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320 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 7, 2021
“The Kemper case, though. I don’t know if you’ve heard about him. He’s sometimes called the Co-ed Killer. He did some pretty crazy stuff and didn’t get caught for years. He’s my favorite serial killer.” The author was struck by that, and wrote:What did it even mean to have a favorite serial killer? Then, suddenly and with great clarity, I was struck by the significance of the remark. Serial killers were gaining notoriety for their crimes. As public fascination with these offenders grew, so too did their mythology. Their stories were becoming familiar, compelling, even entertaining—offering a never-before-seen glimpse into the darkest corners of human nature. The killers were becoming distanced from the heinous carnage they’d left behind and transcending into the status of cultural icons.The author worries that these brutal killers who have no emotions that don't relate to themselves and their desires to torture and murder have become media personalities:The public was beginning to accept them as archetypal stories of classic Americana. Somewhere along the line, the public’s initial shock about killers like Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy had changed from repulsion to fascination. It got to the point where a police artist’s sketch of the Unabomber became an iconic T-shirt. It was disturbing. Because despite how obviously horrible these killers were, despite their utter brutality and the pain they inflicted upon their victims, they’d somehow become romanticized. They were a new type of celebrity.That really made me think on just how serial killers have become an industry that is almost exactly on a par with say Hollywood stars (apart from the interviews). There are endless newspaper, magazine, internet sites books, documentaries and even films made about them. We thrill to their vicious coldness, but we aren't feeling them, we are feeling what the media are exploiting for money. The author puts it well:The spotlight of entertainment glosses over reality and focuses on serial killers only in their most appealing forms. Like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, killers were often portrayed as charismatic, even likable. They were given qualities of empathy and charm that made it easier to separate them from the unimaginable malice of their actions.When the truth of the matter to this psychologist and expert forensic profiler is,Serial killers had emotions, yes, but these emotions lacked depth. They didn’t care about others. They didn’t want to make friends. They didn’t have empathy. They only wanted victims. Connection—through charm, flattery, or humor—was part of their act. It was simply a means to an end.These are the worst of criminals, but they get the best, most extensive 'celeb' portrayals in the media.
The most powerful part of the book was the extensive interview with the serial killer Henry Wallace where the author had been called in by the defence (which probably made Wallace more open than if she had been on the prosecution side). He was unusual being Black - almost all serial killers are White males - and also, dreadfully, having known well most of his victims - these were his friends and co-workers. He got a sexual rush from strangling them, then demanding oral sex, then rape, and finally murder. He'd never been able to get out of his head the gang rape of a girl in school that he'd witnessed - and enjoyed. Perhaps the sexual element is put best in this sentence by the Bind, Torture and Kill murderer, Dennis Rader, and perhaps this is what lies behind so many serial killers motives, people are just objects to indulge their twisted and murderous fantasies out on, then to be discarded, but with pain, suffering and humiliation.BTK Killer Dennis Rader told the investigators that he “was getting a hard-on” when they showed him his own drawings and photos of his dead victims.__________
Notes on reading Maybe I've read too many criminal profiling and forensics books, but there just isn't anything new in this. One thing I read horrified me though, the author interviewed every rape victim (all female) who came into a hospital after the rape, "In all we interviewed 146 individuals from the ages of three to seventy-three." Three! What kind of man (or let me be politically correc,t person with a penis) rapes a three year old?
In the UK sexual assault and rape crimes committed by women went up exponentially. An investigation showed that the rate hadn't actually gone up, the rapes were committed by men identifying as women. Because of planning prisons, probation and treatment, the police were asked to revert to the recording of biological sex. The police in Scotland refused. Women have become the third sex, bottom of the heap, our experience as women whether politically, as feminism, safety as shelters, sports, or in any other way considered irrelevant, unimportant in this time of biology being ignored in favour of personal gender identification.
If this offends you, consider what Salman Rushdie said, and he got a death sentence rather then denouncing, cancelling and deplatforming, "Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people."
Respect for people and how they want to be identified and live their lives should be the norm and unremarkable. Unless it causes harm or pushes a biological sex into a position to their extreme detriment as with sports and rape statistics, then there needs to be an acknowledgement of biological differences and a consequent negotiation of positions.
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Criminal profiling. CSI in hardback! I love these books. I always wonder what a murderer is like. I know people who could get angry, who could slap or punch someone, but I cannot imagine anyone who could plan and then kill a person and then carry on with their lives as if nothing happened. I think that the fascination of these books is that wonder I might be able to imagine them, not intellectually, but as people I might meet. I wrote that as I started the book. Having read it, I know I am very lucky not to have met any of them, and really I cannot imagine what they are like, they look like us but are monsters in every sense of the word, the sort that frightened us as children but worse.