People Really Want There to Be a Serial Killer in Austin

Early voting’s open for an election in Austin this week (I think this is the one where we vote on a bunch of propositions, which I thought were illegal in this country outside of 15 counties in Nevada), and the hottest debate is…

Not the election.

There could be a serial killer here!

We wrote a few weeks ago about the possibility an immortal demon is preying, on a biweekly basis, on the inebriated along the shores of Lady Bird Lake, the section of the Colorado River (not that one, the other one) which forms the southern limit of downtown Austin. Since then, one more body has been found. Again, the police have said there are no signs of foul play. That has not stopped the speculation. Take this TikTok from former Longhorn softball player Lauren Burke:

Uhhhhhhhhhhh, checkmate, haters! There’s totally a serial killer in Austin!! Because whenever you see police, they are investigating a crime, and when they are investigating a crime, that crime is serial killing. Duhh!

We obviously don’t know if these deaths are or aren’t murders. We know much more about murder, the word for a group of crows, than we do about murder, the word for ending someone else’s life. What we do know is this:

• Since 2018, police have averaged finding four or five bodies a year in Lady Bird Lake. There have been about that many already so far this year.
• Rainey Street’s popularity has increased in recent years, with college students especially pivoting from Dirty Sixth to the waterfront street.
• Back of the envelope math (there are more than twenty bars on Rainey Street, conservatively let’s say each gets 500 people on a Friday) indicates that upwards of 10,000 bargoers visit Rainey Street every weekend night. That’s a conservative estimate, and it still leaves us in the territory where if this was a serial killer, the probability of dying on a given weekend from alleged killer is lower than that of being struck by lightning in your lifetime.
• People on the internet desperately want there to be serial killers all over the place.

Are the police increasing their patrols in the wooded area between Rainey and the river? Probably, yeah, that would be a smart and cheap thing to do. Does that mean there’s a serial killer in Austin? Of course not. Sure, there could be, just like it could be Jack the Ripper come back to life and come back to Texas, but there’s no compelling evidence aside from the fact that a few people have died the same way over an extended period of time. It makes sense to increase patrols, it’s not a terrible idea to explore if there are cost-effective ways to make the Hike & Bike Trail safer, but if we’re trying to minimize deaths, Lady Bird Lake is a bad place to start. There are a lot of places more people are dying than Lady Bird Lake. Roads, for example.

There’s also the element here where it’s probably a good idea to not get spectacularly drunk alongside cliffs and water regardless of whether there’s a serial killer in the area. Is there a serial killer preying on drunk men around the age of 30? I don’t know, but I do know that wandering around alone in the dark blacked out from White Claws preys on drunk men around the age of 30. Drive around Austin at night and you’ll see plenty of those, near waterways and far from them.

The big thing here, though, is how messed up it is that these sickos on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram Reels so excitedly want there to be a serial killer on the loose. It’s a wet dream for them. Fictional versions of it and historical incidents aren’t enough. They want someone to be out there killing systematically right now so that they can fulfill their own sad fantasies of connecting strings on Charlie Day’s bulletin board. These are the same perverts who tried to ruin all sorts of people’s lives in Idaho this winter and never came close to successfully identifying the killer in that case. They’re the same perverts whose phone lit up like the bat signal when that girl in Iowa was killed back in 2018 and, again, never came close to successfully identifying the killer. They’re the same perverts who credit themselves with “solving” the death of that van girl two summers ago as though retweeting videos already in possession of law enforcement did a single thing to move an obvious case with an obvious suspect along to its obvious conclusion. They are gross, disgusting perverts trying to build a following out of other people’s deaths. They want people to die. They want all the true crime there can be. It’s their digital lifeblood.

There’s a difference between journalism—the kind of thing Serial did—and posting bullshit TikToks that bring no new information to the table and don’t even take the time to remember the term for an ATV. Journalism is good. Good journalism is great! We need more good journalism around criminal justice, from all sorts of angles. We need a lot fewer losers with ring lights using someone’s death to get their rocks off.

Is there a serial killer in Austin? I don’t know. If there is, they’re doing a worse job than thunderstorms. That doesn’t mean you should go stand on top of the Fairmont holding a car antenna, but again: There were already plenty of reasons to keep the drinking somewhat responsible on Rainey Street.

Don’t be a pervert.