases your chance of being murdered by 200 times,” he says, with killers perhaps coldly calculating that “they’re easily disposed of, and they’re not going to be missed.”
Most police officers don't look for a missing person if it turns out to be a prostitute, because no one is looking for her, probably, and there would be no social pressure too, as in the case of a respectable person. And the assertion isn't wrong, in his book "Lost Girls" author Robert Kolker says how multiple police departments failed to investigate the cases of missing persons who were later found buried in Long Island at Oak Beach, their remains were found when a police dog was accidentally stumbled upon the area, the Long Island Serial Killer so quickly became the national headline news, putting the Suffolk Police Department under immense pressure, but they weren't able to solve the case, Kolker says the police didn't investigate much, and didn't paid much attention to the whereabouts of those missing women, their investigation was scantily closed. Ofcourse there's a lot of crime out there in the world, and police can't solve all of them, but at least they can try.
Kolker says: “There’s a tremendous amount of crime out there. They’re never going to solve everything, and so they play the numbers… They look at a woman who is over 21 years old and who is missing and is a sex worker, and they think that person leads an itinerant life and may not even be in trouble. Meanwhile, there are 16 other cases staring them in the face that they have a better chance of solving.”
Police's antipathy to the work of prostitution, and prostitution being illegal at many places, too, make victims or family of victims to not report the crime to the police, many colleagues fear they may attract unwanted attention of the police, and it may hit their profession and finances, so they don't report any suspicious act involving sex workers.
“Generally, police are not real fond of prostitutes, because there tends to be other kinds of crime going on when there’s prostitution in the area,” he says. “And so when someone goes missing, maybe one of their friends who is also a prostitute might go and report it… but usually, from the stories we hear, there are two or three prostitutes who disappear before they start to get a little nervous. It’s a major factor, and something that everyone knows,” says Kolker. “Including the killers.”
Sex workers are a low hanging fruit, and most often the victims are sexually involved with the accused. The Long Island Serial Killer is allegedly believed to be involved with most of his victims he killed and buried them all near the Oak Beach area. Like many serial killers, notorious serial killer Ted Bundy mostly attacked women who he knew closely, he stalked them, befriended them, and executed his motives. But serial killers like the Long Island one has to do very little to kill a sex worker, more often it is just a street negotiation, and the murderers take them to a secluded place to commit the crimes. It's pretty easy in case of sex workers who don't have a family.
Then there comes the social depravity, and psychopathic paranoia against sex workers, most of the serial murders involving prostitutes have confessed their crimes and said they thought sex workers are evil, and they love strangling them.
From a report: At his sentencing hearing, Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River Killer who was convicted of more than 48 murders, summed this up when he said, “I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes… I also picked prostitutes because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew that they would not be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
In the Long Island Serial Killer story, the victim Shannan Gilbert was escorted to a gated community where she was murdered, but before being killed she had ran a mile asking for help from the community, begging on their doors, but nobody came forward, as most people show antipathy against sex workers, the community cameras had recorded everything but the police never asked for the footage nor the people from the community bothered to check them, and as the system works, the footage got deleted automatically by the camera space.
Kolker says that tape would’ve certainly been saved “if it were somebody in the community who was running around screaming,” Kolker says. “They were looking at the woman who went screaming as the ‘other,'” says Kolker. “That’s a version of something we all do. I live on a street. I know my neighbors. If someone is screaming on the street and seems to be in genuine distress, I might call 911 or I might not call 911. But I will check to see if it’s someone I know first.” That neighborly indifference gives space for sadistic killers to play out their darkest desires.
“It’s about fantasy,” says Hickey. “I think that men who focus serially on women like that, there’s a fantasy: ‘I can have sex with them. I can do whatever I want.'"
Women working in the profession of sex or prostitution face higher number of violence than the women who work in other fields, says a study.
A long-time study conducted in the year 2004 says the homicide rate against active sex workers working in Colorado Springs between 1967 to 1999 is 204 in 1,00,000 people. This is a staggering number when compared to other professions. A Wikipedia page says: "The prevalence of violence against prostitutes varies by location. A study of female prostitutes in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada over the age of 14 who used illicit drugs other than marijuana found that 57% of prostitutes experienced some form of gender-based violence over an 18-month period. A study of 1,000 female (both cisgender and transgender) sex-workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, found 93% of women surveyed had been the victim of rape in the past year."
It’s time the concerned authorities make federal changes to the profession of sex, and prostitution, and give them a dignified life, the society itself is to be blamed for the antipathy shown against sex workers.
