Ten people in this archive contacted the police or the press while they were still killing. Three of them were caught because of it, and in a fourth case the contact is the only reason anyone knows the killings were connected.
John Frank Hickey is the earliest. He killed a fellow worker and two boys over twenty-nine years, and after the last of them he began sending taunting postcards. They gave him the name the Postcard Killer and they eventually led police to him. He was sentenced to life in 1912. He was caught, in the end, because he could not stop writing to the family of one of his victims.
Maury Travis was caught by the same impulse with better technology. He wrote to a St Louis columnist, taunting him, offering to prove himself, and enclosed a printed map with a numbered dot marking where a body would be found. Investigators went to the mapping site's server logs, found the single session that had generated that exact map view at that time, and got the internet address, which led to his telephone line. It was one of the first American cases solved by a server log.
Dennis Rader is the most deliberate version. He named himself BTK, for bind, torture, kill, in letters to police and the press. In October 1974, after two men were wrongly held for the Otero killings, he telephoned a tip to a reporter and directed police to a letter he had hidden inside an engineering book at the Wichita Public Library, a man correcting the record on his own work. He resurfaced thirty years later and sent a stream of packages, and in one of them he asked whether a floppy disk could be traced back to him. He was told it could not. It was, and he was arrested in 2005.
Colin Ireland's contact is the strangest, because the complaint was about coverage. He telephoned the Samaritans, a newspaper and the police, taunting them and complaining that they were not calling it a series. He was caught by the fifth killing.
The others wrote or called without it costing them anything.
The Cleveland Torso Murderer was never prosecuted and taunted Eliot Ness by postcard for years. The Zodiac Killer shot or stabbed seven people in Northern California, killing five, and then sent letters and ciphers to police and newspapers for years afterwards; he has never been identified. Chandrakant Jha left the dismembered remains of men he had killed outside Tihar Jail in Delhi with notes taunting the police. Lee Roy Martin telephoned a local newspaper to direct police to two bodies in Gaffney, South Carolina. Tsutomu Miyazaki sent taunting letters, and remains, to the families of the four little girls he had killed in Tokyo and Saitama.
Paul Stephani does not belong with any of them, and is here because the pattern only makes sense with him in it. After several of his attacks in Minnesota he telephoned the emergency operators, weeping, and gave partial information about what he had done and where the body was, without identifying himself. He was not taunting anyone. He was caught in 1982 for a different reason entirely: a woman he attacked, Denise Williams, shot him with his own gun and survived.
Set the ten side by side and the useful question is not why they made contact. It is who they made contact with.
Hickey wrote to a victim's family. Miyazaki wrote to the families. Travis wrote to a named columnist. Rader wrote to reporters and to the police, and once to correct the record when the wrong men were held. Ireland rang a newspaper to complain about how the story was being covered. Almost none of this was directed at the investigation. It was directed at the audience, and in three cases it was the thing that ended the case, because a letter has a postmark, a map has a server log, and a disk has a name on it.