Abstract: Serial murder has captivated society’s imagination ever since Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror in Victorian London. Over time, though, the United States has emerged as a nation uniquely productive of and fascinated with murder. The serial killer has become a powerful cultural icon in our country, and he has come to be associated in ways both subtle and overt with sexuality. This podcast covers some of the reasons and ways the connection between murder and sex has developed. We discuss the sexual politics of murder itself, media and pop culture representations of the serial killer, case studies of culturally significant murderers, and the association between murder and deviant sexuality. By pulling together these threads and more we hope to provide insight into how and why the American serial killer has become such a sexually provocative figure.
Leah Barr is a third year Gender, Women’s, Sexuality Studies major from Evanston, IL. She has had several serial killer related nightmares this semester, but she perseveres. She spends her free time browsing meme pages and playing with dogs she meets on the street.
Liz Nelson is a fourth year Anthropology major at Grinnell College. Her particular research interests for this podcast are Victorian history and Jack the Ripper. Outside of historical research, Liz enjoys going for walks and cuddling with her cat, Midnight Meowers.
Emma Soberano is a fourth year English and General Science major from Davis, CA. Her interest in this podcast topic stems from watching too many seasons of American Horror Story. In her spare time, she enjoys writing short stories and curating her Instagram account.
Lydia Scott is a fourth year English major from Baraboo, WI. She is from the same state as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein, but funnels her nervous energy regarding this fact into podcasting. Lydia’s other interests include the occult and cooking.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Credits: Thanks to Gina Donovan for her tech support and advice and to purple-planet.com for providing us with music for transitions.
Bibliography:
Backderf, Derf. My Friend Dahmer. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2012.
Caputi, Jane. “The Sexual Politics of Murder.” Gender and Society vol. 3. No. 4 (1989): 437-456.
Casuso, Jorge. “Bundy Blames Pornography.” Chicago Tribune, January 24, 1989. Accessed May 12, 2017. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-01-24/news/8902270928_1_execution-eve-interview-lake-city-schoolgirl-bob-keppel.
Dahmer, Jeffry. “Jeffry Dahmer Stone Phillips Interview.” Interview by Stone Phillips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPMBfX7D4WU.
“The Night Stalker’s Groupies,” KRON 4 News Report, 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rlm-n3vfVM.
Downing, Lisa. The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Epstein, Dan. “The 10 Most Infamous Murderers Who Married in Prison.” Rolling Stone, November 24, 2014. Accessed May 3, 2017. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/the-10-most-infamous-murderers-who-married-in-prison-20141124/tex-watson-20141124.
Griffiths, Mark D. “Passion Victim: A brief look at hybristophilia.” Psychology Today, October 18, 2013. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-excess/201310/passion-victim.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation. “FBI Records: The Vault-Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer.” Accessed April 28, 2017. https://vault.fbi.gov/jeffrey-lionel-dahmer.
Fennessy, Steve. “Atlanta’s Jack the Ripper: Did a serial killer murder 20 women a century ago?” Creative Loafing, October 26, 2005. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://www.creativeloafing.com/news/article/13019958/atlantas-jack-the-ripper.
Hickey, Eric W. Serial Murderers and Their Victims. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2010.
MacDonald, Alzena. Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Polcyn, Greg and Vanessa Richardson. “E09: Ted Bundy.” Serial Killers. Podcast audio, April 2, 2017. https://www.parcast.com/serial/2017/4/2/e09-ted-bundy.
Silence of the Lambs. DVD. Directed by Jonathan Demme, Los Angeles: Orion Pictures, 1991.
Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Tumblr. “Raunchy Richard Ramirez Fiction.” http://raunchyrichardramirez.tumblr.com.
Walton, Priscilla L. ““If You Love Someone, Hunt Them Down and Kill Them”.” In Our Cannibals, Ourselves, 121-40. University of Illinois Press, 2004. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcgrz.10.
Transcript:
[musical introduction]
Lydia: Released in 1991, The Silence of the Lambs is a horror thriller film that captivated America. It swept the Oscars, winning each of the “top five” categories, and became the only horror film ever to win the award for Best Picture. The villain of The Silence of the Lambs is the wiley Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who skins his victims with the intent of sewing himself a “woman suit.” Buffalo Bill’s deviant gender presentation is one of the most sensational aspects of the film — an entire, infamous scene is dedicated to watching him apply makeup, dance around, and ultimately “tuck” his genitals to give the impression of a vagina. There were a lot of reasons that Silence of the Lambs was such a success. The source material, a novel by Thomas Harris, was popular. It was superbly acted — Anthony Hopkins managed to win the Oscar for Best Actor despite having under 20 minutes of screen time. But is there another reason for the immense popularity of Silence of the Lambs — perhaps one tied to our culture’s fascination with the sexually deviant serial killer?
[musical transition]
Leah: Why do we conceive murder as so related to lust and sexuality?
Liz: What social factors forged this connection within our collective societal imagination and how closely does our conception of sexually charged murder match up with reality?
Lydia: In what ways has pop culture and the media, including movies like Silence of the Lambs, sensationalized sexual murder, specifically serial murder?
Emma: And why is it that when you type the phrase “Why are so many serial killers…” into Google, it recommends “gay” as the third autofill option? Hi, I’m Emma Soberano
Lydia: I’m Lydia Scott
Liz: I’m Liz Nelson
Leah: And I’m Leah Barr on May 10th at Grinnell College and today we’ll be discussing the sexuality of serial killers
[musical transition]
Emma: Even though both sex and murder have been around for as long as the human race (prostitutes and mercenaries are the oldest professions, after all), our conceptions of these two acts have gone through a multitude of transformations. One of these transformations in particular relates to our discussion of serial killer sexuality because it marked a moment in history at which the paradigms relating to both sex and violence shifted at the same time, and in a very similar way, thereby linking the two inextricably in our current popular imagining. Beginning in the 19th century as an extension of the Marquis de Sade’s murderously deviant sexual practices – after which the term Sadism was coined – murder became associated with art, expression of human exceptionalism, and with the figure of the libertine. It is important to note that murder was not the only deviant act linked with libertinism; homosexuality was as well. Oscar Wilde was, after all, both the epitome of the libertine and an example of artistic genius at the time. As Lisa Downing notes, the idea that abnormality was associated with genius only strengthened over time.
Lydia: And a lot of people still think that today, right?
Emma: Yes, and Downing writes: “along with the murderer, the homosexual was described in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms that draw on ideas both of genius and degeneracy, and the damaging presupposition that homosexuals had criminal tendencies stemmed from this epistemological and ideological conflation” (18). Therefore, not only was the murderer linked by linguistic proximity to homosexuality, but by association with libertinism, the killer was associated with an excess and misdirection of sexual urges as well.
[musical transition]
Leah: In a lot of ways, sex is about power. One has the power to make someone feel intense pleasure, or, on the other side of the coin, pain. Sex is a vulnerable act, one which can lower our inhibitions and leave us open to be acted upon by the will of others. For some, pain, domination, and sex are so interconnected that they receive sexual pleasure either by dominating or being dominated. In many ways, rape and other forms of sexual violence take these more everyday, though we’d argue that most of American society could consider bdsm deviant, power dynamics exerted in consensual sex acts, and exploit them to the nth degree. The classic feminist theory explanation of sexual violence is that society teaches men to be aggressive as a facet of toxic masculinity, while also teaching women to be meek and submissive. While some serial killers exhibit queer sexual violence, feminist theory argues that toxic masculinity cannot be removed from the equation. This violence, as we shall see, can go as far as murder. Jeffrey Dahmer, an unusual case in the fact that he confessed to his crimes and gave detailed interviews, explained that his darkest sexual fantasies involved necrophilia, which he committed for the first time starting at age 18. For him the pleasure lay in domination, and the urge was so strong he could only satiate it by killing. For Dahmer, there wasn’t even pleasure in the murder– the end goal was to create a sexual slave who he could dominate entirely. As he said in an interview with Stone Phillips, “No, the killing wasn’t the objective. I just wanted to have the person under my complete control to do with what I wanted.” While forensic psychologist don’t entirely understand what truly drives or causes serial killers to kill, the number of serial killers who were also rapists and sexual abusers certainly suggests a connection between the power and pleasure associated with sex and the power and pleasure involved in murder. This being said, murder seems like the logical, though extreme, extension of a culture saturated with sex, violence, and of course, sexual violence.
[musical transition]
Lydia: The existence of a link between pornography and murder has long been debated. The topic got of a lot of attention in the aftermath of the Ted Bundy trial. Bundy is often cited as the ultimate “charming” killer, the man who managed to murder at least 30 women because he knew exactly how to play by the rules of mainstream society. During his time on death row, Bundy went into great detail about the ways that heterosexual pornography — which he recognized as inherently violent — influenced him in his youth. Lisa Caputi takes the connection between culture and crime a step further by looking to the cultural climate of the United States to explain the pattern of the power hungry male killer. “Sexually political murder,” she states, is “in short, a form of patriarchal terrorism” (438). Sex murder is a symptom of the way our society enculturates boys and men to conflate power, sex, and violence. This connection, however, is repressed in the national conscience. Caputi writes: “the culture regularly doublethinks a distance between itself and sexual violence, denying the fundamental normalcy of that violence in a male supremacist culture and trying to paint it as the domain of psychopaths and ‘monsters’ only” (444). From this vantage point it’s easy to understand why murder has been popularized as the domain of the sexual deviant. Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates are the scapegoats of a sexually vicious patriarchy. Perhaps all along, sex murder has been anything but deviant, and rather an intense distillation of our country’s sexual values.
[musical transition]
Emma: Pricilla L. Walton has tellingly titled a chapter of her book on cannibalism “If you love someone, hunt them down and kill them.” Though she focuses on serial killers who consume their victims, I find her use of the word “love” to be interesting, as love and lust are often conflated and dramatized in the media, just as murder, and sexual murders in particular, are often sensationalized by it. Among the examples Walton gives, one killer’s motivation for cannibalism stands out as familiar to me from movies and TV shows: Edmund Kemper, also known as “The Co-Ed Killer” of 1973, admitted he ate his female victims because he wanted to feel close to them. “I wanted them to be a part of me,” he said (125). Which, aside from just being massively creepy because of our societal taboo against cannibalism, also grosses me out because of his implied possession of these nonconsenting female subjects. At the same time, though, haven’t we as a society figured acceptable forms of love and lust as possession?
Leah: And that goes back to Lydia’s point about the acceptability and even encouragement of sexual violence in patriarchal society.
Emma: It also ties back into the 19th and early 20th century definitions of murder associated with exceptionalism; we figure the lust-killer then, as simply displaying exceptional and unacceptable levels of more permissible emotions, such as the (very male) need to possess and thus control female sexuality. The DSM-4 definition of lust killing as paraphrased by Eric Hickey is “sexually sadistic murder involving sexual arousal and gratification as part of the killing.” This definition seems to validate the popular idea that serial killers are motivated by deviant sexual urges. Yet, not all serial killers are lust-motivated or otherwise sexual killers. Additionally, as Hickey states, while lust killers “experience a degree of sexual arousal and gratification from what they do, […] this does not mean that sexual gratification is the primary motive for killing. When we begin to evaluate sexual acts as vehicles to gain control, maintain power, and degrade and inflict pain on the victim, we inevitably are making headway toward understanding the mind of the serial killer.”
[musical transition]
Liz: As Emma noted earlier, murder has been around for a lot longer than since the 70s. When we think of history’s most well known killers, chances are that Jack the Ripper comes to mind. It’s hard to understate the influence of Britain’s notorious prostitute murderer in the impoverished Whitechapel neighborhood of London in 1888. Alzena MacDonald argues: “The five crimes attributed to the never-identified ‘Jack’ have been immortalized via a plethora of blood-curdling recollections of the bodies of female prostitutes found lying in slums . . . The gruesome representation of the ‘Ripper’ murders has informed the mythology of the serial killer as an intelligent male, elusive, and obsessed with ‘doing things’ to and with bodies”. Jack the Ripper helped establish a perception of serial killers as sexually deviant. His case was also the first in a long tradition of the victimization of prestigeless people by serial killers–as well as by the authorities meant to protect them. By targeting prostitutes in a poor area of the city–women that few people in wider society cared about–Jack the Ripper killed without being caught.
The legacy of Jack the Ripper continued far beyond nineteenth century Britain. In 1911, the Atlanta Ripper terrorized another marginalized population: young women of color. The Atlanta Ripper killed between fifteen and twenty-one women in 1911, but was never caught–just like Jack the Ripper. The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, also murdered prostitutes, and it earned him the title of the United States’ most prolific serial killer. Could this pattern of victimology indicate societal indifference towards the deaths of marginalized people? The case of another Ripper–this time from Yorkshire–indicates yes. One constable on the case, West Yorkshire’s Jim Hobson, stated: “‘He has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies”. In this instance, it seems the police are almost more concerned with societal distaste for prostitutes than the murders of women. This provides an explanation for why many high profile serial killer cases involve the murder of sex workers. However, the trend has had the effect of portraying the serial killer as a sexually motivated killer.
[musical transition]
Lydia: A shift in the way that murder was perceived and portrayed in the United States occurred in the 1970s. It’s around this time that Robert Ressler, of the FBI’s behavioral science unit coined the term serial killer. Giving a name to the phenomena lent it gravity in the national imagination. There are also a lot of high-profile murder cases going on in the 1970s. Charles Manson, The Zodiac Killer, Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bendy, and the Hillside Stranglers are all active between 1970 and 1980. Since serial killing is so rare and highly publicized, even a statistically insignificant increase in cases is very noticeable. Also, as the Parcast Network’s episode on Ted Bundy notes, “the 60s and 70s were a hyperbolic breeding ground for sex murderers. The free love movement and the rise of the singles bar and gay bath houses made it easier to find victims.” This correlation also helps to explain the emerging association between murder and sex.
[musical transition]
Leah: Jeffrey Dahmer is a good example of the modern phenomenal serial killer. When he was arrested in 1991, he was unusual in the sense that he both confessed to his crimes and was remorseful. Growing up in rural Ohio, Dahmer found himself experiencing dark sexual urges that he felt he couldn’t share with anyone. He wanted to be able to dominate his partners entirely, enough that he would kill them to do so. As a younger child, he had examined roadkill in a shack in the woods near his house, and even once stole a fetal pig from biology class. He killed his first victim at the age of 18, a hitchhiker who he bludgeoned to death and used to satisfy his necrophilic tendencies. While he was able to keep his sexual urges in check for a few years, he began killing again after 9 years, and ended up with a total of 17 victims before his arrest. Not only did Dahmer have sex with his victims, but he also disemboweled them. He would store their torsos in acid and occasionally eat bits of his victims to “keep them with him forever”. When Dahmer was arrested, and the Milwaukee police searched his apartment and found chunks of humans bodies, he became a topic of national attention. Newspapers from around the country covered his arrest, trial, and sentencing. He even did two extensive interviews while incarcerated with news outlets. Through his heavy media coverage, Dahmer entered the national consciousness and influenced the American popular perception of the Serial Murderer.
Emma: Around the same time, Aileen Wuornos complicates the stereotype of the male serial killer, but, her narrative is ultimately used to further validate it.Though she was commonly referred to as the “first female serial killer.”, this is a misnomer, as between 10-17% of serial killers are female. However, as Lisa Downing says, she may have been the first female serial killer to capture popular attention because she “killed like a man,” using a gun instead of traditionally “feminine” methods such as poison, and shooting strangers in public places rather than family members in the home .Her supposed masculinity was emphasized by her deviant sexuality: she was both a lesbian and a prostitute (as well as a survivor of sexual assault, the blame for which is often pinned on female victims).Thus, Wuornos’ deviation from the norm of “feminine” killing only reinforces stereotypes about serial killing: that it is a uniquely masculine and sexual pursuit. She seems, in a way, to be the exception which proves the rule; she is painted as an overly masculine and dangerously sexual woman whose gender nonconformity drove her to kill.
[musical transition]
News Announcer (voice over): They are the women in black, the admirers of Richard Ramirez.
Interviewer: Why were you in the courtroom today?
Woman: I just wanted to see what he looked like. I think he’s cute.
News Announcer (voice over): This woman, who gave her name only as “Paige” calls herself a Satanist. She says Ramirez has written letters to her and that she’s talked to him in jail.
Woman #2: Everyone makes him look so bad, y’know. But I know that he’s… he’s a nice person because I’ve met him and I know.
Interviewer: He’s convicted of 13 murders.
Woman #2: I know. [laughs] But he’s a really nice guy.
Lydia: Hybristophilia, as defined by sexologist John Money, is a sexual paraphilia in which an individual derives sexual arousal and pleasure from having a sexual partner who is known to have “committed an outrage or crime, such as rape, murder, or armed robbery.” It’s the name some experts use to describe the fan bases, mostly female, that male serial killers tend to accumulate. Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, and Tex Watson of the Manson family are among the more famous names to have married one of their groupies while in prison. The advent of social media has only amplified the presence of murder fans. raunchyrichardramirez.tumblr.com is exactly what it sounds like. You can find hundreds of fan videos for famous killers on YouTube. Some groups even have names — for example fans of school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are called Columbiners.
[musical transition]
Liz: Alzena MacDonald argues: “The serial killer… is a discursive construct; a figure that has been reified in popular culture.” “Serial killing is spectacularized by the mass media in its discursive production of a genre that satisfies the culture’s obsession with violence.” If our culture’s obsession with violence demands serial killers, then our culture’s obsession with sex demands an association between criminal deviance and sexual deviance. Cultural changes in the 1970s and 80s brought forth not only a desire to consume violence, but a desire to consume sexuality. While mass media ramped up production of serial killer related movies, TV shows, books, and blogs, ardent “fans” wrote lust letters to their violent idols in prison. From the libertine Wall Street executive in American Psycho to the flamboyant Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, we need look no further than ourselves to understand our nation’s obsession with the sexual serial killer.
[Highway to Hell by AC/DC plays]
