Serial killers have long targeted prostitutes—from Jack the Ripper , an uncaught murderer who terrorized streetwalkers in late 19 th -century London, to the Long Island Serial Killer , an uncaught murderer whose last confirmed victim disappeared in September after advertising sex work on Craigslist.
Other killers, apprehended, have given investigators more detailed stories of their motivations. Robert Hansen, who came to be known as the Butcher Baker , said he thought prostitutes were evil, so he kidnapped them from Anchorage and then hunted them in the Alaskan wild. The so-called Torso Killer , Richard Cottingham, professes to have acted on a sociopathic sadistic sexual impulse. According to a recent study , 22 percent of confirmed U. And those numbers are climbing—over the last decade, 43 percent of victims were sex workers.
Considering that prostitutes make up just over 0. One reason a serial killer might target prostitutes? In his book Lost Girls , journalist Robert Kolker explores how multiple police departments failed to investigate the disappearances of several sex workers whose remains were later discovered buried near one another on Oak Beach in Long Island, New York.
But the missing women were still isolated cases, and police gave scant work hours to solving their whereabouts. Hickey agrees, adding that police antipathy for sex workers further frays the lines of communication. Because sex work is illegal in most of the country , prostitutes are far less likely than the general population to report victimization of themselves and their colleagues to the police.
In planning their murders, serial killers often try to bring their victims to a location beyond police detection or Good Samaritan intervention. But when killers target prostitutes, it can be as simple as negotiating a fee from across a car window.
