Serial Killers Who Could've Been Caught Sooner But Cops Missed Important And Obvious Clues

People often think of serial killers as modern savants, men and women who gleefully lead homicide detectives in a game of cat and mouse that ends with a dramatic climax and maybe even a skin suit. The reality is, there are serial killers who evaded the police for years while the detectives working on their case were either ignoring clues, disregarding hot tips, or just screwing around while the killers continued to go about their business.

These stories of serial killers who left obvious clues and the cops who ignored them in favor of going on a wild goose chase are extremely frustrating. The levels of police incompetence on display here will hopefully give you an appreciation for the detectives who actually do catch killers, but you’ll probably develop a deep-seated hatred for the police, too.

It won’t come as a surprise that the killers who weren't caught because of police incompetence tend to have higher body counts, although many of them were only convicted of murdering a handful of people because the evidence of their mass slayings had either decomposed, or it had become inadmissible due to the ineptitude of the police working the case. These stories offer up some of the most glaring tropes of shoddy police work; the wrong suspects being apprehended, police agencies refusing to work together, and quite possibly the most frustrating thing of all: police blatantly ignoring a victim’s pleas for help. Keep reading to lose all faith in humanity.

The story of Arthur Shawcross is one that sheds light on how a strained correctional justice system that doesn't take care to curb recidivism can lead to mentally unstable criminals acting out until they completely snap and become next-level bogeymen. Shawcross was a classic serial killer: he was a bed wetter, he set fires, and he was allegedly the victim of sexual assault by his mother. All of those things are the perfect combination of what you need to make a deranged serial murderer. In 1972, Shawcross raped and murdered two children; as part of a plea deal, the charges were dropped to manslaughter, and in 1987, he was released from prison despite psychiatrists assessing Shawcross as being a "schizoid psychopath." 

After prison, Shawcross didn't live anywhere for long. Whenever he moved into a community and they were informed of his past they would flip out, he would lose his job, and he and his wife would be forced to leave town. Because of this, the authorities made the worst decision they could have and sealed his records. Shawcross moved to Rochester, New York, in June 1987, and his parole officer failed to notify Rochester authorities of Shawcross's arrival. Less than a year later, Shawcross would begin a year and a half-long killing spree that would claim the lives of 12 women.

If the incredibly strange and horrifying case of Dean Corll, a Houston-area serial killer who was murdered by one of his teenage accomplices in 1973, sheds light on anything, it's the way in which law enforcement agents will go out of their way to avoid facts that are staring them in the face. Because Corll died before he could be apprehended, the only facts that are available come from Jack Olsen's spectacular biography of Corll's life, The Man with the Candy, and what Corll's teenage accomplices, Wayne Henley and David Brooks, have said about their time spent with the murderer.

Despite the inconsistencies that come with jailhouse tall tales and a tight-lipped good ol' boy sheriff's department, it's agreed upon by everyone involved that between 1970 and 1973, Corll molested and murdered at least 28 teenage boys, and that there were probably more victims, but no one knows for sure. 

So how did the Houston Sheriff's Department botch this job? In the early 70s, Houston was in a period of steep economic decline that effected every aspect of the city and its surrounding suburbs. There was a severe lack of homicide detectives in the area, and when teenage boys went missing they tended to chalk the young men up as runaways and call it a day. That method of detective work would come back to bite everyone in the ass when Wayne Henley and David Brooks led the police to a storage shed where Corll had buried the bodies of most of his known victims. If the police had followed up on just one of the reports from the families of one of the boys that Corll killed, they could have saved the lives of dozens of young men. 

The police have never been closer to arresting a serial killer without actually arresting him than they were when Gary Ridgway took a polygraph test in 1984 to prove that he hadn't murdered a series of prostitutes and runaways near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, before posing their naked bodies by the Green River. Because polygraph technology was still in its infancy (it never really became very trustworthy) the whole thing was a waste of time for the police, and it made Ridgway aware that he was on their radar.

Ridgway began to work smarter and between 1982 and his arrest in 2001, Ridgway supposedly murdered so many woman that he forgot his kill count (he was convicted of 49 murders but is presumed to have more than 90), and when he was finally arrested, he admitted to planting fake evidence and generally just screwing around with the cops who were chasing him. Fun!

The detectives working on the Green River case suspected Ridgway for decades. The polygraph test was the first roadblock in their investigation; then in 1987, they took a DNA swab from the killer, but that didn't pay off for over a decade when the technology finally came along that would allow the police to match the saliva sample to semen that was found on multiple victims. This finally allowed the police to arrest Ridgway and bring some kind of closure to the families of the victims.

Out of all the serial killers who could have had their orgies of murder cut short, Jeffrey Dahmer proved to be the luckiest of them all. Not only had tenants in his apartment building been complaining to their landlord about the smell of "rotting meat" coming from Dahmer's apartment for over a year, but prior to his arrest, he had a run in with a cop who was more than happy to let Dahmer off the hook. 

After Dahmer's neighbors called the police about a naked boy covered in blood running from the killer cannibal's apartment, one of Milwaukee's finest came down and spoke with Dahmer and the 14 year-old boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone. Dahmer convinced the officer, Joseph T. Gabrish, that he and the boy were lovers and that they had simply had an argument. After the incident, Dahmer killed four more men - including Sinthasomphone - before he was finally apprehended on July 22, 1991. 

There are few serial killers who haunt the psyche of America as thoroughly as John Wayne Gacy. Not only did he have one of the creepiest alter egos known to history, Pogo the Clown, but for all intents and purposes, he seemed like a regular guy. It turns out that the white bread, upstanding member of the Democratic party that was known to Cook County, Illinois, was nothing more than a poorly crafted persona that hid the soul of an aberrant nightmare beast.

Gacy is most known for raping and murdering 33 boys before hiding them in the crawl space of his Illinois home between 1972 and 1978, but prior to that, he ran into some trouble in Iowa that should have been the key to keeping him off the street forever.  

In 1967, Gacy was living in Iowa, where he was molesting the sons of his fellow Jacees, including 15-year-old Donald Voorhees. When Voorhees reported the sexual assault to the police, Gacy paid another teen to assault Voorhees in a park to keep him from testifying in Gacy's case. Gacy was sentenced to a decade in prison, but got out on parole two years later before immediately running away to Illinois. In 1971, Gacy was charged for impersonating a police officer and sexually assaulting a teenage boy, the kid didn't show up to court so the charges were dismissed, and no one thought to contact the Iowa Board of Parole. Eight months later, Gacy's parole ended, giving him a clean record that allow himself to ensconce within the community and begin committing his most heinous crimes. 

Between 1984 and 1985, Richard "The Screen-Door Intruder" Ramirez broke into homes across Los Angeles, where he murdered 14 people, sexually assaulted 11 women, and terrified anyone who thought they were safe from the kind of gruesome violence that Ramirez inflicted on his victims. According to biographer Philip Carlo in the book The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, the killer was almost caught by a police officer who pulled him over on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. 

Carlo's books recalls a run-in between Ramirez and one Officer Stavros where the officer asked Ramirez point blank, "Hey, you're not that guy killing people in their homes, are you?" Ramirez played it off, and when Officer Stavros went to back to his motorcycle for some reason, the killer "said a prayer to Satan, drew a pentagram on the hood of the car," and ran away. 

Anthony Sowell (or the Cleveland Strangler) was a sex offender who strangled women to death before lazily burying them in shallow graves in his backyard and basement - and there were even a few bodies that he allowed to decompose on the floor of his home. By the time he assaulted his final victim, his death count had reached 11 women who were murdered after he promised to smoke crack with them. On top of that staggering body count, Sowell also had three living rape victims who never reported the crime over fears of past drug arrests. 

Some of the atrocities Sowell committed could have been avoided had the police seriously considered a 2008 call where a woman claimed that Sowell had repeatedly raped her before she escaped to the bathroom, where she found a decapitated body wrapped in plastic sitting in the bath tub. Rather than respond immediately to this call, the police informed the woman that she would have to come to the station to make a statement. At Sowell's 2011 trial, the woman was allowed to testify and she said that after making the call she "felt less than human. I didn’t know who to turn to.”

On the other side of the pond, a little known murderer named Stephen Port (or the Grindr Killer) moved silently through the London gay scene, drugging his victims with GHB and a loose collection of party drugs before watching them die. His first murder occurred in June 2014 when he contacted a student who was moonlighting as an escort, drugged him at the Barking Station bus terminal, and then left the student for dead at Port's own apartment.

Port called an emergency services line to report the death, and was arrested for giving a variety of conflicting stories to the police before being released. Yet when he started killing again with the same exact M.O., leaving bodies in cemeteries, and walking around in public with a jug of GHB, the police were dumbfounded with how to proceed. 

After Port was finally arrested for murdering four young men, Scotland Yard realized that there were at least 58 other suspicious GHB-related deaths in London that shared multiple similarities with Port's style and launched an investigation into 17 of its officers who they say may have mishandled the case from the jump. 

The police investigation that surrounded the Claremont serial murders that occurred in Western Australia throughout the mid '90s has the air of a comedy of errors that would honestly be very funny if it didn't involve the murders of at least four young women and the possible sexual assault of a teenage girl in the same area prior to the murder.

The three confirmed victims of the Claremont Killer disappeared from the same wealthy shopping center in suburban Perth under the same circumstances. Newspaper editor Bret Christian, who has followed the case for a decade, believes that by ignoring the connection between the teenager's rape and the murders that they may have set their investigation back by years and endangered the lives of multiple Perth area women. 

In the 20 years that it took to bring in a suspect, Bradley Robert Edwards, how did the police investigate the appalling crimes? At one point detectives handed out questionnaires to persons of interest that read, "Are you the killer?" They took DNA tests of local cab drivers, and they asked other serial killers who had already been arrested if they had committed the crimes. Top-notch detective work all around. 

In 2016, Todd Kohlhepp, a real estate agent in South Carolina, was arrested after authorities traced the cell phone signal of a missing woman and her boyfriend to Kohlhepp's property. Police discovered the woman, Kala Brown, alive and chained inside a shark cage inside of a metal storage shed where she could be heard banging on the walls. A search of Brown's property revealed the graves of Brown's boyfriend and two more victims who had the unfortunate luck of coming into Kohlhepp's orbit.

Thirteen years prior to the murders of the people on his property, Kohlhepp shot and killed four people inside Superbike Motorsports, a motorcycle shop in Chesnee, South Carolina. Could he have been stopped earlier than he was? Yes. 

While living with his father at the age of 15, Todd Kohlhepp kidnapped a 14 year old girl using a .22-caliber revolver, tied her up in his home, taped her mouth shut, and raped her. Then he took her home and threatened to kill her family if she told anyone. The girl didn't even blink and had Kohlhepp arrested for kidnapping and sexual assault. At the end of his trial, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and registered as a sex offender.

How was this man allowed to become a real estate agent? One woman who met with Kohlhepp alone at a listing in her area researched him after he began behaving erratically during their walk -through, discovered that he was a sex offender, and not only contacted the Greenville Board of Realtors, but she also reached out to the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department, who said that Kohlhepp had "special approval" to work as a real estate agent.

But that's not the full story. When Kohlhepp applied for his real estate license in 2006, there were no background checks in place, and when asked if he had any past felonies he said yes and explained, "I entered into a verbal argument with my girlfriend who was also 15 at the time. I was charged with felony kidnapping due to the fact that I did have a firearm on me." Obviously that's a lie - and legitimately crazy that he believes that's a less damning version of the story - but it's distressing that the people in his real estate company were fine with making themselves complicit in a series of murders because they didn't want to follow up on his felony kidnapping charge.