The Long Island serial killer who terrorised a community for over a decade will now spend the rest of his days behind bars. Eight women, most of them sex workers, were butchered and dumped along a desolate highway. The killer, a mild-mannered architect, was finally caught via a discarded pizza crust.
DNA, as ever, is the great equaliser. But let us pause before we applaud the justice system. Let us ask: why did this man evade capture for so long?
The answer, I submit, lies in our collective myopia. We have become a society that values the veneer of normality over the substance of vigilance. The killer was a neighbour, a colleague, a man who mowed his lawn on Sundays.
We look for monsters in black vans, not in the man who holds the door for us at the coffee shop. The trial was a farce of legal manoeuvring and victim-blaming. The women were 'prostitutes', as if that makes their murders less heinous.
We have forgotten that every life, regardless of its circumstances, is a sacred thread in the human tapestry. The killer will now rot in a cell, forgotten by a public that has already moved on to the next outrage. But his victims will remain forgotten, their names a footnote in a true-crime documentary.
We have locked away a monster, but we have not confronted the culture that allowed him to thrive. We call it justice, but it is merely containment. And containment is not civilisation.
It is a holding cell for our own moral decay.
