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Notes -
At any given time, the FBI knows about up to a half dozen active serial killers.
I mean serial killers in the classic sense; killing random strangers with whom they do not have a prior relationship, not gang, drug, or domestic violence related.
There's zero public announcement of this fact because the FBI doesn't want to induce any sort of panic or deal with the inevitable media circus. More ominously - more conspiratorially - I also believe the FBI is aware they cannot prosecute the cases. They may even know who the killer is. How does the FBI "know" without proving? Data. Sites like The Murder Accountability Project have identified previously undisclosed "murder clusters." Collect enough details about a crime scene and that's almost a tailor-made problem for a basic classification algorithm. Considering there are always non-public details about crime scenes, the FBI should be able to connect murders over even a wide geography fairly trivially with some basic data science plus manual review.
At the root of this conspiracy is the plain fact that solving a murder between strangers is hard. The overwhelming majority of criminal violence occurs between people who know each other and its always over money (or another "currency" like drugs), conflicts of love and sexual interest, or perceived respect and honor violations. Offenders and victims are 90%+ of the time young males. When none of those factors are present, law enforcement struggles to find all the necessary ingredients for a prosecution: motive, means, opportunity, suspect. Unless you more or less catch a serial killer in the act or with a room full of trophies, it's hard to even begin an investigation.
Compounding the conspiracy, I think the serial killers of today are more aware of both police investigative procedures and evidentiary processes. There's a tidal wave of information available anonymously now because of the digitization of various court records. Finding police process manuals online isn't hard. There are hundreds of online communities that discuss various law enforcement methods and the challenges in dealing with the fourth amendment (among others). If we take as our model serial killer a deliberate and methodical individual, I can see how a little bit of Applied Internet Autism could provide a competitive advantage towards "getting away with it."
I have thought about the fact that digital technology does make it fundamentally easier to track movements. If law enforcement can narrow a time of murder down to a few hours and know the place of murder (not necessarily the same place where a body was recovered), they could potentially piece through CCTV footage etc to at least scan for a suspect, right? Surely, with cell phones, they could just see who was in the area?
Well, the latter is an obvious fourth amendment issue. I don't see the FBI trying to get a court to give them a subpoena for cell location data for every human within given coordinates over an hours long timeframe. Certainly not for a single "basic" murder. If the circumstances pointed to a serial killer, I still think a judge is dubious. The FBI appears to be willing to bend and break the rules for highly political cases, but your run of the middle blood-and-guts may not meet the bar for officially sanctioned dirty tricks. The former (CCTV streaming) is a law enforcement ROI problem. Is a detective / FBI agent really going to sit through hours and hours of random footage trying to find some guy going into a park at 9:15 with a hooker and coming out at 10:30 alone? Even if they have a sincere desire to do so, I have a hunch the general case load is so high they can't actually devote a full day to doing it without getting severely behind on their other work. Instead, you're looking for quick access "smoking guns." DNA or fingerprints that get hits own known previous offenders. Cell phone data of the victim that literally says something like "I'm meeting this guy at the park at 9:15" combined with a call log to a dozen numbers the police can easily screen against. If these "level one" pieces of evidence are not present, I don't think the cops throw up their hands and go "it can never be solved!" I think they pause for a moment and think, "how much do we want to sink into this to solve a murder that could be extremely difficult to try in court?"
So, law enforcement and the FBI in particular know about these likely offenders and do not pursue them both because of some very serious difficulty in actually building the case combined with questionable "return" (pardon that indelicate analogy) on a high level of investment of time and effort. This is why I like it for a low grade conspiracy. No grand plots or narratives. No massive coordinate coverups. Just garden variety bureaucracy, poor organizational management and orientation, and difficult problem constraints that all combine to form an abysmal outcome.
I think most serial killer cases today will solve themselves, in that they will eventually turn into pretty open and shut style murders. Serial killers, according to the literature, eventually get kind of sloppy or they escalate and get more brazen, thereby taking on more risk. Eventually, you have a crime scene with a ton of physical evidence, some eyeball witnesses, and a zeroed-in timeline.
(Closing tangent) I've written about some of the basic philosophy of policing before. Leaving how fucked up the execution of law enforcement currently is, I think the philosophy ought to be oriented around crime prevention and fast interdiction of immediate crime. The investigation of already committed crime is always disproportionately resource intensive. Two cops in a squad car rolling through a rough neighborhood regularly might effectively prevent one gang member from shooting another. And that's done at some fraction of the cost of those two cops' salaries plus the cost of procuring their cruiser and the training pipeline it took to get them on the street. The detective work and court work for the prosecution of that same hypothetical shooter - should he actually pull out the gun and shoot - easily gets into the millions of municipal dollars.
Often a victim gets away or kills the killer. It goes down as burglary or attempted rape, since it's generally not clear that the killer was planning to kill them.
I hadn't thought of that, but it tracks.
There's something profoundly destitute about that. A living monster is never investigated because it looks like he was some lower level hoodlum who fucked up an attack. Life goes on.
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