Who is getting cut up into a million pieces and dumped into the sewers? How common is such an occurrence?

This is a quite hard question to answer, as if it's done correctly no-one will know and the person will simply vanish.

And there is of course countless reasons why someone vanishes, but then again, there is a lot of missing people: https://www.statista.com/statistics/240387/number-of-missing...

Those numbers are astounding.

Slightly south of half a million kids/teens go missing every year? And 150,000 adults?

How many of these cases are never closed?

> The vast majority of child abduction cases in the United States are parental kidnapping, where one parent hides, takes, or holds a child without the knowledge or consent of another parent or guardian.[3] Depending on the state and the legal status of the family members, this might not be a criminal offense. In 1976, parental kidnappings in the United States stood at 60,000.[clarification needed] By 1984, it was between 459,000 and 751,000.[citation needed] In 2010, the US Department of Justice reported 200,000 cases of parental kidnapping; these comprised both domestic and international abductions.[4]

> Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017.[5]

> The federal government estimated about 50,000 people reported missing in 2001 who were younger than 18. Only about 100 cases per year can be classified as abductions by strangers.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_in_the_United_State...

There's a pretty good fiction book series called The Naturalist that uses these statistics as part of its discussion about serial killers.

There was (is?) a serial killer in LA killing homeless people with a bat in 2018/19 that got barely any news coverage.

Isn't a common practice for serial killer coverage to be limited? I thought this was intentional to not influence copy-cats and other mis/dis-information which muddy the investigation.

While withholding some details happens in murder cases, this is the first I've heard of there being voluntary editorial standards that restrict information about the murders of serial killers. In fact, you'd generally think there'd be a voluntary policy to do the opposite given their prevalence in modern media.

My understanding is that it's more of the cops withholding information than it is the media exercising restraint.

No idea, but I can't sit here and pretend that every drug abusing/poor person/different race/what ever gets reported on. And that every single gruesome murder gets reported on.

Cause there is fair too much evidence both historically and current to say that is not the case.

Well, this incident did go viral the other month.

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/watch-tiktok-video-seattle-de...

Happened atleast once in San Francisco - https://mashable.com/2015/01/29/body-parts-twitter-headquart...