But why would a whole face light up in Luminol? To do that the whole face would have to covered in blood exactly all over. While I can see why people see a face here it seems so much more likely to be a handprint.
Lucas was a bullshitter, but Toole was the actual retard.
I haven't read the book so i don't know how well and/or thorough their research is but that summary sounds like a total ass pull.
It sounds more like a Black Dahlia conspiracy board than legitimate true crime reporting. There are just so many high profile unsolved cases being tied to one person who would have to have traveled so widely, it's too perfect. Maybe I'm wrong and Hans Größßtäbb lived out the rest of his days stabbing chickens in a remote Bavarian village, but it seems to explain too much. Maybe a few of the cases that actually share an apparent MO and similar means are genuinely tied to a single train-hopping killer, but not so many and not Hinterkaifek.
The "and then he hopped back on a boat back to Germany" thing alone makes it sound incredibely implausible to me. Travelling that far was a grueling affair back then and even if he was indeed afraid of getting caught it would make much more sense just hopping states instead of making the journey back home.
Yeah...after looking it up, it sounds exactly like I thought.
I guess 'notorious liar' is more applicable, as Lucas had claimed something like 200+ killings. He's notable for how comical his bullshit is.
Yep, if junkie can escape his debts, he usually does. Is this what you're trying to tell us?
If there is a rural area nearby or a body of water, most likely his body is there. People with paranoia often try to hide in the water.
If he had some mild concussion that might have been the case.
I think, at that point he had a life sentence without possible death penalty, so implying he had more victims wouldn't hurt him at all. They could take him out of his cell for questioning or even take him somewhere to show where his totally real victims were buried. At the very least it was extra someone to talk to.
Actually hilarious in it's over-confident retardation.
I've kept up with enough true crime to know that any theory requiring a serial killer to be unusually intelligent will typically be wrong. Contrary to popular stereotypes, pure serial murderers usually aren't very bright. They're interesting to me in the same way as Horrorcows, personally, being awful people who have an unusual but severe blend od mental illness and extreme personality pathology. Only a handful would even be capable of realistically planning an undetected multistate killing spree on the scale suggested by the author, and even then actually carrying it out would have been a challenge. Billy the Axeman might have been a real person who really killed a lot of people, but not everyone attributed to him, and he probably wasn't a German immigrant. More likely, he got drafted and died in the war, assuming that he did in fact exist. It's a possibility, but the "Man from the Train" version of him isn't likely.
Also the glorification of psychopathy as some elite evolutionary benefit when prisons are filled with the fuckers because their poor impulse control leads to them getting caught for stupid things.