Hi, all. Read entire thread, have listened to and watched all interviews with IK, as well as all linked articles.
Quick response to "seeing for the 1st time," above. I'm kind of thinking not, because this is directly before the Vermont trip murders in June 2011. IK's obsession at the time was with perfecting his silencer, and using it his upcoming trip "back east." Then he got too excited to wait, and thought about trying it out locally. But the places he lay in wait were bike rides from his house, and, after the episode where the cops showed up, he shelved the impulse for a week or so. I extrapolated that this might well be a time he was expected to be a "regular guy," hanging out with his gf at home prior to the trip to ostensibly visit family. He also stated (and i found credible) that it was only after the Vermont trip that murdering didn't have a calming effect for at least 6 months. Therefore, I believe he had not killed for at least 6 months prior to June 2011.
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Stuff I believe about potential victims based on all info available to me:
1) All victims will be low profile, with none having generated more than a day or 2 news story
2) All will be either missing persons or non-missed persons. In other words, we are not looking for victims whose bodies were found and known to be homicides. One victim was found and ruled an accident.
3) Bodies will be either weighted in very deep water or buried or burned in house fires that were not ruled arson. May be dismembered. All bodies will be skeletal at this point.
4) There is at least one man who was traveling alone, probably hiking. (this I extrapolated)
5) One body is in Crystal Lake in Washington State
6) None are friends or acquaintances of IK.
7) I extrapolate at least one woman traveling alone at night on a deserted rural road. Probably more than one, as he said (rough quote, from memory), "people are naive, they don't expect something like that to happen'"
8) Not all trips were kill trips. This is my opinion, but it looked to me as though the pattern involved trips to check on or move caches; trips to establish caches; trips to revisit bodies and sometimes move or destroy them; trips to bury souvenirs. Some trips were only bank robbery or only lurking around abandoned houses and "staking out" likely areas. The finding of good places and the staking out were a big part of the behavior, and I got the sense he liked choosing victims and then being thwarted and having the self-control to continue the hunt. He used the word "shopping" in two separate interviews. Shopping, i think, was almost as fun as "buying." I also think he liked the godlike power of knowing that, if he chose, this person would soon be dead, but was somehow saved by a small hitch, and would never know how lucky they were.
9) LE should look especially at people who disappeared in severely inclement weather. The 2 cases we know details of were on very stormy nights.
10) He leaves town the day after killing. That means that some trips (like the NO cruise) are "distancing trips." The travel is not to a crime location, but from one.
11) I believe a large part of the driving is both targeting and nostalgia. I think he revisits the crime scenes every few years, moves some stuff from one place to another.
12) I also think he stalked, but not in the more familiar way. I think he stalked over years sometimes. In other words, he may well have seen the Curriers in 2009 and filed them as possible targets in his mind. I think he revisited potential targets as well as sites of crimes and remains.
13) The crimes are not as random as they seem. He actually had about 5 U.S. "comfort zones" (NW, NE, California-Nevada-Arizona-Texas area, Wyoming, Indiana). I believe that, within those areas, he had a set of places he visited when he was there.
14) Interesting that he used his own name to rent cars, motels, and post on online message boards.
15) The overall pattern has the feeling of some kind of board game or strategy game where you move things around according to a set of rules. I bet he had internal rules for how long he could keep, for example, jewelry, where he could burn it.
Remember how his original plan was to use the Curriers' car to rob several banks, return to Essex and park the car, and then, on his way back through Burlington several days later, both torch the house and move the car *to the very place from which he had removed the cache with the guns that he used to abduct them*, which place he had cached the guns two years earlier, after killing someone else, probably in a place that was also associated with an earlier time.
What I'm getting at is, this is not "random" -- it's a complex, personal, and symbolic sort of layered geo-historical fetish sites.