Getting Serious About Serial Killers

by June Pulliam

Vronsky, Peter.  Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. New York: Penguin Berkley, 2004.  412 p.

12/24/2004

This morning on CNN, it was reported that evidence from the 25 year old unsolved BTK[1] case in Wichita, Kansas had surfaced.  I was particularly struck by a comment made to the press by local police about how the BTK killer was doubly unsettling to the good people of Wichita because the city is located in the Midwest, where things such as serial killings just don’t happen.  It is this myth of serial killers that Vronsky punctures in his book, which purports to be “the definitive history of the phenomena of serial murder.”

In fact, the people in Wichita are no more immune from serial killers than are denizens of New York City or Oakland or Atlanta. Serial killers walk among us undetected, since on the outside, they are seemingly normal individuals. Worse still, serial killers are more than likely far more numerous than we know, their crimes often going unsolved since they so frequently victimize prostitutes, transients and runaways whose permanent absence isn’t always noticed. Also, lacking modern DNA evidence, law enforcement isn’t always able to definitively link crimes that might not be similar in other regards and thus can’t detect the work of a serial killer.

So the obvious question is who is the serial killer, and what motivates him?[2] 

Vronksy’s theory about the serial killer phenomena holds that it is a product of the industrial revolution, as this type of homicide necessitates a certain degree of leisure time to both contemplate the deviant pleasures of murder (and sometimes torture and mutilation) to carry out the crime. Earlier examples of serial killers cited by Vronsky include the seventeenth century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her beauty, and the eighteenth century aristocratic killer of children Giles de Rais. But as the industrial revolution wore on, it was no longer only aristocrats that had the leisure time necessary to become a serial killer. Everyday people such as John Wayne Gacy and Baton Rouge’s own Derrick Todd Lee could also rack up a high body count and terrorize populations.

Vronsky is particularly interested in what he describes as the postmodern age of serial murder, a period of time he claims was ushered in by Ted Bundy. He contrasts Bundy to someone like Jack the Ripper

who was always imagined as an aristocrat with a top hat—the best of our society gone worst. The serial killers who followed were portrayed as depraved monsters—freaks of nature—outcasts and drifters whose demented criminal features should have given them away. But not Bundy. He was like so many of us: an attractive college student with typical ambitions who drove a cute Volkswagen bug. He was an updated and egalitarianized version of Jack the Ripper—a killer of superior social qualities attributed to all the young middle-class upwardly mobile professionals taking over America. In other words, unlike serial killers of the past, he was not one of “them” but one of “us.”

It is this postmodern killer who is also so fascinating to me, as I am an avid reader of serial killer fiction. Serial killer fiction differs from true crime writing in that the story of a killer is crafted into a narrative that focuses on both the savagery of his/her crimes and sometimes also represents him/her as fiendishly clever, leading either an equally clever or clueless police force on a wild chase. This formula, ultimately, is not that much different from the one employed on the campy Batman television series from the 1960s. However, real life serial killers and their apprehension are very different from what is depicted in fiction. While the killers’ crimes are grisly, they do not seem to have an unconscious desire to be caught, and thus, don’t leave cryptic clues for a well-equipped police force to decipher. Instead, it is more often than not merely very good luck and just dull, plodding police work that gets them caught. Someone happens to notice the killers’ usually unremarkable features and places them near the crime scene, or they are caught during a routine traffic stop.

Vronsky’s analysis of the serial killer also deflates a good many myths. For instance, it is commonly believed that serial killing is a predominately male phenomena, and that women very rarely become serial killers. While men do make up the majority of serial killers, a startling one in five serial killers is female. Killers such as Aileen Wuronos particularly attract media attention because her crimes so much resemble those of her male counterparts. In some ways, Wuronos resembled Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer, in that she too was a missionary murderer, and her crimes were related to prostitution. The missionary killer believes that he or she is doing the world a favor by ridding the world of a particular type of victim. Ridgeway thought that the world was better off without prostitutes, whereas Wuronos believed that she was ridding the universe of the sort of scum who patronized prostitutes[3]. However, most female serial killers don’t get the same media attention as their homicides are in part an extension of their female gender roles. Women are more likely to kill in their care giving roles, such as nurses who operate as angels of mercy or mothers who suffer from Munchasen by Proxy syndrome and kill their children to get sympathy.

Another myth deflated by Vronsky concerns Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber.  Represented by the media as a crazed kook who lived in a shack in the woods, Kaczynski actually lived in more of a suburb hardly located outside of civilization. Also, as a young college student, Kaczynski was “a survivor of a series of brutal personality-breaking psychological experiments in 1959, conducted at Harvard by Henry A. Murray, a towering figure in the world of intelligence agency personality analysis, brainwashing, and interrogation techniques.”  Kaczynski became such a kooky caricature during his trial because the media coverage “was highly controlled by the very corporate powers he so hated.” Only a handful of people were issued press passes to the trial, with most of them going to major media outlets, the remaining two available on “a daily lottery basis to independent or small media organizations.”

His final chapter is unique in that it offers advice on how to survive an encounter with a serial killer. Admittedly, this advice is culled from a somewhat flawed sampling, as the serial killer’s ability to continue to murder depends on his ability to remain invisible, and thus, it is likely that a good many people have unknowingly come into contact with this person and are not aware as to why they have escaped from the encounter unharmed. Instead, this chapter is based on interviews with serial killers in captivity and their would-be victims who survived. The advice, basically aimed at women (who are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of serial homicide than are men) is to both trust their own fear instincts and to fight against their gender programming, which tells them to be polite and helpful and to appease attackers.  I particularly appreciated these last two bits of advice, as I am always impatient with those who tell women to do things when being attacked such as give in so as to not further piss off their attacker or to urinate on themselves so they will be unappealing. In essence, that sort of advice encourages women to further embrace a dangerously dependent feminine identity as they’re being victimized, rather than go down swinging. Becoming more passive in the face of adversity always seemed to me to be both dangerous and patronizing to women, and I was pleased to see someone encouraging women to actually fight back.

Vronsky’s book isn’t the usual litany of horrors perpetrated by serial killers. Instead, he actually puts this phenomena in historical perspective and examines the shortcomings of modern police work.  For this reason, as well as all the others cited throughout this review, I recommend Serial Killers as required reading for anyone who is particularly interested in the truth in this particular type of fictionalized reality.