Originally posted by Bronco51
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SPOILERS
All of these docs are good, but my one criticism is that they don't really explore the psychology of the killers as much as I think they should (e.g., Peter Sutcliffe's famous line, "I were just cleaning up the streets, our kid." And Richard Ramirez's line, "...I'll see you in Disneyland.") To me, those statements imply possible context for their motives that might've contradicted the perspectives of law enforcement. Things that were never explored in the docs. One or two more episodes following their capture would've been great, IMO.
I'll elaborate a little. The police became convinced that Sutcliffe was not exclusively targeting prostitutes as originally believed. The possibility however, was that he was never specifically about prostitutes in the first place. In Ramirez's case, he went out of his way to cite Satan or the occult throughout. I question whether he truly believed any of that. His lawyer spoke of Disneyland as a means for persuading leniency from the jury, hence the joke. That was the thing with Ramirez. They touched on his horrible childhood and life as a means for explaining the extremely vile and disgusting things he did, but his attitude was always nonchalant. He didn't seem to ever fully grasp the seriousness of what was going on. There was this total lack of empathy, and desire to get a rise out of people or to shock people.
I did a school report on Ramirez a long time ago, and I focused on the lack of inter-organizational coordination in law enforcement. The docs highlighted that for narrative purposes, but you could do an entire series on how a lack of departmental, organizational, or media/political cohesion impeded investigations back then.
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