The vanishing of Hannah Graham from her Virginia university town in mid-September is the fifth such disappearance of a young female from that particular locale in as many years. And only one body has ever been found.
That's the bad news, considering the search for Graham -- or what remains of the 18-year-old -- has become more desperate by the hour.
The good news is that police now believe they finally have the serial killer in custody after DNA evidence linked Jesse Matthew, the prime suspect in Graham's disappearance, to a similar attempted abduction and sex assault in 2005 as well as to the rape and slaying of Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington four years later.
If their theory is correct, then the 32-year-old exceptional athlete with an exceptionally checkered past that includes a rape charge would also be an exceptional serial murderer too, since, by and large, such violent sadists are supposed to be young white males.
That has been the longstanding supposition, of course, with infamous
Ted Bundy the standard bearer.
Lately, though, experts have been cautioning homicide investigators that the rule book on this class of deadly perpetrator contains some outdated and extremely faulty data; namely that black offenders just like Jesse Matthew are grossly underrepresented in it, and they and their victims wrongly falling under the radar as a result.
How, in the land of Rodney King, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown could that happen?!
Because, as with most other types of criminal profiling, when law enforcement officials try to pinpoint who a likely serial killer may be, and who he likely could not be, they rely on age-old beliefs borne mainly out of bias: Maniacally murderous men who successfully evade detection and arrest are smart (really, really smart like Jack the Ripper was) and Caucasian males are obviously way smarter than African American males are. At the very least because they're better educated.
It's called racial stereotyping at its most perverse and reverse, but the myth of a deviously-brilliant white man butchering for sport and eluding capture for years or even decades might not only be bigoted to the core. It could in fact be the only reason why some serial killers are never caught.
After all, the crime experts appear to be dead right in their latest assessments -- a majority of the world's homicidal sociopaths did not turn out to be anywhere near the geniuses once thought, and a fair number of them have also been dark-skinned as well.
So too the perceived status of victims and their communities unjustly factor into the criminal justice equation, more often than not, determining the speed and depth to which certain investigations are conducted, if at all.
Thus, cases of affluent individuals who are missing or murdered in affluent areas typically garner greater public attention and resources than those of down-and-out vagabonds, prostitutes or drug addicts. Especially if the latter unfortunates fell victim to foul play in economically-depressed neighborhoods -- the exact environments where, studies show, serial killers of color almost exclusively prey.
That historically prejudicial treatment by police and the press explains why we know and care so much right now about still-missing college coed Hannah Graham and her unlucky lookalike predecessor Morgan Harrington. Yet the same killer's equally tragic victims who were themselves either black or lesser privileged ... not so much.
A societal slant which, to the opportunistic predators hiding among us, makes for fertile hunting grounds.
Eponymous Rox
*Look for more case updates in the comment section
UPDATE: Authorities are offering a $100,000 reward for information which leads to the safe return of Graham. The University of Virginia sophomore’s been uncharacteristically missing since September 13th.
Additionally, they are now examining a number of other unsolved homicides and missing person cases of young people throughout the Virginia areas that suspect Jesse L. Matthew was known to have either lived or worked in.
For instance, in Campbell County police are searching for a link to the abduction, rape and murder of Cassandra Morton, whose body was dumped in woods near Lynchburg in late 2009.
Orange County police are also re-investigating the case of Samantha Ann Clarke, missing since September 13, 2010.
And in nearby Montgomery County, the sheriff's office is revisiting the 2009 double homicide of Virginia Tech students Heidi Childs and David Metzler. The two were in a long term relationship and sitting together in a parked vehicle the night they both were shot to death and then robbed. DNA evidence emerged in the case a few years later but their murders remain unsolved to date.
On October 18th, would-be rescuers of the missing teen found a badly-decomposed body roughly five miles from where missing college student Morgan Harrington was discovered raped and slain in 2009, and. coincidentally, the same distance from Matthew's mother's home where he was raised.