Did Dexter Inspire Real Serial Killers?

I’m a TV binge watcher. I will go months without watching any TV, casually put on a show for background noise while I clean, then spend the next 2 weeks sprawled on my couch from 6PM — 3AM gobbling season after season until I hit the series finale.

My latest unhealthy love affair was with Dexter. 8 seasons in just over a couple weeks. Approximately 96 hours of ass-glued-to-couch existence. I was neither terribly thrilled nor disappointed with its conclusion, but I found myself obsessing over a question after the finale.

Has anyone committed murder because they watched Dexter?

Honorable scholarly and scientific sources inform me that since the mid-2000's, “undergraduates studying forensic science and crime scene science has more than doubled over a five year period…students said they had been inspired by TV coverage of the profession.”

If watching CSI inspired thousands of teens to choose forensic science majors, could Dexter inspire people to murder?

Obviously TV can change our behavior — the advertisement industry has proven that — but the difference between buying a razor and killing someone is a doozie.

There’s tons of research on the behavioral impact of TV, but even with a solid decade of SEO-guru-ninja-rockstar experience, I couldn’t sift through the heaping mass of shit about “TV and violence ruining our youth”.

I could have gone to the library and immersed myself in scholarly journals, but I chose an alternative investigatory practice. I swiveled my lazy ass 90° counter-clockwise and consulted my spiritual guide and fellow Dexter fanboy Bradley.

“Yo, you think Dexter might have got some shady Miami kids too amped and inspired them to go on killing sprees? Or is it the opposite and serial killers in Florida were like…‘Dexter is blowing us up too much and ruining our hidden lifestyle’?”

Brad, being the sage that he is, took a moment to ruminate. He furrowed his brow hard, causing his pipe-cleaner eyebrows to crowd his dreamy eyes.

I dunno man, but I bet you could find some murder counts and solve rates for Miami and do some deep nerd science to figure it out.

Genius. I’ll look at trends for Miami’s murder rate vs. the rest of the U.S. for the past 8 years (8 seasons) and see if Dex inspired an uptick in murders in his home city.

Since the government shutdown made all of the usual crime data totally unavailable, I was forced to trust the seemingly reputable people of www.city-data.com.

I discovered that murder trends in Miami haven’t drastically changed in over a decade. There have been between 50 — 80 murders annually in Miami for the past 11 years.

What can be said for Miami is that Dexter definitely chose the right city to kill in:

Miami-Dade County recorded 8,793 homicides between 1980 and 2008 — by far the most in Florida, and nearly three times the number recorded by Duval County, the next highest in that period, according to FBI reports. Law enforcement officers from the 30 agencies that work in Miami-Dade cleared 3,951, for a 44 percent clearance rate — the lowest in the state.

How does that compare to the U.S. at large?

Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

Even at its worst, the U.S. average is 20+% better than Miami in homicide solve rates.

Now, being the astute reader you are, I know you’re wondering how I planned on definitively tying Miami murders to a Showtime series, given the infinite number of other variables I couldn’t possibly account for.

Let’s be real — I was going to blindly assume that Dexter is the only possible explanation for the upward trend in murders in Miami. I may not have strictly adhered to the scientific method per se, but it would have been close enough for me. Unfortunately, my research left me no closer to solving my quandary.

I had gone astray. The real question haunting me wasn’t about demographics or trends. It was about an individual. It was more like the intro to Kickass. Dave Lizewski wanted to know why no one ever became a vigilante crime fighter. I wanted to know if anyone watched one too many episodes of Dexter and started covering garages in plastic to kill people.

Google autocomplete is a crazy thing. Sometimes it thinks you want to know why your parakeet hates you, but other times — with just the right word ordering—it knows you want to find a serial killer who was inspired by Dexter Morgan.

His name is Mark Twitchell and he wanted to be Canadian Dexter. Twitchell emulated Dexter’s kill rooms. He talked openly about his “inner savant power” during trial, mirroring Dexter’s obsession with his “dark passenger”. He watched the first four seasons of Dexter before he was convicted and went to great lengths to get a TV and Showtime in his cell so he could finish “every episode of Dexter’s four seasons that he missed since he was arrested and convicted of first degree murder.”

Unlike his muse, Twitchell was messy and careless, making it quite a bit easier for forensic investigators to pin the murder of John Altinger on him. The sticky note in Twitchell’s car that read “kill room clean sweep” was incriminating, but not even close to the manuscript police found on his computer. Titled “S.K. Confessions” — “Serial Killer Confessions” — the first line of the book read:

This story is based on true events. The names and events were altered slightly to protect the guilty. This is the story of my progression into becoming a serial killer.

Twitchell admitted his guilt in court and hailed Dexter as an inspiration.

I wanted to discover a Dexter-esque murderer who killed with a twisted altruism. A troubled genius who kept to a code, only killed the “bad guys,” and never made flippant mistakes like leaving post-it’s around with murder-related to-do’s. What I realize though, is if he exists, I will never find him. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. No one is writing stories on HuffPo about him. His family probably doesn’t even know about his secret life. I will never find the disturbed, but well-intentioned killer inspired by Dexter Morgan, driven to carry out his mission outside of fiction.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist though.