Serial Killers

views updated

Serial Killers

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the threat of serial and mass murder became a topic of great popular and academic interest in America. While there is no murder "epidemic," as hyperbolic writers and law-enforcement officials claimed in the mid-1980s, the apprehension of high-profile serial killers (such as David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Henry Lee Lucas) and an apparent upswing in mass shootings in schoolyards, post offices, etc., served to bring the problem to public attention. In a capitalistic mass-media age where sensational news stories increase ratings and sell advertising time, the "random" killer (especially the serial murderer) provides good source material. He also inspires generations of fiction writers, who simultaneously view him not only as an artistic metaphor for any number of social ills but a guaranteed moneymaker. Literally thousands of fiction and nonfiction ("true crime") novels and films centered on multiple killers have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars during the past twenty years in America alone. One of the most recognizable of these is the Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs, which is based on a best-selling novel by Thomas Harris. Harris, in turn, was inspired to create his memorable work of fiction by his research into the lives of real-life serial killers and the law-enforcement agents ("profilers") who pursue them. Most of the well-known fictional stories that feature serial and/or mass murder, then, are contemporary morality plays in which evil, murdering villains threaten the social fabric but are eventually brought to bay by the heroic profilers. The reality of serial and mass murder, however, is much more complicated.

Multiple homicide, whether called serial or mass murder, has always been a part of human history. Gilles de Rais, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Jack the Ripper, Belle Gunness, Carl Panzram, Albert Fish, Earle Nelson, Peter Kurten, Ed Gein, Albert DeSalvo, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Edmund Kemper, Juan Corona, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Peter Sutcliffe, Angelo Buono, Kenneth Bianchi, Dean Corll, Wayne Henley, Henry Lucas, Ottis Toole, Richard Ramirez, Joel Rifkin, Danny Rolling, Dennis Nilsen, Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrei Chikatilo, and Aileen Wuornos are only some of the most notorious practitioners of multicide. However, "serial murder" has existed only, in the strictest sense, since FBI Agent Robert Ressler coined the term and the American mass media disseminated it throughout the culture during the 1980s. Before "serial murder" as a sobriquet came into vogue, the phenomenon in question was usually called "lust murder" or "mass murder" and included a variety of multiple-homicide crimes. Now, in criminological jargon, serial and mass murder usually refer to two disparate concepts. Complicating matters further, there are many "subspecies" of serial and mass murderer. All of them must be distinguished from other varieties of multiple killers, such as paid hit-men or state-sanctioned assassins, executioners, torturers, etc.

Serial murder is most commonly defined as the commission of three or more murders over a period of time, with a "cooling off" period or hiatus between each murder. The victims may or may not be known to the killer, but more often than not the social class any one victim represents to the killer is more important than the victim's identity. The fact that victims are often unknown to the killer prior to the murder episode leads many to call serial murder "irrational" or "evil." In most cases, no comprehensible motive exists for the crimes, and the murders do not seem to provide the killer with any clearly understood, tangible benefits. According to Elliott Leyton, the serial-killer category most definitely does not encompass those who kill repeatedly for profit or for governments. These killers are performing more of a public "job" than a privately significant act; the motive is basically rational and readily apparent. By contrast, the serial killer, while not without certain "professional" aspirations of his own, works according to a more esoteric agenda which observers often find inscrutable. This leads them to call him insane, psychotic, or schizophrenic: psychiatric terms that all denote a severe and socially crippling disjunction between reality and perception. The terms do not fit most serial killers. The serial killer only appears nonrational because he operates from, as R. M. Holmes and J. De Burger have it, "intrinsic motive systems … that originate within the individual; they govern and structure the serial killer's behavior."

The vast majority of known serial killers are males, and the vast majority of their victims females (a fact which understandably leads many to conclude that serial murder is synonymous with sexual murder; however, this is not strictly the case). In August of 1985, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin published a series of articles (later expanded to a book-length study entitled Sexual Homicide in 1988) in which primary offender characteristics were listed. This data was compiled from lengthy interviews with thirty-six incarcerated serial murderers, all of them male. Most writers on the fact and fiction of serial murder, even those critical of law enforcement claims and methods, have been drawing on this specific set of FBI conclusions ever since, so the study is crucial to any analysis of the popular culture's portrayal of the "typical" serial murderer. He is usually a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, though of course there are teen-aged and elderly serial killers as well. Generally, the male serial killer is at the height of his physical powers, a fact which not only serves him in the practical matter of overpowering victims but also empowers him in the public arena: his strength and apparent potency (and of course, choice of innocent victims) render him an effective media monster. He is also likely to be an eldest son or an only child and of average or above-average intelligence. His childhood may have been marked by incidents of sexual or physical abuse, and his parents may be divorced or flagrantly unfaithful to one another. He usually possesses a strong belief that he is more intelligent and privileged than ordinary people (a belief that only grows stronger when confronted by evidence to the contrary) and thus exempted from the social restrictions that govern the masses. No safe predictions can be made about his economic origins, but as Leyton notes, serial murder in our era is more a crime of the middle classes than of the lower or upper ranges of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Also, it should be noted that while males are overwhelmingly responsible for most serial/mass murders, there are more female multicides than commonly believed. A partial list of female American multiple killers alone includes Susan Denise Atkins, Patricia Krenwrinkel, Charlene Gallego, Belle Gunness, Nannie Doss, Martha Beck, Carol Bundy, Dorothea Puente, Priscilla Ford, Amy Archer-Gilligan, Anna Hahn, Mary Elanor Smith, Jane Toppan, Genene Jones, Judy Neeley, and Debra Brown. The most famous female multicide of all is Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who with a coterie of female disciples imprisoned and murdered hundreds of women in her castle in the early 1600s.

Not all privately conceived acts of multiple homicide qualify as serial murders. Scholars now generally agree that mass murder forms a separate category. James Alan Fox and Jack Levin point out that mass murderers are generally caught at or near the crime scene, and that the crime is of horrific proportions but relatively short duration.Unlike serial killers, who typically target strangers and traumatize a community over an extended period of time, the mass murderer plans one ultraviolent assault upon victims who, more often than not, are known to him. The mass murderer category can include depressed people who kill their entire families before committing suicide, but more commonly refers to those who violently retaliate against a specific group or class of people because of a real or imagined grievance; for example, disgruntled employees gunning down supervisors and coworkers. Racism or sexism also often motivates this kind of killer, as was the case with James Huberty, who killed twenty-one people in California because of an obsessive hatred of Hispanics; or Marc Lepine, who killed fourteen women at the University of Montreal because he blamed "feminists" for his romantic and professional difficulties. Massacres in public places (restaurants, schoolyards, classrooms, the work place, the post office, commuter trains, campuses, etc.) typically involve one heavily armed killer who racks up a high death toll. However, the massacre is a one-time-only event that often ends in the death of the killer by the police. Charles Whitman, who opened fire on students from a clock tower on the University of Texas campus in 1966, is probably the best-known example of this kind of mass murderer.

The spree killer occupies an intermediate position between the mass murderer and the serial murderer, although it should be noted that some authorities see no real distinction between spree killing, mass murder, and serial murder. The spree killer does not operate in secret like the serial killer, but neither does he lay siege to one specific locale until a SWAT team cuts him down. Instead, he often drives cross-country, with a companion or two (what R. M. Holmes and S. T. Holmes call "disciple killers"), murdering randomly and noisily as he goes until he is captured or killed. His weapon of choice is the gun, as opposed to the serial killer's more intimate knife. He makes little or no effort to cover his tracks; instead, he exults in the sheer nihilism of destruction and relies on brute mobility to keep him free as long as possible. His crimes are very visible but generally of short duration because of their high profile. During the 1950s, for example, embittered garbageman Charles Starkweather and his young girlfriend Caril Fugate rampaged across the Midwest, killing eleven people before they were captured and arousing the nation to new heights of paranoia concerning the dangers of juvenile delinquency. The conspicuousness of the spree killer contrasts significantly with the serial killer, who wishes to remain undetected for a period of time, at least in identity if not in deed.

It is undeniable that during the past half-century the United States has been producing more of these sensational criminals than the other Western industrialized nations. Sociologists point to many possible explanations. One of the most compelling is that the American cult of individuality has always prized violence (particularly for males) as a quick response to frustration. The simple outlaw (Jesse James, Billy the Kid) on the lam from the maddening complexities of communal, multicultural existence remains a heroic American icon. For many (if not most), violence is more attractive as a form of immediate gratification than the intangible results of long-term, peaceful political activism. In spite of the public rhetoric condemning violence, Americans have traditionally accepted even extreme levels of group and individual violence alike as appropriate responses to conditions perceived as intolerable. Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti's hugely influential study, The Subculture of Violence, analyzes how it is possible for people within a culture to embrace some of its general values while denying, de-emphasizing, or inversing others, and yet remain within that culture. For many segments of the American public, violence is regarded as a perfectly legitimate form of social expression and problem solving, dependent upon and framed in terms of prevailing local conditions even as it is decried by the supposedly overriding social discourse.

The serial killers and mass murderers of America are no exception or aberration in this sense. Their fantasies of murder and revenge are constructed from accessible cultural symbols recognizable to others. If such killers were truly alien to us, as facile notions of evil and deviance insist, then their motives would not be comprehensible. Indeed, many insist that serial murder is incomprehensible. While such exclusionary approaches are undeniably comforting, the unsettling observation must be made that serial murder is clearly rooted in our consensual reality and discourse. Its manifestation and shape obviously relies on the contemporary values, norms, and beliefs it seeks to overturn or, perversely enough, to uphold. In medieval Europe, multiple killers were perceived as, and often believed themselves to be, vampires (Gilles de Rais) or werewolves (Peter Stubb); in modern America, as demonically possessed monsters or formerly abused children, depending on the observer's sociopolitical orientation. The only commonality one can easily discern about multiple murderers from century to century and country to country is their monstrous, outcast status. In ancient legend and contemporary fiction, they lurk on the fringes of civilization, raid us in our vulnerability, then retreat back into the wilderness until a hero (usually an amateur or professional detective) can find them and destroy them. After this ritual expurgation of the murderous exile, the people can reassume their complacency until the next time. In the interval, however, narrative myths keep alive the awareness that somewhere out there, the monsters (be they Grendel or Norman Bates) grow hungry. The names and details may change from one generation's folklore to the next, but the basic plot remains.

—Philip Simpson