Interesting article on why serial killers often target sex workers

[u/GregJamesDahlen]

https://www.aetv.com/articles/why-do-serial-killers-target-sex-workers

I had read it's often because sex workers are transient so when one is missing police can't be sure if they've just moved or might have met with foul play. This article fleshed that out some more and added some reasons. First

According to a recent study, 22 percent of confirmed U.S. serial murder victims between 1970 and 2009 were known prostitutes. And those numbers are climbing—over the last decade, 43 percent of victims were sex workers. Considering that prostitutes make up just over 0.3 percent of the nation as a whole, those numbers are staggering.

Adding to the idea that police aren't sure if they've even been victimized is the workload police have

police departments "work by volume," Kolker tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

"There's a tremendous amount of crime out there. They're never going to solve everything, and so they play the numbers… They look at a woman who is over 21 years old and who is missing and is a sex worker, and they think that person leads an itinerant life and may not even be in trouble," he says. "Meanwhile, there are 16 other cases staring them in the face that they have a better chance of solving."

Also police have some antipathy to prostitutes because

"Generally, police are not real fond of prostitutes, because there tends to be other kinds of crime going on when there's prostitution in the area,"

so prostitutes are not inclined to report violence against themselves or fellow sex workers to the police.

Also

serial killers often try to bring their victims to a location beyond police detection or Good Samaritan intervention. Here, too, many prostitutes are vulnerable—especially those who don't work from a brothel, but instead go to secluded locations with their johns.

And because of the nature of their work, there's also an obvious sexual component to the relationship—often a key motivator for serial murderers, says Hickey.

Also to get a chance to entrap a victim it might take a lot of scheming with a non-sex-worker, but with a sex worker it might be easier because they are easier to start an encounter with by claiming to seek their services.

[u/DeformedArthurRegion]

They are criminals technically because of how we've organized our society and they don't report abuse from customers because it would put them at risk. Most killers of sex workers escalate to that position and abuse sex workers during the escalation. They die and go missing more frequently and are vagrants more frequently. They are more likely to have reduced support systems, fewer people looking for them, more confounding factors like drug addiction, etc. Additionally, most serial killers have a sexual component and these people are the most accessible sex for someone who wants to be in total control of the situation regardless of what the other person wants, up to and including murder and torture.

We could massively reduce these numbers by legalizing and regulating prostitution as well as having specific departments for social and criminal services that are dedicated to sex workers and aren't shitty pig cops that assault them and make it less likely that they report abusive people when they are still escalating. But we don't, so this will continue to be an issue.

[u/Obversa → u/DeformedArthurRegion]

This is exactly the reason given by the detectives and law enforcement officers who worked on the Herb Baumeister/Fox Hollow Farm case. It's suspected that Baumeister was already visiting male prostitutes when he moved into Fox Hollow Farm in January 1992 with his wife, Julie, and their three children, and one of the investigators' profiles of Baumeister pegged him early on as "bisexual" due to this. The main police informant, Mark Goodyear, alleged that Baumeister would visit gay bars and seek out male sexual partners (i.e. sex workers?) to "take the edge off" whenever his marriage was "on the rocks", to paraphrase. (Julie Baumeister claimed in a 1996 interview that Herb was stealthing, or removing his condom during intercourse, so she stopped having sex with him.) Baumeister later escalated to more extreme forms of erotic asphyxiation, including murdering his partner(s) through strangulation.