The Serial Killer Files (68 page)

In more recent times, Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” offers one of the most chilling fictional portraits of a psycho-killer ever created, in the character called “The Misfit,” a Bible-obsessed madman who travels around the Southern countryside conducting unspeakable massacres. Joyce Carol Oates’s deeply unsettling 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—loosely based on the case of serial killer Charles Schmid, the so-called Pied Piper of Tucson—is another classic of contemporary Gothic fiction.

Psycho-killers have also appeared in the work of serious poets. The speaker of Robert Browning’s 1842

“Porphyria’s Lover,” for example, seems rational enough—until he decides that the best way to express his love for his girlfriend is by strangling her with her own hair: That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her.

More recent poets have also explored the psychology of serial murderers in their work. Notable examples include Ai’s “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” (about the Atlanta Child Murders) from her 1986 book Sin, and the sequence of poems called “Troubadour: Songs for Jeffrey Dahmer” from Thom Gunn’s 2000 book Boss Cupid.

Even before the term “serial killer” was invented, some outstandingly scary examples of the species had appeared in works of popular fiction. Now considered a classic, Jim Thompson’s 1952 The Killer Inside Me— about a deputy sheriff in a small Texas town whose aw-shucks manner conceals the sick mind of a sadistic murderer—is one of the most unsettling portraits of a psychopath in print. The decade of the 1950s ended with the publication of Robert Bloch’s pulp classic, Psycho, the granddaddy of serial killer novels and inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie.

The enormous critical and commercial success of Thomas Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter books, Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) unleashed a flood of popular procedural thrillers focusing on investigative heroes and their struggles with assorted, highly colorful serial killers. Among the most popular works in this genre are James Patterson’s Alex Cross books ( Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls, Jack and Jill, etc.); Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels (including Postmortem, Cruel & Unusual, and The Body Farm ), John Sandford’s “Prey” series ( Rules of Prey, Shadow Prey, Night Prey, and so on), and Jeffery Deaver’s novels featuring quadriplegic criminologist Lincoln Rhymes ( The Coffin Dancer, The Bone Collector, The Vanished Man ).

A comprehensive list of contemporary serial killer fiction has been compiled by Martin Kich, professor of English at Wright State University—Lake Campus in Ohio, and can be found on his Web site, www.

wright.edu/~martin.kich.

Recommended Reading

Philip L. Simpson, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary Film and Fiction (2000)

Killer Fiction

By dint of their superior literary qualities, a handful of novels dealing with psychopathic criminals stand out above the rest. These include:

1. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (1996). Set in Seattle, this thematically complex, racially charged thriller centers on a Native American serial killer who targets whites in retribution for the historical injustices suffered by his people.

2. Toni Cade Bambara, Those Bones Are Not My Child (2000). A hugely ambitious, posthumously published novel about the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s, told from the point of view of an African-American mother whose eldest son disappears one afternoon on the way home from an outing.

3. Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994). This mega-selling historical mystery is not only a highly suspenseful psychological thriller but a brilliant evocation of late-nineteenth-century New York City.

4. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991). A savage satire of Yuppie consumerism that largely consists of detailed itemizations of upscale consumer goods alternating with scenes of dizzyingly baroque, stomach-churning violence, most of it directed against women.

5. John Fowles, The Collector (1963). Though the protagonist of this book is more serial kidnapper than serial killer, the fantasy he enacts—abducting a beautiful young woman and holding her captive in a dungeon—has made this story a perennial favorite among actual psychopathic sex-killers.

6. Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). The first of Highsmith’s books to feature her sociopathic hero, Tom Ripley, this gripping novel sends him to Europe where he becomes entranced with the life of golden-boy acquaintance Dickie Greenleaf, with fatal consequences for the latter.

7. Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote (1983). A deeply unsettling, unconventional novel that takes the form of a letter to Truman Capote (author of the true-crime classic In Cold Blood ) written by a homicidal maniac who intends to murder forty-seven women, one for each year of his life.

8. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (1974). A haunting, lyrical novel about an Eddie Gein-like outcast named Lester Ballard who holes up in a Tennessee cave with his necrophiliac trophies, emerging periodically to seek new victims.

9. Susanna Moore, In the Cut (1995). A brutally suspenseful erotic thriller about a New York City college professor who finds herself caught up in an intense sexual affair with a cop who may also be a serial killer.

10. Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie (1995). A profoundly disquieting book, inspired by the doings of Jeffrey Dahmer, about a young psycho obsessed with the idea of turning victims into mindless sex slaves by subjecting them to ice pick lobotomies.

There’s nothing amusing about serial murder. By the same token, there’s nothing intrinsically funny about dead babies, quadriplegics, and Princes Di’s death in a car crash—all of which have been the subjects of widely circulated jokes. Psychologists and other academic experts tell us that sick humor functions as a coping mechanism—a way to ventilate the fears stirred up in us by the overwhelming horrors and tragedies of existence. “Where there is anxiety, there will be jokes to express that anxiety,”

says folklorist Alan Dundes, adding: “The expression ‘laughing to keep from crying’ has a good deal of merit in it.”

According to Professor Dundes in his 1987 book Cracking Jokes, the tradition of American sick humor dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when macabre rhymes about a character called

“Little Willie” became popular throughout the United States. Though sometimes the victim of horrible accidents (“Little Willie, in bows and sashes/ Fell in the fire and got burned to ashes”), the incorrigible Willie was more often portrayed as a pint-sized psychopath—Dennis the Menace with a seriously homicidal streak:

Willie poisoned his father’s tea

Father died in agony.

Mother came, and looked quite vexed.

“Really, Will,” she said, “What next?”

Little Willie hung his sister;

She was dead before we missed her.

Willie’s always up to tricks.

Ain’t he cute? He’s only six.

Willie, of course, was a fictional creation. The now-familiar custom of swapping sick jokes about real-life serial killers seems to have begun in the late 1950s, when crude little riddles about the Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein became the rage throughout the Midwest. These so-called Geiners caught the attention of psychologist George D. Arndt, who wrote an article about the phenomenon, “Community Reaction to a Horrifying Event,” in which he reprinted a number of examples: Why did they let Ed Gein out of jail on New Year’s Eve?

So he could dig up a date.

Why wouldn’t anyone play poker with Ed Gein?

They were afraid he’d come up with a good hand.

Forty years later, the discovery of Jeffrey Dahmer’s atrocities set off another wave of morbid rib ticklers: What did Jeffrey Dahmer say when his mother told him she didn’t like his friends?

“That’s OK, Mom, just eat the noodles.”

What did Jeffrey Dahmer do when he finished his vegetables?

He threw away their wheelchairs.

More recently, serial killer humor has been a staple of the parody newspaper The Onion, which has run such classic stories as WHY MUST THE MEDIA CALL MY RITUAL KILLINGS “SENSELESS”?

(“Is it that the media simply don’t see the pride and craftsmanship I put into my work? What about the way I wrap the victims’ own intestines around their necks not once, not twice, but three times, then tie them off in a sheepshank?) and NEIGHBORS REMEMBER SERIAL KILLER AS SERIAL KILLER (“

‘He was kind of a murderous, insane, serial-killer type of fellow,’ said Will Rowell, 57, who lived next door to the man arrested for the murder of 14 nurses in Florida and Georgia. ‘He sort of kept to himself, killing nurses, having sex with their corpses and burying the bodies in his backyard.’ ”).

Jeffrey Dahmer novelty pin

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Some people collect autographs of movie stars. Others invest in sporting equipment signed by their favorite athletes—a Wayne Gretzky hockey puck or Derek Jeter jersey. Still others have been known to bid thousands at auction for John Kennedy’s golf clubs or a cocktail dress worn by Princess Di.

And a small but highly controversial subculture of hobbyists devote themselves to the acquisition of artifacts connected to serial killers.

Why anyone would seek out, let alone spend good money on, a lock of Charles Manson’s hair or Ted Bundy’s high school yearbook seems deeply perplexing, if not downright immoral, to many right-thinking people. Apart from changes in technology, however—the fact that such collecting is now typically conducted over the Internet—there is nothing new about this phenomenon.

From crucified criminals lining the Appian Way in ancient Rome, to medieval traitors left to rot in dangling gibbets, to the gunned-down outlaws exhibited in store windows and undertaking parlors in the Old West, the dead and decomposing bodies of murderers, thieves, and rapists (and sometimes of perfectly innocent victims of lynch mobs) have always been put on public display. And the law-abiding, God-fearing types who flock to see these gruesome spectacles have often felt a need to procure a little keepsake.

Exactly how long this practice has been going on is impossible to pin down, though—extrapolating from

the known anthropological evidence (such as the habit of various aboriginal peoples to collect skulls, scalps, and other anatomical relics)—the most likely answer is forever. When King Charles I was executed in 1649, for example, his blood was mopped up with rags, which were torn to pieces and sold to eager bystanders. Even the sawdust that had been sprinkled on the scaffold to soak up the gore was swept up and offered for sale.

Describing the “grisly appetite of souvenir hunters” as a “timeless” phenomenon, historian Michael Hollingsworth cites the case of Maria Marten, a young Englishwoman who vanished after supposedly eloping with a man named William Corder in 1827. The following April—acting on pleas from her mother, who had dreamed that the girl was buried beneath the floor of a local barn—police discovered the young woman’s body, just where her mother had said it would be. The crime became a nationwide sensation. When Corder was executed three months later, the crowd was so eager for souvenirs that the hangman’s noose was cut into pieces and sold for a guinea per inch. Corder’s skin was subsequently flayed from his body, tanned like cowhide, and sold piecemeal at auction. One of the larger sections ended up being made into a tobacco pouch. The barn itself was reduced to splinters by the owner, who made a small fortune by peddling them as individual souvenirs.

Serial killer novelty pins

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

When actual relics of a murder weren’t available, the public has happily settled for other sorts of mementos. In 1889, a Paris court bailiff named Gouffé was murdered, stuffed into a trunk, and transported to Lyons, where the horribly decomposed corpse was eventually discovered. When the killer was guillotined on February 2, 1891, a horde of spectators turned out for the beheading. To satisfy the demand for souvenirs, peddlers strolled among the crowd, selling miniature replicas of the trunk with a little lead corpse inside.

The situation hasn’t changed in the past hundred years. When the junkyard possessions of Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein were auctioned in the spring of 1958, twenty thousand people showed up. One enterprising bidder drove away with Gein’s battered Ford sedan, which he promptly put on display at county fairs and carnivals. Over the next few months, more than two thousand Midwesterners—men, women, and children—eagerly forked out a quarter each for a peek at “the car that hauled the dead from their graves.”

Forty years later, another proposed sale of serial killer belongings set off an uproar in Wisconsin, when a lawyer representing the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims announced plans to auction off a bunch of items owned by the Milwaukee Cannibal, including the drill he used to perform his makeshift lobotomies and the freezer in which he stored human body parts for future consumption. So frenzied was the interest in these macabre artifacts among serious collectors of psycho-memorabilia that the organizers of the event expected to reap a profit of one million dollars. In the end, however, the auction was canceled when a civic group—fearful that such a ghoulish event would tarnish Milwaukee’s image

—purchased the goods and destroyed them (much to the dismay of Dahmerphiles everywhere).

Owning a Gein, for some, is to own a Rembrandt for other collectors.

—Andy Kahan, commenting on the theft of EdGein’s gravestone in June 2000

Beyond good old morbid fascination, the lure of such grisly items appears to have something to do with the kind of primitive thinking that humans never seem to outgrow. There is a demonic quality to these objects. They are the antithesis of saints’ relics—artifacts that are infused, not with the sacred, but with the profane. To possess something owned by a serial killer offers some people titillating contact with the taboo—the frisson of the forbidden. It is also a way to ward off anxiety, as though having control of something belonging to a monster will magically keep evil at bay.