When did serial killers become sexy? Why did serial killers become sexy? Or more to the point, when did they become interesting? Fascinating? A subject of intellectual discourse of heated debate? Because to a man, they are all complete losers.
There was great interest in these losers in the 1990s, due in some part, I guess, to the 1992 Academy Award Winner for Best Picture,
The Silence of the Lambs. It is not, however, the subject of the manhunt, Buffalo Bill, who became iconic, but the already incarcerated murderer, Hannibal Lecter, as performed by Anthony Hopkins. He’s cool, eerie, stylish, witty, brilliant, and, some would say, sexy.
He wasn’t the first murderer to hold my interest, however. That would be David Warner as Dr. John Leslie Stevenson in the 1979 time traveling romp,
Time After Time. Malcolm McDowell, playing against type, is the bespectacled, naive and charming H.G. Wells, who (in this fictional tale) invents an actual, functional time machine. The device proves advantageous when the police arrive to arrest Dr. Stevenson, who uses it to escape Wells’ home, the city of London and the 19th Century. For Dr. Stevenson also happens to be the man known as “Jack the Ripper.”
Warner’s character travels through time – and space! – to disco-era San Francisco, where he continues his compulsion for slaughtering sex workers.
Because that’s what we know about him, isn’t it? I queried my brother recently, what do you know about Jack the Ripper? Nothing, he told me. I asked who his victims were. He said sex workers.
Seriously, my sixty-four year old brother said sex workers, not prostitutes. We have Gen Z children, after all.
Warner’s “Jack” was cool, eerie, stylish, witty, brilliant, and, some would say, sexy.
We seem to ascribe an extraordinary intelligence to serial murderers, and I imagine we do so due to the fact that they get away with it. They are "always one step ahead of the police” or that some even manage to stay anonymous, forever.
In the mid-to-late 1990s I read both
Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer by Steven Nickel and Paul W. Heimel’s
Eliot Ness: The Real Story. The Ness-Cleveland connection greatly interested me (duh) and exposed me to the so-called
Torso Murders, a series of grisly killings which occurred in the 1930s, and primarily during Ness’s tenure as Safety Director.
Attempts to connect these crimes are specious, but that hasn’t prevented folks from crafting their own theories about a single perpetrator. I personally cleave to the belief that these murders are unrelated. I was particularly grateful when this theory was put into print by Cleveland true crime author John Stark Bellamy in his book
The Maniac in the Bushes (and More Tales of Cleveland Woe) that in the absence of corroborating evidence these tragedies should be assumed to be the work of different individuals.
Much has been made of this one guy, a member of a well-placed political family, who wrote taunting letters to Ness, claiming to be the culprit. But what of that? I send taunting letters to the Vice President every week.
Regardless, this desire to tell stories about these violent criminals … before Dexter, a contemporary cable program in which the serial killer is the hero because he kills other killers (oy) there was the
X-Files spin-off
Millennium. An FBI agent played by Lance Henriksen has the ability to access the sight of criminals, to see what they see. The first season was all about the crimes of serial killers, and I checked out from that show pretty fast. A network program thick with images of pain and horror.
Because that’s what we’re talking about – pain and horror. And as with fictions (
Silence of the Lambs, Millennium, Dexter) or reality (
Kingsbury Run or Whitechapel) the focus is on the killer. Ostensibly, to discover who he is, but also, because – as they say – he fascinates us.
Except he doesn’t. If reality has shown us anything, it’s that actual serial murderers are not interesting. They aren’t surgical villains with a penchant for chianti. They are outcasts and losers. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, Wayne Williams and John Wayne Gacy, unremarkable sociopaths.
The Whitechapel murders of 1888 inspired the legend of Jack the Ripper. That’s not even a real name, it originates from an anonymous letter to the editor of a newspaper, and almost certainly fake. Popular subjects have included barristers, doctors, and – of course – those within the sphere of the Royal Family.
The single, unidentified person of “Jack” killed five women over a period of several months, and then never again. These five are referred to as “canonical” which, while accurate because it means – generally – to be accepted as part of a group, is offensive to me as it lends legitimacy to something that cannot be known and is likely to be false.
All five were women, and all five have always been said to be sex workers. My introduction to “Jack the Ripper” was the film Time After Time, and it begins with Warner’s doctor encountering and then murdering a woman who has made it clear that the encounter is meant to be transactional.
In her book,
The Five, author Hallie Rubenhold does what no one thought to do before, which is to question the common wisdom and to investigate the lives of the victims. Contemporary police accounts state clearly that all five were “prostitutes.” Rubenhold thoroughly documents the prevailing assumption at that time that all destitute women were, or that they may as well be so.
In describing the lives of each woman, we understand each; their unique descent into penury – which brought each to this locale, a district of London which was just one center for the destitute and unhoused – and their commonality, namely that each had an addiction to alcohol.
Rather than slaughtered in the act of solicitation, the first four were much more likely to have been preyed upon while sleeping out-of-doors, while the fifth – also sleeping – was surprised in her bed, the door to her one-room, ground floor apartment easily opened. To ascribe a (still) socially unacceptable occupation has always diminished their personhood, adding “they asked for it” to their epitaphs. But they were human people, undeserving of their economic status as well as their horrifying demise.
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This is an actual, mass-marketed
"Jack the Ripper" costume. |
This throws some salt into the works for many “Ripperologists” (a hateful term) whose theories about who the murderer may have been, especially those bespoke theories about an assassin for the Man-mans; eliminating a cabal of sex workers who could bring down the Monarchy, or someone on a Messianic quest to purge the city of lechery.
When we understand who the victims were, their deaths seem random. Each was just a very unlucky woman, sleeping rough (as they say) in the wrong place at the wrong time. And conspiracy theorists hate randomness. In fact, Rubenhold has had to endure a great deal of criticism and abuse for this book, as it does not offer any new insight into who “The Ripper” may be, Worse, it tears down a few theories carefully crafted by men (always men) who fancy themselves experts in a rarefied field.
The point is, we don’t know. We’ll never know. Accepting what we do not know is a very difficult thing. Conspiracy theories are born when men strain to apply meaning to what they do not understand, and in doing so they lose sight of the victims.
