Area Man Spends Three Years Trying To Convince Police He Invented The Concept Of Serial Killers

It began, as these things so often do, with a moment of profound, yet tragically misguided, civic pride. In the autumn of 2021, Kyle Brubaker, a 42-year-old technical writer for a company that manufactures industrial lubricants, was watching a true-crime documentary. The program detailed the grim methodology of a prolific offender. A thought, fully formed and catastrophically stupid, bloomed in Brubaker's mind: 'I came up with that.' He wasn't claiming to be the killer, mind you. He was claiming to be the copyright holder of the killer's modus operandi. This was not, perhaps, an entirely unproblematic interpretation of intellectual property law.

His initial attempt was what one might charitably call a low-key inquiry. He dialed the non-emergency line for the Akron Police Department and patiently explained to a confused dispatcher that while he had no leads on the 'John Doe Strangler' case, he wished to formally register the 'conceptual framework' of targeting victims based on their astrological signs. The dispatcher, wearily accustomed to the city's more eccentric citizens, logged the call as 'unfounded nonsense' and moved on. For Brubaker, this was not a dismissal. It was a challenge.

What followed can only be described as a symphony of bureaucratic horror, conducted by a man wielding a kazoo. Brubaker escalated. He began filing notarized letters with the police chief's office, outlining his 'prior art' in the field of sequential homicide. He drafted elaborate flowcharts, meticulously comparing the timelines of various serial killers to his own personal diary entries from the 1990s, where he had jotted down story ideas for a novel he never wrote. He argued, with the pedantic fury of a man who has read the entire terms of service for a free email account, that the police were inadvertently infringing upon his creative commons license every time they mentioned a 'signature' in a murder case.

The Akron PD's internal response was a masterpiece of organizational paralysis. Brubaker's missives were initially routed to the Public Information Office, who forwarded them to the Legal Department, who determined it was a matter for the Detective Bureau, who decided it fell under the purview of Community Relations. His file grew fatter, shuttling between departments like a hot potato that nobody wanted to admit was, in fact, just a potato. All the while, a very real, very un-astrological serial killer was, one assumes, continuing his work, blissfully unaware of the intellectual property dispute simmering over his chosen career path.

Brubaker's dedication has been, to put it mildly, unyielding. He has scheduled annual appointments with the Deputy Chief to 'review his portfolio.' He has shown up at town hall meetings to ask, during the Q&A portion about pothole repairs, if the city has considered licensing his 'geographic clustering of victims' theory. The police, for their part, have perfected a strategy of benign neglect, a tactic less born of malice and more of a profound, soul-crushing exhaustion. They have not arrested Brubaker, largely because charging someone with 'aggressively misunderstanding copyright law' is not, as yet, a statute on the books. The situation is not exactly a catastrophe for public safety, but it is certainly not helping.

And so, three years on, the stalemate continues. Kyle Brubaker remains at his post, a self-appointed sentinel guarding the gates of an idea he believes he owns. The Akron Police Department continues its actual work, occasionally pausing to bin another of his laminated diagrams. The real killer, whoever and wherever they are, remains free, their movements unencumbered by the arcane legal fiction being constructed in a suburban home office. It is a farce of such staggering proportions that one can only look upon it with a kind of horrified, British disbelief. It turns out that the most effective way to fool the police for years is not with a fake voice or a clever ruse, but with the relentless, pedantic application of an idea that is, in every conceivable way, completely and utterly wrong.