After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected. [printer-friendly version; behind-the-scenes video; via]posted by kirkaracha (131 comments total) 98 users marked this as a favorite
“Think how good you’ll look if we actually catch the guy responsible. You’d be solving a horrible crime!”If they thought they were open to litigation before, it'd be nothing compared to if they hadn't tried to track down someone they thought was a serial rapist.
They seemed distinctly unmoved.
“Look at how cool this guy is,” he told them, replaying the video. “He just raped and beat a woman to death, or thinks he has, and it’s not like he’s all nervous and jittery. He’s cool as a clam! Tell me the kind of person who could do such a thing and be this nonchalant. This ain’t the only time he’s done this.”
A discussion ensued. There were some in the room who wanted to find the rapist, but the decision was primarily a business calculation. It was about weighing the detective’s fee against a chance to limit their exposure.
Brennan called NASA to see if they had a way to enhance the picture. He described the camera and was told that it couldn’t be done.Does this mean that there are some cameras whose recordings have an "Enhance!" feature?
These undetected rapists:posted by muddgirl at 1:02 PM on November 19, 2010 [17 favorites]
• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
• use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;
• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.
Why would a man haul his luggage out of an airport hotel early in the morning, when he was not checking out, and then return to his room within the hour without it? That question, coupled with Brennan’s careful process of elimination, led him to the conclusion that the victim had been taken out of the hotel inside the big man’s suitcase.Talk about doing your homework! How many others would have just gone by what their eyes said, "That's too small," and looked elsewhere or called it quits?
But it seemed too small. It looked to be about the size that air travelers can fit into overhead compartments. But the man himself was so big, perhaps the size of the bag was an illusion. Brennan studied the video as the man exited the elevator and also as he left the hotel, then measured the doorways of both. When he matched visible reference points in the video—the number of tiles to each side of the bag as it was wheeled out the front door, and the height of a bar that ran around the inside of the elevator—he was able to get a close approximation of the suitcase’s actual size. He obtained one that fit those measurements, which was larger than the bag on the video had appeared to be, and invited a flexible young woman whose proportions matched the victim’s to curl up inside it. She fit.
The rather depressing upshot of all this is that, as much we may hate the idea of "blaming the victim," people who are on the receiving end of crime often do mark themselves out, if only subliminally.Fuckin' Psychology Today... could you better exemplify the trend towards terrible pop science journalism??
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I hope the reason there havent been any comments yet is because people are actually reading the whole thing (A bit unorthodox I know) but if you were considering it then DO NOT MISS THIS.
It's like Law and Order, but not moronic and poorly acted.
posted by Senor Cardgage at 12:01 PM on November 19, 2010 [2 favorites]