Why We Love Serial Killers

by Scott Bonn

  As previously noted, serial killers are responsible for less than 1 percent of all murders and non-negligent manslaughters in the US annually, claiming approximately 150 victims per year. Serial killers receive a disproportionately high level of media attention and exposure considering the relatively small piece of the homicide puzzle they represent. Serial killers are defined as folk devils in that their terrible exploits are exaggerated and their crimes grow to mythical proportions in the minds of the public. I use the moral panic concept for guidance in this book because it offers a powerful sociological lens through which to examine the roles of key social agents such as the mass media, law enforcement authorities, politicians, and the criminals themselves in the construction of serial killers in the US. In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce another important concept known as atrocity tales that provides additional insights into how and why the public is influenced by distorted and stylized media images of serial killers.

  Atrocity Tales

  The social construction of evil and moral panic are both facilitated by the use of colorful and shocking atrocity tales. What exactly are atrocity tales? Communications scholar David Bromley and his colleagues offer the following definition:

  An atrocity may be defined as an event which is viewed as a flagrant violation of a fundamental cultural value. Accordingly, an atrocity tale is a presentation of that event (real or imaginary) in such a way as to (a) evoke moral outrage by specifying and detailing the value violations, (b) authorize, implicitly or explicitly, punitive sanctions, and (c) mobilize control efforts against the alleged perpetrators.104

  Stated differently, atrocity tales are highly inflammatory stories used by those in positions of authority and influence to ignite or prime public outrage toward a socially disvalued individual or group. Atrocity tales are central to the social construction of evil because of their unique ability to evoke powerful emotional responses from the public.

  The use of atrocity tales in the social construction of evil is analogous to the framing and labeling of folk devils by state officials and the news media in a moral panic drama. As is the case of allegations against folk devils in a moral panic, it is not important whether allegations made in atrocity tales are actually true or false. The intent of atrocity tales is not to present the complexity of an event dispassionately. Rather, the intent is to provide purported evidence to support a claim that the targeted group is evil and thus worthy of punishment or even elimination. When atrocity tales are employed by those in positions of power and authority they can be very persuasive, given the perceived credibility of the source of the tales.

  In a recent example from my own research, former US President George W. Bush used atrocity tales in his political rhetoric after 9/11 to bolster a case for invading Iraq.105 During the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, he frequently referred to atrocities allegedly perpetrated by Saddam Hussein against the Iraqi people such as the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in Northern Iraq prior to the Persian Gulf War in 1990. President Bush manufactured atrocity tales to provide so-called evidence, regardless of whether the claims were true or false, to support the administration’s argument that Saddam Hussein and his followers were evil and represented a growing threat to US security. It didn’t matter that the alleged atrocities occurred fifteen years earlier or that they had nothing to do with US security. The atrocity tales employed by Bush were designed to trigger hostility toward Iraq among the US public. Stated differently, atrocity tales were used to prime retaliatory sentiments toward Iraq in US citizens who were hungry for revenge against Arabs after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

  As previously discussed, once a particular individual or group becomes defined as evil in society, those in power have the moral authority and obligation to eliminate the evildoer or doers. This premise is central to the moral panic concept and it is also very consistent with the principles of social constructionism because objective reality does not matter in such instances. What matters is the degree of concern felt by society toward the alleged threat or offender and the belief that the evil label is accurate and valid. The label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as public fear and media coverage both prompt and justify punitive actions by authorities against the evildoers.

  I present empirical evidence in chapter 10 that law enforcement officials and the news media use highly stylized and exaggerated atrocity tales to apply the label of evil or monster to serial killers. Ironically, the actual accounts of serial killers are so barbaric that no dramatization of them is necessary to elicit shock or horror from the public and yet their exploits are exaggerated nonetheless by law enforcement officials and the news media. Consider, for example, the following true story of a prolific serial killer who was transformed into a cartoonish monster through sensationalized atrocity tales in the mass media.

  The Incredible Tale of Ed Kemper

  Edmund Kemper III, a serial killer and necrophile who became known as the “Co-ed Killer,” was born December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California. He was arrested in April of 1973, at the age of twenty-four, after murdering six female students, his own mother, and his mother’s best friend. Despite his relative youth upon capture, Kemper had actually committed his first two murders nearly a decade earlier. Kemper was an extremely intelligent child but he engaged in psychopathic behavior early on. For Kemper, this psychopathic behavior included the torture and killing of animals, which is a common childhood practice among nearly half of all serial killers. During childhood, Kemper was physically and emotionally abused by his alcoholic mother, Clarnell, who was divorced from his father. Clarnell frequently locked her son in a dark basement alone at night.

  Not surprisingly, Edmund grew up to hate his mother and at the age of fourteen ran away from home in search of his father in Van Nuys, California. After locating but being rejected by his father, young Edmund was sent to live with his paternal grandmother and grandfather in North Fork, California. Kemper claims that his grandmother, similar to his mother, was very abusive and he disliked her intensely. In 1964, at the age of fifteen, Edmund shot his grandmother in the head allegedly just to see what it felt like. He then killed his grandfather, too, because he believed that his grandfather would be angry at him for killing his grandmother. Kemper was subsequently committed to the Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane. To his chagrin, he was released into his mother’s care in 1969 after less than five years of confinement and treatment. His juvenile criminal record was expunged.

  As a young adult, Kemper was an imposing giant—standing six-foot-nine and weighing 280 pounds. He frequently thought about killing his mother by 1970 but was not yet ready to do so. The prospect of killing his mother without first perfecting his murder skills on others was too overwhelming for Kemper. So, between May 1972 and February 1973, Kemper embarked on a series of six shocking serial murders in which he picked up hitchhiking female students along the highway and then transported them to rural areas where he would kill and then decapitate them, and have sex with their corpses. He collected their dismembered heads in his apartment and would later have sex with them also. Similar to other infamous serial killers such as Dennis Rader and the Zodiac Killer, Ed Kemper sought public recognition and acclaim for his murders. This led him to socialize and drink in a bar called “The Jury Room” with the very law enforcement officers who were pursuing him. His law enforcement friends began calling him “Big Eddie.”

  Ed Kemper’s mugshot following his arrest in April 1973.

  Kemper finally realized his ultimate fantasy and killed his mother with a claw hammer and strangled her best friend on Good Friday 1973. After having sex with his mother’s decapitated head, Edmund Kemper casually telephoned the local law enforcement authorities to confess what he had done. The police initially refused to believe him, thinking that their friend “Big Eddie” was just pulling a prank on them. After several follow-up calls and the disclosure of information that only the “Co-ed Killer” would know, Kemper finally convi
nced the police that he was the man they sought. He was quickly arrested without incident and charged with eight murders in the first degree. Kemper was found guilty and given a life sentence because there was a stay on the death penalty in the US at the time of his conviction.

  Given his homicidal obsession with his mother, one might wonder whether killing her exorcised the demons that had tormented Ed Kemper throughout his life and finally provided him with a twisted sense of closure. As it turns out, the answer to this question is simultaneously chilling and fascinating. Kemper was asked by a Cosmopolitan magazine reporter during a prison interview how he felt when he saw a pretty girl after killing his mother. He said, “One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side says, I wonder how her head would look on a stick.”

  The inglorious atrocity tale of Edmund Kemper demonstrates just how loathsome the actions of a real-life serial killer can be. Although the abuse he suffered during childhood was tragic and terrible, and while it offers some insights into his criminal pathology, Kemper’s odyssey of murder, dismemberment, and sexual perversion still defies comprehension. No hyperbole is required for his crimes to shock and horrify the public, yet the facts of Kemper’s murders are often misrepresented or exaggerated in their retelling by the entertainment media. There are numerous books, films, puzzles, poems, calendars, and games that hyperbolize his story of murder and mayhem. For example, he was portrayed as a demonic freak in a slash-and-gore book titled The Lonely Head-Hunter: Ed Kemper and has appeared as a supernatural monster in comic books. There is an Ed Kemper gothic horror necklace and locket for sale on the Internet. The 2008 horror film Kemper: The Co-ed Killer is almost entirely devoid of facts. As a result of his inaccurate and sensationalized depiction in the entertainment media, Kemper has been transformed into a celebrity folk devil.

  I contend that the grotesque and stylized depiction of Ed Kemper and his crimes have obscured the distinction between reality and fiction for the general public. That is, incessant media stereotyping has changed Ed Kemper from a human being into a serial killer caricature similar to “Freddy Krueger” in the Nightmare on Elm Street horror film franchise. I believe that Kemper and Krueger have become interchangeable in the minds of the public due to the inaccurate depiction of serial killers in the mass media. I also believe that it no longer matters to serial killer fans whether the media image is a real-life predator such as Kemper or a fictionalized one such as Krueger. They are equally scary and entertaining to the public. I argue that this stereotyping harms society because the blurring of reality and fiction causes confusion and desensitizes the public to the truth about real-life serial killers and their victims. If Ed Kemper becomes just another cartoonish entertainment commodity like Freddy Krueger, then the actual horrors he perpetrated and the lives he destroyed are forgotten. This is unfair to Kemper’s victims and only intensifies the tragedy and pain for their surviving family members. I explore these troubling notions in the chapters that follow.

  Conclusion

  In this chapter I introduced a sociological theory called social constructionism and a related concept known as moral panic, which together provide insights into the social construction of serial killers. I have argued that the concept of evil is socially defined and that influential parties such as law enforcement, politicians, the news media, and the public contribute to the distorted public identity of serial killers. I have argued that inflammatory stories known as atrocity tales also contribute to the social construction of serial killers. I presented the story of Ed Kemper, a real-life serial killer whose sensationalized tale of atrocity has transformed him into a celebrity monster on the popular culture landscape. We now turn to the evidence that supports the claims made in this chapter.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE MAKING OF CELEBRITY MONSTERS

  In his book Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, Kai Erikson wrote:

  Investigators have studied the character of the deviant’s background, the content of his dreams, the shape of his skull, the substance of his thoughts—yet none of this information has enabled us to draw a clear line between the kind of person who commits deviant acts and the kind of person who does not.106

  This statement expresses the public’s curious desire or perhaps compulsion to understand the reasons that some people do very bad things. Because serial killers are among the most egregious of all criminal offenders, many of us want to understand why they do what they do. Their actions seem incomprehensible to us, which could explain why they are particularly fascinating for us to contemplate. The public’s curiosity about serial killers leads the news media to focus a tremendous amount of time and attention on them relative to other offenders. The intense media spotlight elevates them to the realm of criminal rock stars.

  In the previous chapter, I introduced the moral panic concept to demonstrate how certain social agents such as the news media, law enforcement authorities, and the public are involved in the creation of larger-than-life criminal folk devils. I maintain that serial killers fit the folk devil classification due to an exaggeration by law enforcement and the news media to the threat they actually pose to society. In this chapter, I attempt to answer the central question of this book: What makes serial killers so interesting to so many people? In order to answer this question, I demonstrate how each of the key agents discussed in chapter 9 contributes to the social construction of serial killers and their celebrity monster status. It is important to remember that many serial killers such as the Son of Sam, the Night Stalker (discussed in this chapter), and BTK, to name just a few, were active contributors to the construction of their own public images. Therefore, I include their voices as an essential part of my explanation of this phenomenon. Throughout this chapter, I use the actual words of homicide detectives, FBI criminal profilers, investigative journalists, academics, and notorious predators to provide insights into the social construction of celebrity serial killers and the public’s fascination with them.

  How Key Social Agents Construct Serial Killers

  The moral panic concept can help to explain how and why certain social agents such as politicians, law enforcers, and the news media sometimes exaggerate the threat posed to society by a particular individual or group to further their own agendas. As explained in the last chapter, law enforcers and elected politicians must work to justify their respective positions in the social hierarchy. These agents of the state are expected to detect, apprehend, and punish anyone who threatens the social order. In fact, law enforcers and elected politicians have a sworn duty and moral obligation to protect society from any internal or external threats that may appear. The police and elected officials are charged with enforcing the laws of the state, so it is important to their public images and careers to be perceived as fearless protectors of society. Therefore, law enforcement agencies frequently frame their crime fighting efforts in terms of good versus evil in such a way that they emerge as the force of good.

  The Role of Law Enforcement Authorities

  The normal routines of policing and the relative scarcity of serial homicide incidents both contribute to the reinforcement of serial killer stereotypes by law enforcement authorities. As explained in chapter 2, law enforcement professionals often circulate misinformation about serial homicide due to their reliance on anecdotal information rather than on scientifically documented patterns of serial killer behavior. Most law enforcement professionals, including detectives, prosecutors, and pathologists, have very limited exposure to serial killer cases. The rarity of serial homicide means that even a veteran professional’s total experience may be limited to a single investigation. Therefore, he or she is likely to extrapolate the factors from that one experience to another serial murder investigation when such a case presents itself. As a result, certain stereotypes and misconceptions take root among law enforcement authorities regarding the nature of serial homicide and the characteristics of serial killers.

  Ultimately, state managers, including la
w enforcement and politicians, define who and what is evil in society and those definitions, whether or not they are based on stereotypes, become the accepted reality for the majority of the population. When the police define a serial killer as evil or a monster they are exercising their power to construct reality according to their own specifications and needs. The earliest known use of the term “monster” in this context dates back to 1790 in London when law enforcement authorities sought a sexual deviant who committed a series of “nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamed of.” The so-called monster stalked well-dressed women in the streets and slashed more than fifty of them over a two-year period. One hundred years later, also in London, the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper was declared to be a “monster” and a “maniac” by police authorities.

  In contemporary society, the terms “evil” and “monster” are frequently used by law enforcement officials to explain serial killers in their public statements. For example, Richard Ramirez—the Satan-worshipping Night Stalker who claimed to have been inspired by Jack the Ripper and the infamous cannibal and killer, Jeffrey Dahmer—was persistently described as “evil” by the police. More recently, the unidentified predator known simply as the Long Island Serial Killer has been called a “cold-blooded monster” by his pursuers. In addition, the popular memoir of the late FBI profiler Robert Ressler is entitled Whoever Fights Monsters.