15th September 2021
One of the ugliest aspects of modern culture is the glamourisation – and monetisation – of serial killers.
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In From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, about the Whitechapel murders, an opportunistic salesman sets up stall after the body of Catherine Eddowes is found in Mitre Square:
We then go to the reaction of the investigator Detective Abberline:
And then, in Moore’s footnotes to the story:
Quite.
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The best thing, of course, to read on those killings is Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five.
Here Rubenhold pulls together the extant information about the lives of each of the victims for a sequence of compelling social histories.
Rubenhold explains how the victim’s social and economic predicaments – especially the then-common outdoor sleeping of the Victorian poor – made them easy to kill.
And also how social prejudices about (supposed) prostitution meant the murders were not taken seriously.
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In The Collectors episode of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg depict a convention of serial killers, with all their braggy self-importance.
But at the end of the convention these proud killers are stripped of their glamours:
And they disperse as pathetic losers.
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It is not just comics.
The serial killer as a figure whose ‘mind’ we are supposed to ‘enter’ is a staple of modern fiction – and modern non-fiction.
Take the pseudo-science of ‘profiling’.
It certainly makes great film and television:
But profiling is mainly woo-woo – at least to the extent to which it is based on individual subjective assessments rather than broad statistical analysis.
(See here and here – but also here.)
And the glamourisation – and monetisation – of serial killers continues.
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So it was against this background when I stumbled on the following YouTube video.
I was expecting more of the same Cracker and Mindhunter tish-tosh.
How wrong I was.
Instead of the usual pseudo-science, Professor David Wilson takes us on a refreshingly sensible and unimpressed guided tour of well-known and less well-known depictions of serial killers.
This is Wilson on Lecter:
“I have encountered serial killers who have tried to scare me, but I wouldn’t be scared by Anthony Hopkins.
“I’d have laughed, frankly, if you’d told me about fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
The video is worth watching from beginning to end – and the end is brilliant (here is the video at 27:54):
Wilson refers to the “trope that we see in a lot of Hollywood movies, that people like me would try and enter the mind of a serial killer.”
He then concludes the video:
“I am not interested in what motivates a serial killer.
“I am much more interested in who it is the serial killer is able to kill.
“If we concentrated our attention on the groups that serial killers constantly target, we would do a lot more to reduce the incidence of serial murder in our cultures, as opposed to any number of offender profilers who claim that they can ‘enter the mind of a serial killer’.
“If you really want to do something to reduce the incidence of serial murder in our culture, let’s challenge homophobia, let’s have a grownup debate about how we police those young men and young women who sell sexual services, and above all, let’s try and work out why the elderly are so vulnerable in our culture because they don’t have a voice and have no power.”
Quite.
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Is glamouring killers and criminals really a modern phenomenon or is it simply that modern media makes the glamour seem more glamorous? Popular culture has always got a morbid thrill out of violent crime and has idolized Robin Hood and anti-establishment criminals (Kelly, Great Train Robbery, even the Krays). And along with that there has always been the pseudo scientists and the simply wrong scientists.
You do not name any serial killer as any of your counterexamples?
Glamourising crime is a staple, of course. But glamourising serial killers seems to be a modern thing.
Sweeney Todd and Little Shop of Horrors would two examples of pre-social media glamour for murder. I seem t remember that Jack The Ripper generated a (un)healthy trade. Horror stories and movies are a continuation of fairy tales and legends.
My point is that we have a ghoulish fascination/titillation with crime including murder and serial murder. The demand for media content may have made that more evident but I wonder if it has really changed that basic instinct which may be part of our natural tendency to focus on bad news because that used to keep us safer.
‘J the R’ is the start of the modern fascination. The others you mention are in the different tradition of the old penny dreadfuls.
As a historian, I quibble with that. Agree to disagree.
If the recent Channel 4 drama ‘Deceit’ is correct, the criminal psychologist, Paul Britton, was the driving force behind the Met Police’s disastrous attempt to ‘honeytrap’ Colin Stagg into confessing to the murder of Rachel Nickell. This pointless exercise drew their attention away from the true killer, a far more obvious candidate, Robert Napper who went on to kill Samantha Bissett and her 4-year old daughter.
There is a good summary of the chain of events here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/18/robert-napper-clues
He was. In the book DAG links to, he goes on for some length about how he’s still convinced Stagg is guilty and the police let a murder walk. It was written before Napper’s DNA was identified, but as far as I know he has never either apologised for his role in the affair or issued a correction to that chapter.
There’s an interesting intellectual link here with the different approaches to psychology. Social psychology often finds it difficult to get a hearing because the guidance it provides is too INCONVENIENT for those in power to hear.
Social psychology says, for example, that young, poor, unsupported mums of small children are much more likely to become depressed, ill and bad at parenting if they’re housed where they can’t easily make friends with other adults and can’t access support services. Not rocket science … But designing and providing homes and services to meet the social and personal needs of the powerless takes a lot more money and thought than doling out barely adequate “pacifiers” (a few rushed appointments at long intervals with overstretched mental health nurses and social workers).
Not to disagree with the thrust of your blogpost, but there has been significant popular adulation of some criminals for some time, such as Jack Sheppard in the early 18th century. And Wikpedia has a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_before_1900
Public executions were mass entertainment in the 18th and part of the 19th century – tens of thousands attended the executions of Burke and Hare – accompanied by the gallows speech, preprinted confessions, and a circus of commercial activities.
Perhaps death was such a commonplace event before the Victorian period, and public executions a suitably cathartic outlet, that there was little place for fascination with the specific crime of serial murder.
Even today there still seems to a significant level of interest in Jack the Ripper – perhaps because the perpetrator was not caught and convicted – but much less for, for example, the notorious baby farmer Amelia Dyer. Perhaps her motive was too clearly pecuniary and not titillatingly psychological, occult, or sexual.
Quite so. Go further back and people were obsessed with poison, witches and other forms of murder and destruction. We dont “hear” them so easily because much was by word of mouth and the printed evidence is often obscure for the modern reader.
What a superb blog!
There is also the fairly revolting book by Brian Masters, only bits of which I have read (standing in a bookshop), which gives far too much weight to Dennis Nilsen but indeed, as you say, no weight at all to Nilsen’s victims. Yes, I did watch Des, feeling somewhat ashamed of myself, because I can’t resist David Tennant. I say “revolting” because Masters claims we’re all capable of such murders, which I say is tosh.
But yet, there is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. A masterpiece. Mrs. Lovett is the mover and shaker. Her lie (his wife is alive) sets him on a course from just revenge to mass murder. She also sets up the pies as a way to dispose of the corpses. He is killing anyone.
One of the great comic songs “A Little Priest” joke being pies made of various kinds of people taste appropriately. “Here’s a politician so oily, he comes with a doily…”
In terms of screen violence, I have heard it described as “the most effective form of dramatic punctuation”.
I don’t see any glamourisation of the UK’s most prolific serial killers, Dr Harold Shipman (250+) and Dr John Bodkin Adams (160+). They were both general practitioners.
The law caught up with both of them; Shipman was convicted. Bodkin Adams “had connections”, his trial including a nolle prosequi (this second victim had been cremated) was a nonsense, and he was unsurprisingly acquitted.
Both enriched themselves through their victims; Bodkin Adams had a penchant for Rolls-Royces.
Just one correction to Andrew’s comment above: William Burke was hanged in 1829 but William Hare, who had given evidence against Burke, was released from prison and eventually disappeared into obscurity.
Thank you for the correction. Mea culpa. Yes, Hare was granted immunity from prosecution in return for giving evidence against Burke.
Burke was convicted, hanged, and then (somewhat ironically) dissected in public. His skeleton is still held by the Anatomical Museum at the University of Edinburgh. https://www.ed.ac.uk/biomedical-sciences/anatomy/anatomical-museum/collection/people/burke
Agree with your central point re profiling – junk science. Profiling, tv shows and true crime magazines create the idea that murder is dramatic and premeditated. The reality of most murders is tragically mundane. All the while we forget that we will struggle to address violence in our society.
The serial Mindhunter did a good job of subtly skewering the protaganist’s efforts to profile anyone, I thought. Each of the characters had traits that would have – by their own measures – made them suspicious.
That said, I’m not sure Prof Wilson is a counter to the glamourisation and monetisation of serial killers. While he has been sceptical about profiling, his television work seems to revel in the morbid and feeds an – in my view – unhealthy – imagining of what murder is. His interest in victims certainly doesn’t leap out of his CV –
https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/david-wilson/cv#!
Having followed quite a lot of David Wilson’s TV programmes and read a number of his books I agree with your observation about his interest (or lack of that) in victims. His autobiographical “My life with Murderers” can hardly be said to be victim focussed. I found it interesting, but not from a victim perspective.
I also agree that most murders are tragic and “mundane” – killer and victim known to one another and some spur of the moment event escalates. But for those (thankfully rare) which are unusual I do think, within some strict limitations, profiling may help an investigation. David Canter and Laurence Alison are probably the leading UK academics in this field and well worth reading. (Declaration of no interest – I don’t know either of them or David Wilson personally!).
As I happen to have a degree in Psychology, a degree in law and a Ph.D in law (specialist subject miscarriages of justice) I am less inclined than you to dismiss criminal profiling as woo-woo.
I also don’t think that, for example, Peter Sutcliffe, Robert Napper or Fred West have been glamourised (but perhaps I insulate myself from such glamourisations).
On the subject of profiling I think the key is to recognise that it can be a useful investigative aid to the police. It can potentially help to narrow a suspect pool. The problem in the case of Colin Stagg was that too much reliance was placed upon it and that led to the “honey trap”, the evidence from which Ognall J threw out in court. Stagg was vilified in the media but Ognall was eventually proven correct when Napper was identified via DNA. (Ognall’s autobiography has a good chapter on it and his ruling is contained in Stagg’s account of his ordeal. – Who really killed Rachel? David Kessler and Colin Stagg). And, of course, that investigation was not predicated on the existence of a serial killer (even though it turned out to be one). And although I haven’t tried specifically to place Britton’s description of the likely killer against what is known of Napper’s personality my broad recollection would be that it is probably a reasonably close fit for Napper.
Overall I would say that as a guide to the likely characteristics of a serial killer profiling might be of some value in some cases. And that might help an investigator.
But any information should be used with great care.
I do not have a PHD (I do have a very out of date law degree and a Psychology degree) but I spent over a decade and a half in law enforcement. I am afraid I very much have to respectfully disagree with Dr Venn on the usefulness of profiles.
At best they contain a number of generalised non-specific “insights” that a experienced investigator would be able to make for themselves (particularly if they work in team of diverse outlooks and talents). At worst they tend to narrow down the suspect poor unduly with no real intelligence of evidential basis to do so. It become part of the assumptions about the case and when they are wrong or untested…well That has literally cost lives in some cases.
I would put profiles in the same space as psychic readings and associated woo. The sad fact remains that just as serial killers are not genius monsters, just profoundly damaged individuals (in modern culture desperately being shoehorned into the role previously filled by monsters in both the popular and original meaning of the word) the vast majority of police work is not sitting smoking pipes and coming up with clever theories (there is a bit of that, ok), its almost entirely just hard graft, interviewing witness, watching hundreds hours of CCTV, going through page after page of phone records and back checking everything. Crimes get solved by a team of overworked detective Constables doing tedious chores, not one grumpy superintendent and his plucky assistant!
It really doesn’t make good TV…
As an aside I note I used the word “graft” an expression that of course has two meanings. In this instance I meant work, but I accept (having spent some time working in the counter corruption arena) that, especially at the moment, any reader might feel that the other meaning might fit more often than society likes or deserves.