It’s an old trope in crime fiction: a serial killer is on the loose but the authorities don’t want to alarm the public and won’t give their Cassandra-like detective the resources he needs. Then he goes rogue.
The Portland Police Bureau is discouraging rumors a serial killer is active in Portland, after six women were found dumped in wooded areas outside of Portland over a three month stretch.
Promising to communicate with the public if anything changes, PPB said the cases do not present an “articulable danger” at the moment.
Speculation runs wild on Twitter.
One reason for the rumors is the women were drug users and/or homeless; at least one has a violent criminal record. A woman found dead in a tent in the Lents neighborhood police are not calling a homicide (the five others appear to have been dumped where they were found); police revealed one died of blunt force trauma but haven’t given the causes of death in the other cases.
One of the victims was said to frequent Portland’s notorious fentanyl market downtown. One relative is accusing the police of misleading the public.
It’s an unfortunate time for any authority seeking to establish trust with the public after the obfuscations of Covid and the daily gaslighting around race, sex and “gender”. The Portland Police Bureau has the added problem of having had its image thoroughly gutted by the last almost-three years since the BLM riots. Despised as Nazis by the left and feckless by the right. An interesting question that will never be asked is whether the flight of qualified cops from the Bureau over this time leaves it less capable to deal with either a serial killer or the standard mayhem they insist explains these cases.
The only real reason police have for discouraging “panic” about a potential serial killer is a high-profile media-driven case puts them on the hook.
Six unrelated murders of people who abandoned or were abandoned by society don’t register for the public; tie them together with the “serial killer” label and instantly the fascination with serial killers with which we’ve all been conditioned by film and television is conjured in us, and we come alive. Pardon the phrase.
untethered 