Who is Culpable in the Promulgation of Serial Killer Myths and Stereotypes?

The Role of Researchers, Practitioners, Law Enforcement Officers and the Media in Sustaining the Serial Murder Entertainment Complex

Even though data supports the fact that the heyday of serial murder has long concluded, there remains an immense yet explicable interest in the offenders and the crimes they commit. Television programs such as You, Barry, Killing Eve, Mindhunter, Dexter, The ABC Murders, Hannibal, Criminal Minds and Luther and movies like The House That Jack Built and You Were Never Really Here are unrelenting in the portrayal of the serial murderer as a persistent facet of society that must be dealt with, usually by those with intimate knowledge of their mesmeric personalities. The killers in these shows and movies are shown to be thoroughly damaged people that place the blame for who they are externally, typically due to a past traumatic experience which compels them to pay it forward by killing other people. Showrunners and directors have theorized that serial killers can and will work on becoming the best version of themselves but only with the help of those one or two people that truly understands them. Without our support, they hypothesize, serial murderers have no choice but to go on harming others until someone gives them their due. In that way, the serial murder entertainment complex has made all of us complicit in humanizing serial killers. This essay will attempt to demonstrate that researchers, practitioners, and law enforcement officers willfully sustain the serial murder entertainment complex.

The resurgence of Bundy, namely through Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, is a blatant attempt to re-popularize an offender cohort that has mostly disappeared from the catalogs of those that keep track of them, coming at a period of time where the serial killer exists in abundance only in the entertainment world. Similar to Ross Lynch’s turn in My Friend Dahmer, Zac Efron sought to break out of his juvenile roles and shed the goody-goody image with his recent depiction of Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. While attachment to a serial killer was meant to instill an air of seriousness to his performance and career, the filmmaker instead chose to hone in on Efron’s physique as a partial explanation of how Bundy was able to use his looks and charm to disarm his victims. Instead, both real-life Bundy and Dahmer benefited from the naiveté most had held toward their fellow man and woman in that bygone age. The word “creeper” had yet to be widely adopted into our societal lexicon. These series hearken back to a more innocent time where people still hitchhiked and left their doors unlocked because we trusted one another. The shattering of that illusion and the yearning for a time before serial murder continues to make their series of homicides memorable. When juxtaposed with the popular but false opinion that society is more violent today than it has ever been we look to Bundy and Dahmer as those that ushered us here. We know the bogeyman is not real and have therefore manufactured the serial killer as a modern day monster, a scapegoat to fault as the singular source of our collective anxiety and dread. The sexualization of serial killers is one mechanism designed to assure us that these monsters are, in fact, human beings just like us that can be jailed and controlled. It is also a pathetic response to competition and stands as a translucent attempt by the entertainment complex to capture the interest of women who now have more options than ever of where to get their true crime fix.

What is most damaging about this newfound interest in Bundy and his ilk, though, is that he is allowed to retain his status of serial murder poster boy despite there having been far more prolific offenders, such as Carl Eugene Watts and Kermit Gosnell. A new generation of researchers, practitioners and law enforcement officers will ignore them in the chase of what is trendy and popular, resultantly embarking on the study of the same old offenders that society has elevated as examples of the cream of the serial killer crop. The creation of media celebrating serial killers has a detrimental effect on the next generation of violent criminal, though, as half of aspiring serial killers — those that harbor an initial propensity to kill but have yet to be successful — engaged in the consumption of violent imagery to fuel fantasies and homicidal ideation while self-identifying as future serial killers.

The commingling of criminal justice with the entertainment industry is by no means a recent phenomenon but what is unique about our current cultural obsession with serial killers is that it comes as a direct byproduct of researchers, practitioners and retired law enforcement officers who now deliberately attempt to profit from the pain and anguish experienced by victims and their families. As new information about these offenders became known over the past few decades, it made sense to promulgate theories about how they behave and under what circumstances they are successful but certain unscrupulous individuals knowingly shielded themselves from scrutiny by claiming to provide a public service. Today, however, we have reached true saturation where all that is likely to be discovered about serial killers is already known. Myths have been debunked and stereotypes have been exposed and challenged.

At immediate fault are those that have encoded this behavior as routine by appearing on television, or more recently podcasts and true crime documentaries, and taking what was once a niche subject into the mainstream mainly to fill seats in a classroom and increase textbook sales. These types of pop-criminologists maintain an expressed goal of satiating their egomania with appearances on the talk show circuit and reducing the study of homicide to a petty exercise in paronomasia. In spite of dead wrong theories like that of the ‘superpredator’, a supposed scourge of violent youth thought to bring “a blood bath of violence”, the theorizers are able to bathe in the spotlight. The road to knowledge in this area has been paved by these self-proclaimed pioneers which explains how the myths and stereotypes describing the archetype of the serial killer as a lonely, intelligent, supremely deranged white man came to exist and be known so widely. Unbeknownst to them, those who deem themselves to be the architects of the modern study of serial murder are referred to as the ‘old-guard’ and subsist merely to extend their relevance by peddling outmoded ideas and repackaging them for a new generation. For example, even though there are thousands of unresolved homicides that currently deserve attention, a new and preposterous effort to identify Jack the Ripper is launched seemingly every year.

The serial killers that most can name — Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Berkowitz — are germane to a specific bygone era from which the old-guard hails and from which they apply such generalizations to modern day offenders. But serial murderers have evolved beyond the situational factors that allowed those previous killers to be successful back then and have since adapted to our heavily surveilled society, better prepared and connected law enforcement and vigilant public that is aware of the damage they are capable of. These combined forces have driven modern day killers to adopt the tactics of the spree killer and pushed them further into obscurity, not because of our efforts to combat them but by the natural proliferation of technology and its ubiquitous use by potential victims. Still, the old-guard clings to tropes and embellishments that make it feel as if serial killers still lurk around every corner, a morbid type of job security, with some claiming upwards of two-thousand serial killers at large in North America. The facts are being bent to inflate contributions in the search for popularity and funding. Old crimes are resurrected in a desperate effort to maintain relevance in a world whose criminal offenders have overwhelmingly gravitated towards mass murder. A recent event titled ‘The Minds Behind Mindhunter’ was held at Boston College and was designed precisely for this purpose. The controversial and, some say, useless process of offender profiling was discussed in a congratulatory manner with no mention of the frequent pitfalls of the process. The hosts even avoided a direct question regarding what use offender profiling has today. After all, it was the original FBI study of twenty-five serial killers (not thirty-six as some suppose) titled “The Men Who Murdered” that generated much of the misinformation on the topic that most still believe today.

The point is, we are no longer educating the public about potential future threats but instead feeding into a newfound demented need to empathize with the killers under the auspices of gaining a deeper understanding of their methods and motives. Some believe that if we fully capitulate to the pull of the serial killer and let them invade all aspects of our lives, from escape rooms and games to calendars and shot glasses and even clothing, we may someday be able to identify them before they kill or at least avoid them while they victimize someone else. This warped reasoning is simply a thinly veiled attempt to excuse our involvement in a highly exploitative system that celebrates the death of young women. If we consume these products, we are to blame for the perpetuation of the repulsive cycle where those that are killed are re-victimized countless times for our pleasure.

Too many detectives yearn for the day where their lives and experiences will be tapped for the next Investigation Discovery show that inevitably will focus on a fabricated cat-and-mouse game between him and the killer while the victims receive little, if any, mention. But there are real dangers inherent in melding crime with entertainment, ranging from providing hosts who harbor biases and despicable viewpoints with a platform to display abhorrent behavior, to the false hope provided by utterly bogus ‘investigations’, to the more extreme wrongful incarceration of the innocent by criminal profilers. Perhaps the biggest perpetrators of this despicable behavior are CrimeCon and the Death Becomes Us True Crime Festival, both of which provide an outlet for one-time investigators who strive for the Oxygen network level of celebrity status by allowing themselves to become sexualized with hashtags like #HotforHoles or #ManCrushMonday. Family members of serial murderers have lunged at the opportunity to attain wealth through the crimes committed by their fathers: Dennis Rader’s daughter wrote ‘A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming’ and Keith Jesperson’s daughter wrote ‘Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter’. Even potential victims have begun to rely on these past experiences as fuel towards stardom. But none have been more exploitative than the team that completed ‘I’ll Be Gone in the Dark’ after its author, Michelle McNamara, passed away. They transformed what could have been a quiet conclusion to an author’s project into numerous stage appearances to launch their own careers. It was claimed that McNamara’s book led to the arrest of the East Area Rapist/Original Nightstalker even though detectives directly denied it, but the claim was still repeated numerous times during the book tour. It has apparently become acceptable to use the dead to springboard ourselves into fame and fortune all while dissecting the accounts of others that lost their lives to extract a superficial warning to others on what not to do to end up like them, delivered under the tasteless nickname “murderino” and among jokes, drinks and laughter. It is ironic that women are being prepared by other women to be on the lookout for potentially violent strangers all while the true threat to their well-being often resides in their own household and lays next to them at night.

With fame within such easy reach it is no wonder how and why so many have been corrupted. Many still feign attempts to perform the balancing act between conducting themselves in a serious manner while also outwardly presenting as crime fighting superheroes. Others do not even bother with enacting such a façade. An upcoming symposium on serial killing titled Hunting the Hunters — whose focus on rehashing timeworn offenders like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam, Charles Manson, and The Zodiac Killer — places into perspective our need to convince the public that we are just as compelling and mysterious as the offenders we seek. It is through that symbiosis that we are able to be at the forefront in the tireless pursuit and vanquishing of evil monsters. In order to secure such standing, it is singularly important to make others believe that we place ourselves in grave danger of being consumed by the abyss, that we wrestle with our own inner demons, and that we make great sacrifices in allowing these offenders into our headspace. In reality, we profit greatly from the dramatics that we instigate since we crave the same credit[1] and demand the same adulation for solving or addressing the crime as the killers themselves do for committing it. But serial murderers are not masterminds and neither are we for locating them. They merely take advantage of circumstances afforded to them by a victim pool populated by sex workers desperate to make money, those not paying attention to potential threats and others that choose to take the risk of mingling with strangers. We rely on lucky breaks to apprehend them rather than a tightly coordinated effort by a diverse set of colleagues.

In the end, the defensive argument will be made by the willful participants in the serial murder entertainment complex that we are simply giving the crowd what they already clamor for and that credit is rightly due for work performed. After all, there are often wait-lists for college classes with titles like Criminal Homicide. But recent research by Lankford and Madfis demonstrates that not only can pandering in this way be a dangerous precedent but that we are in full control of how much we divulge to the public and how we participate in the grotesque quest to provide every gory detail to whoever will pay for it. We must confront within ourselves that we behave like this because we share traits with those that we sometimes help to capture and study while grappling with the notion that we cause a hefty amount of damage to past and future victims and their families in the process. Rather than thrust ourselves to the forefront, we could just as easily privately volunteer our efforts to local cold case groups instead of searching for any opportunity to chase notoriety. Researchers, practitioners, and law enforcement officers must shed these desires in favor of collaboration with one another and actually share data openly instead of warehousing it for personal gain. We need to call for an end to petty infighting where ideas are trumped and even outright usurped in the advancement of another’s hunt for the glory of being ‘first’ in discovery. Academic mentors must prepare their protégées to resist becoming part of this competitive landscape instead of entrenching them in their own timeworn ideas and championing siloed thinking. Until then, serial killers will be celebrated and thought of as an ever-present facet of our society whose true prevalence will be misrepresented for our own personal gain and self-promotion.

[1] A recent example highlights how the erroneous attribution of credit can turn some into false pioneers while the source of true ingenuity is ignored. The detectives who solved the Bear Brook Murders inspired those that brought resolution to the East Area Rapist-Original Nightstalker case but it is the latter that is credited with delivering the advent and widespread adoption of genetic genealogy to criminal justice.