A serial murder investigation usually begins when somebody is reported missing. In sixteen cases in this archive, that report was never made, or was made and filed as something else, and the killing continued for as long as it took anyone to notice a pattern.
Chandrakant Jha killed men in Delhi over nine years. Indian reporting has returned to the same point about the case: young men came to the city from Bihar to work, they disappeared, and no one reported them missing. Jha eventually left the bodies outside Tihar Jail with notes taunting the police, which is how the case was made. He had to draw attention to it himself.
Joel Rifkin killed nine women in New York at the height of the crack epidemic. Women disappearing from that world were not reported missing, and no connection was made between remains found in Brooklyn and remains found elsewhere. Robert Silveria killed along the freight lines and his entry says it in five words: almost nobody looked for the victims. Dorangel Vargas killed at least ten men in a park in Venezuela, all of them living rough or passing through, all of them people whose disappearance was not reported.
Where a report was made, it was often converted into something more convenient.
Dean Corll's victims came from a few streets in one Houston neighbourhood, and their disappearances were largely written off as runaways in a period when the police were logging a great many of those. Émile Louis killed women in the Yonne who were recorded as having left of their own accord. Andrei Chikatilo took people whose absence nobody reported quickly. Julio Pérez Silva's victims in Alto Hospicio were treated as runaways for months, and the authorities kept saying so while the girls kept going.
Two cases in this group were about who the victims were rather than how they lived.
Stephen Port killed four young gay men in London and left them where they would be found. The families' central charge, that the deaths were not taken seriously, has been made and largely conceded: seventeen officers were investigated by the police watchdog afterwards. Chester Turner killed women in South Los Angeles across a period in which, on the LAPD's own later account, the deaths of women in that part of the city were not investigated as they should have been. Both of those are admissions, not accusations.
Some of it was structural rather than deliberate. Volker Eckert left a body in Spain, another in France and another in Germany, all of women whose disappearances were not reported, and there was no European mechanism at the time that would have connected them. Lisa Jane Turner's four infant deaths in New Zealand were each recorded as sudden infant death syndrome, a common finding in that period, and not investigated. Baekuni killed street children in Jakarta whose disappearances were not investigated at all.
The West Mesa case is still open, and the families have spent fifteen years making exactly this argument: that the disappearances were not investigated when they were reported, because of who the women were. Eleven bodies were found in a field outside Albuquerque in 2009. Nobody has been charged.
The common thread is not police failure in the ordinary sense, though there is plenty of that here. It is that these investigations could not begin, because the event that starts one, a person reported missing and believed to be missing, never happened.
That produces a specific distortion in the record. A killer whose victims are reported has a shorter run and a smaller count. A killer whose victims are not reported can work for years and will show up in an archive like this one with a bigger number beside his name. The number is partly a measure of how much attention his victims were owed and did not get.