Monster Men Episode 1: The Bureau

Francisco Goya’s aquatint The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters depicts the artist asleep while various predatory animals gather around him, perhaps in his dreams. The picture illustrates Goya’s fears about society, put simply “the sleep of reason produces monsters”, but it plays with a simple idea - that dreams aren’t simply the things that appear when the conscious mind is absent, but they form around reasonable and rational ideas processed by the subconscious, and furthermore that our nightmares come from things that we have reasons to fear.

One of the reasons we tell stories is to create monsters. We create monsters to warn each other about threats, to unite against common enemies, to live a fantasy of revenge against the unjust, and of course, for maybe the simplest reason: to get a little fright. It’s kind of thrilling, to make yourself afraid, get a little bit spooked. Boo! Et cetera.

This is a new series looking at why we tell monster stories, where they come from and what they mean, and today, I'd like to start with a monster that has fascinated us for decades - the serial killer - and the famous team of pioneers in the field of catching serial killers - the FBI Behavioural Sciences Unit.

The Monster Men, by Eric Sophia McAllister

Episode 1: The Bureau

When it comes to the niche strain of media representing the FBI Behavioural Sciences Unit, and also in the broader cultural phenomenon of serial killer media, two properties are absolutely vital. One being Hannibal, originally a book series by Thomas Harris adapted to screen multiple times, first as Manhunter starring Brian Cox, most famously with Silence of the Lambs and most recently with the TV series simply titled Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter is a spectre that haunts serial killer fiction - Hannibal Lecter, more like Hannibal Communism.

Hannibal the cannibal is a seminal character for many later stories and tropes and directly informs the cultural common idea of the serial killer monster. He’s essentially the platonic ideal of the serial killer, and it’s no real surprise since elements of his character, behaviour, appearance and crimes are all based on real-life famous serial killers. In fact, even the main thrust of the plot is based on the real life instance of Ted Bundy helping the FBI to psychologically profile and eventually catch another serial killer. Hannibal is the charming, intelligent, deeply evil but deeply brilliant psychopath. It’s no wonder that as a character he continues to fascinate us decades on.

Dr. Lecter is, simply put, too powerful to be kept strictly within our analysis here, so although I’m going to repeatedly reference various versions of Hannibal, he will be getting his own episode later in the series.

Which brings us to the second piece of media that should never be overlooked in discussing the BSU, which is of course David Fincher’s true crime series Mindhunter. Mindhunter is a fictionalised history of the Behavioural Sciences Unit based on the book of the same name by real-life FBI profiler John E Douglas, and what’s interesting about Mindhunter is that while it is true crime - i.e. the crimes are true and they really happened - it mostly follows a fictional story loosely based on Douglas’ account.

This episode, by the way, is primarily going to be about policing, psychological profiling and the Behavioural Sciences Unit rather than the violent crimes themselves, but I will discuss the cases of various serial killers and their crimes, so those particularly sensitive to the topics of murder, violence, sexual assault et cetera, proceeed with caution.

Mindhunter follows Special Agent Holden Ford, based on Douglas, whose passionate belief that psychological profiling can be used to stop violent crime drives the creation of the BSU and much of the plot of the series. By the way, if you like the series, Jonathan Groff who plays Ford voices the audible version of one of the books Mindhunter is based on.

In the show, Holden and his partner Agent Tench struggle to revolutionise the stuffy and conservative FBI, and meet resistance at every turn, eventually allowed to start their venture into this fringe science but consigned to the basement of the Quantico headquarters. To some degree this is accurate - the FBI was created to track booze smugglers during prohibition and tackle cases of mail fraud, which doesn’t usually get much focus because it isn’t exactly sexy. Its slow evolution into this sort of mythic “supercop” organisation as it gets portrayed in things like Hannibal should always be presented along with its history of serving the conservative political establishment and making sure letters go to the right place.

The FBI also sent letters to Martin Luther King telling him he was gay and should kill himself, best desrcibed in the Chapo Guide To Revolution as “the last known instance of liberals knowing how to troll”. (important note, the Chapo Guide was written at a time before the K Hive) To some degree painting the establishment as crusty and conservative is only there however, to make us root for the young up-and-coming progressive cop. The good cop. The hero cop.- yes okay Mindhunter is goddamn filthy copaganda it won’t make it out of this video essay alive.

The belief that serial killers, cannibals et al are monsters that exist outside of humanity lets them off the hook for their actions, or more importantly lets us off the hook - we don’t need to reconcile a morally just world with the morally repugnant actions of serial killers if we rely on the simple explanation - they’re crazy. What Mindhunter sets out to do is break down that mythology by showing the real people and examining their individual psychology.

In the first episode of Mindhunter, in one of the earliest striking moments of the show, Ford goes to interview Edmund Kemper, a serial killer and necrophiliac who beheaded his own mother, and finds that… Kemper is a polite, calm, genial guy. The real Edmund Kemper is reportedly just as jovial and eager to please, and even lent his voice a bunch of audiobooks while in prison.

But this first case also starts to show the cracks.

Kemper, even besides being an early interview, was a good choice to open the show with. He has quite a unique affect, even among serial killers. As Douglas writes in The Killer Across The Table “though his victims suffered horribly, he wasn’t motivated by sadism as many serial killers are; what he told us he was doing, and this isn’t a phrase I’ve heard before or since was evicting them from their bodies so he could possess them at least temporarily after death”. Now of course, Kemper is obviously, to put it simply, a pretty messed up guy, and both the real agents and the fictional ones in the show benefit from being men interviewing him, since he is almost incapable of being around women whatsoever.

It certainly gets across the message very effectively, but it’s a complicated fiction.

Kemper’s example breaks down the perhaps common idea that serial killers are so mentally ill that they can’t understand reality or control themselves moment to moment, or as Douglas puts it, “[we] operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto in that ‘normal people’ do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder in and of itself does not mean that the perpetrator is ‘insane’ which is a legal rather than a medical term which has to do with culpability.”

The reason the monster of the serial killer is so fascinating is that they represent a contradiction. We want to believe they are an “insane” monster which simplifies their character to a pure uncontrollable evil, but we also find a morbid fascination in the idea that they are rational, self-interested, potentially likeable and at least semi-normal people. It’s easy to see from where a public appetite for a character like Hannibal Lecter arises - people want their serial killers to be charming, scheming masterminds.

Later in the book, Douglas writes “If there is one word that I’ve found that survivors of murder victims detest, it is closure. The media, the public, well meaning friends, and even the judicial system itself often feel that this is what all grieving loved ones are seeking so they can put this behind them and get on with their lives. But anyone who has experienced a murder [sic] knows that there is no such thing as closure, nor should there be.”

This idea of closure is not for people who have real experience of serial killers - it’s for us. We want the monster story to have an ending so we can put it away and move on.

On August 9th 1969, white supremacist doomsday cult The Manson Family gained international infamy after four of their members murdered movie star Sharon Tate and four of her friends. The cult members, whose long-term goal was to incite a race war and thereby subjugate people of colour, wrote “pig” in blood on the walls of the crime scene in an attempt to either frame the Black Panthers, or to paraphrase the cult’s leader, Charles Manson, “to teach [black people] how to start a race war”.

Now you may well be asking Soph. Sophie. Sophia. Why are we talking about Charles Manson. He’s a cult leader, not a serial killer. He didn’t even kill those people himself and to that I would say pshawww, cmon, just vibe with me, sib. Mindhunter talks about Charles Manson, so why shouldn’t we?

The episode of Mindhunter where they interview Manson is one of their most interesting and intense. In the interview, as was apparently true in real life, Manson sits up on the back of a chair so he can talk down to Ford and Tench. In Killer Across the Table, John Douglas actually describes deliberately recreating this height differential with another later subject to let his interviewee feel more in control of the interview.

The cinematography deliberately plays with this preacher pose using point-of-view. The camera is low when looking at Manson and on the reverse it’s high, looking down at Tench and Ford. This tells us that what Manson says is true and shouldn’t be questioned, so afterwards in the car, as the agents unravel the interview and realise that Manson was manipulating and lying to them, we’re realising that too. This isn’t the only time Fincher uses perspective to manipulate the audience, but we’ll get back to that later.

In the car, Ford and Tench realise that Manson has fed them the “canonical” version of his mythology, and they haven’t been able to properly learn about his psychology or motivations. They quickly turn around on the interview entirely, and land on the conclusion that Manson’s entire public justification is nonsense - he doesn’t want to start a race war, he isn’t a white supremacist, et cetera et cetera.

This really bothers me, because, well, Charles Manson was a white supremacist, and even if his outward justifications were lies, he still used them to build a following and his followers were still acting based on white supremacist doomsday cult logic. Someone who uses racism to build a cult following still doesn’t care about racism. It’s a bit like Douglas’ “ipso facto” explanation for mental illness in serial killers. Maybe Charles Manson has other stuff going on, but you don’t just start a white supremacist cult because you’re a woke king.

Also, there are curious things, like this bizarre symbol Manson had tattooed on his forehead. What does it mean? We’ll never know.

Douglas highlights in his writing how some serial killers are drawn to neo nazi or other racist groups because a hateful and violent mission statement, especially one that is self-aggrandizing and tells them they’re more important than other people, is very appealing to them. It makes sense, but it also pokes a big hole in the individual psychology approach to criminology. Like, if our intention is primarily to catch killers more than to understand their internal machinations, clearly white supremacy is something worth addressing.

In Atlanta Georgia, between 1979 and 1981 a series of boys, teenagers and men went missing, all of them black. These disappearances, generally dubbed “The Atlanta Child Murders” are a pretty messy case from a few angles. First off the main drive to connect the murders came from the families of the dead, and as such the exact number of murders considered part of the pattern ranges from 28 to somewhere over 30. Therefore there are a lot of other things that are hard to pin down, primarily the number of perpetrators.

In 1981, Atlanta radio broadcaster Wayne Williams was stopped by police after a surveillance team heard what later turned out to be a body being dumped in a river, and when asked where he was going he provided a fake name and phone number of a friend he was allegedly visiting. When interviewed, colleagues said they had noticed Wayne with scratches on his face and arms around the time of the murders, and police also later found matching dog hair and carpet fibers from Williams’ home that matched evidence found on some of the bodies. Ultimately Williams was only convicted for two of the murders - the body he had been dumping when the police stopped him and one other - but Atlanta PD closed the other cases attributing them to him.

In Mindhunter, the coverage of this case deliberately plays with uncertainty and ambiguity a lot. Agent Ford comes in insisting that the killer is black because of the psychological profile - serial killers usually murder within their own race - while the black community are sure they are racially motivated crimes, likely committed by the KKK. After the conviction, despite having been so confident Ford is still a little unsure of whether they’ve caught the right guy.

In real life Williams’ case is the subject of much debate. In 2006 Williams’ attorneys pushed for retrial on the basis that police had covered up evidence of KKK involvement. The move for retrial was dismissed by a judge, and DNA evidence in 2007 matched Williams hair to hair found on one of the victims, and John E Douglas is confident that Williams is the perpetrator.

However, a report in 2005 found that a KKK member called Charles T Sanders had praised the crimes in secretly recorded conversations, had told a police informant that the killer had "wiped out a thousand future generations of n*****s" and according to an anonymous source who claimed to be a former friend of Sanders, Sanders actually claimed he and his brothers had committed some of the murders.

The same anonymous source alleged that Sanders was really pleased he had the same type of carpet and breed of dog as Williams, because it was that fibre evidence the forensics team had used to convict Williams. They said, of the fact the killings stopped when Williams was arrested "Once it was pinned on Wayne Williams, they were through. That was their way out."

Sanders was an early suspect, but Atlanta PD let him off after he and his brothers passed lie detector tests and after that the FBI profile led the direction of the investigation. I don’t think Wayne Williams is innocent, but I do believe Charles T Sanders did some of these murders. So did psychological profiling help find the killer, or let one walk free?

There are troubling aspects to individual psychology as well. The Hannibal franchise has been plagued by horrible anti-queer garbage since the very beginning, and it seems pretty clearly inspired by an amateur serial killer fan’s shallow understanding of psychology. There are places where this can work really well: For example, Francis Dolarhyde, the eponymous Red Dragon of Harris’ first book is a really compelling fictional serial killer. The details of Dolarhyde’s psychology, character and crimes were directly based on the then uncaught BTK Strangler, and the obsession with William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun was Harris’ own invention. That’s just a really good character.

However when you get on to Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, things critically fall apart. Buffalo Bill is based primarily on several serial killers, and one of them, Jerry Brudos, was arguably transgender, although it’s complicated because Brudos was schizophrenic, and a misogynistic serial killer who clearly had some baggage around gender. I can’t be clear enough about this, the overwhelming majority of serial killers are cis straight men who kill women based on a deeply misogynistic worldview. The fact that Harris felt the need to focus in so sharply on queerness can only be explained with bigotry. The fact that JK Rowling chose to base her serial killer in Troubled Blood on Brudos can only be explained with bigotry, but if you wanted to know JK Rowling hates trans people you could just look at her twitter meltdowns. Queerness and especially transness keeps popping up again and again and again in serial killer stories, despite once again the vast vast vast majority of serial killers being cis straight men.

Hannibal Lecter is bisexual, Buffalo Bill is supposedly a “failed transsexual” and in the third book in the trilogy Harris introduces a character called Margot Verger who is presented as a lesbian but Harris hints that she is on testosterone and has Clarice Starling speculate on Margot’s genitals because, Thomas Harris has a creepy obsession with trans people. It needs to be said and said again: Thomas Harris has a creepy and harmful obsession with trans people. Fuck you Thomas Harris.

Margot is presented as going on testosterone as a response to a sexual assault, because Harris is clearly aware of transmasculine but understands them even worse than he understands transfeminine people.
As to Buffalo Bill: It is one of the most harmful possible constructions to have characters profile Buffalo Bill as a failed trans woman especially one who would have been rejected by doctors for medical transition. Trans people have to go through an agonising process of self doubt and fear because of stigma like this that makes them absolutely petrified they’ll be outed as a “fake trans” who isn’t actually trans but just mentally ill. The gatekeeping of medical transition by cis doctors who often don’t understand trans people that well at all is actually a very serious issue, and treating rejection by doctors as a concrete proof that someone is a fake trans person is, to use the technical term: fuck you Thomas Harris.

I think this really shows where individual psychology falls short. Like on the one hand, looking at a society that oppresses and stigmatises queer people, and saying to ourselves the sleep of reason produces monsters, maybe you would draw the conclusion that the few serial killers who aren’t heterosexual or cisgender might have failed to process internalised bigotry.

On the other hand, taking the queerness of a serial killer on a purely individual basis, you can really only conclude that for someone who murders women and dresses in their clothes their queerness is sort of the explanation of their sickness. It naturally breeds transphobia. Furthermore, any fear mongering about fake trans people is only there to attack trans people generally, just like how any focus on fake refugees is just an excuse to drum up racism.

As for John Douglas, on whom the Hannibal character of Jack Crawford is based, he has said he really enjoys Silence of the Lambs and Ted Levine’s performance as Bill in particular. This does make me feel dubious about Douglas’ grasp of psychology frankly, but mostly I read this as Douglas being a big nerd for FBI serial killer stories. He is clearly very invested in the job he did for decades and the science of criminal profiling, and I think it’s not a huge reach to say he’s a little blinded by the flattery. He actually pointed out in an interview with Jonathan Groff how nowadays the FBI receives tonnes and tonnes of applications for people wanting to do his exact job.

I think we can treat a lot of FBI media as de facto BSU media to some degree, for the simple fact that before the BSU became famous for studying serial killers, the FBI was just so unfuckably boring. Twin Peaks for example, features an FBI detective coming to investigate the latest victim of a serial killer and using confusing and mystical methods to determine what happened and who did it.

This is where serial killer fiction takes a fantastical turn.

In a typical episode of The X Files Mulder and Scully go to a place where a series of strange events, possibly attacks on people have been taking place, and rely on a fringe science that most people don’t agree with and people see Mulder as a crank for believing in to profile and then track down whatever is causing the events. They have a cult following of young people who think their work is really cool and are also interested in the kind of monsters they track and hunt. Fox Mulder even works in the basement office of the FBI, which is the literal physical place the BSU work out of. I think there’s a pretty compelling reading of The X Files as representing a fantastical version of the Behavioural Sciences Unit.

It’s not as interesting to see X Files as an intentional allegory though, especially as such a long-running, monster-of-the-week story, that interpretation doesn’t imbue it with much fresh meaning. Instead I think we should imagine the reasons for this similarity come from a cultural trauma and intrigue - although serial killers existed long before, they really came into the public consciousness in a big big way in the 60s, 70s and 80s with what seemed like an epidemic of serial killers like the Zodiac, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy. It might even seem strange that something like Mindhunter wasn’t made sooner, given the public fascination with serial killers, but in a way the fantasy and science fiction version is the much more predictable response.
It’s been noted a lot before how Godzilla served as displacement fiction for the people of Japan after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how much American fiction after 9/11 served the same purpose. Huge sci-fi catastrophes destroying either New York or New-York-Lite became the go-to for hollywood blockbusters, and that’s displacement fiction too.

This is related to what Goya was depicting in The Sleep of Reason. Goya lived through war and times of political turmoil in Spain that led him to feel increasingly disenfranchised with the social and political mood of the time, and through his life his art more and more took on a fantastical nature, while at the same time depicting madness, suffering, and isolation. It seems that he gradually worked more and more to depict the social trauma he was so hurt by not as literal events with real people, but with witches, animals, gods, and figures of folklore.

I would argue that X Files and things like it served as displacement fiction for the public awareness of serial killers and the people whose job it is to hunt them.

One paranormal Bureau that could be understood as doing the same thing is the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy Franchise. Mignola’s art, clearly inspired in style by Goya, uses gothic fantasy elements to tackle real-world concerns, and engages very knowingly with this idea of displacement. Mignola’s protagonists are cursed, magical, monstrous, or transformed people, working with the Bureau to take on supernatural threats. It’s really no surprise that the (good) film adaptation of Hellboy would be written and directed by best precious excellent boy Guillermo Del Toro, whose entire body of work revolves around the embracing and understanding of monsters.

Now, the BPRD through its publication history has primarily served as a different kind of displacement fiction. The main series took off in the early 2000s with the stories revolving around enormous lovecraftian monsters tearing apart American cities - monsters we would probably now call Cloverfields even though BPRD was doing it first - and so for a large part BPRD serves as displacement fiction for 9/11, terror attacks, and fears about US national defence responses, but the Bureau was first conceived by Mignola in 1993, and I think in its original, much more X Files-y incarnation it can be understood as another version of the basement boys - the BSU.

The team are a secretive and highly specialised taskforce, just like in X Files, using their unknown sciences to battle the forces of evil, and crucially the team is made up of either people imbued with magic or magical creatures, which feeds into a common idea throughout all forms of FBI and serial killer fiction - that the people who hunt monsters start to take on the magical qualities of the monsters themselves.

In Control - Yes more Control videos are coming you hogs don’t rush me - Jesse Faden gains more supernatural powers as she progresses through the world of the FBC and becomes more mired in the magical and unseen reality that exists on top of the normal one. The story leads us toward the conclusion that the power used to battle against The Hiss is the same power that led them here in the first place, and furthermore that this power is an evil and corrupting influence. This trope follows the logic of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “When you stare into the abyss too long, the abyss begins to stare back” which people really like to quote a lot, so I guess it must be really meaningful and smart.

It’s a very romanticised aspect of this kind of crime fiction, that “gazing into the abyss” will somehow deeply change you, and to be clear it isn’t simply about the detectives. David Fincher uses a lot of POV shots in his work. More than are actually usually feasible. He doesn’t just do POV shots that are from the perspective of his characters, but shots that treat the camera, and therefore the audience, like an invisible person moving through a scene as well. In fact, in Mindhunter I would say nearly the majority of shots utilise this form. The show absolutely wants to let you feel like you’re being sucked in as well.

1976 and 1977 found New York City gripped with terror as a series of attacks were carried out by a serial killer known as the Son of Sam. Son of Sam particularly hunted dark haired young women, who he would shoot with a 44 caliber handgun after which he would disappear in the ensuing chaos.

The killer taunted police and journalists with letters detailing how his father Sam abused him and insisted that he kill and drink blood. At the end of one letter he says “Police: let me haunt you with these words: I’ll be back! I’ll be back [...] Yours in murder, Mr. Monster”

When David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was eventually caught, he remarked to police “what took you so long” and generally seemed to express a sincere relief at having been apprehended and later sentenced to life in prison. He would first claim that Sam was his neighbour's dog who was sending him telepathic messages instructing him to kill, before later admitting to profilers that he was deliberately pretending to be schizophrenic to throw off the police.

Post-arrest, Berkowitz was allowed to talk to the press, closing with a statement that “there are other sons out there, God help the world” which some read as evidence that he wasn’t working alone. Berkowitz, it turned out, was ex-military, and viewed the streets as a warzone, and felt compelled to patrol them until he found the “right girl”. With this in mind, and with the American government commonly referred to as “uncle Sam” it seems kind of odd that it isn’t a prominent focus that Berkowitz was ex-military. His relief at being captured seems to speak to a strong comfort derived from the security of institutions, which would also align with him finding Jesus in prison later in life.

Berkowitz’ childhood showed some signs of potential trouble, such as starting fires, but he didn’t suffer abuse or trauma in the same way as the archetypal serial killer. According to psychologists, it was David’s discovery that he was adopted that shattered his identity and sense of self. Here, it might be interesting to consider the role of the army, an institution which happily imposes its identity onto young, impressionable recruits and actively seeks out people who feel lost and directionless in life - why it’s recently started marketing to Gamers.

The uncomfortable thing here is that the identity of soldier may have been Berkowitz’ mould in which he formed Son of Sam.

Which all leaves me with some questions: How many serial killers have we never even noticed because their murders are state-sanctioned? How many go unconnected into a pattern because they are hate-crimes? How many Sons does Sam have?

It feels like psychological profiling of violent criminals is a sleight of hand which puts mental illness at the absolute forefront of what makes serial killers kill. It makes monsters out of the mentally ill, particularly the schizophrenic, those with DID, and in a lot of cases treats queerness like a spooky mental illness too. It’s so strange that it puts sexual obsession, bad relationships with mothers, dressing in women’s clothes and misogynistic violence right in our faces, and yet we’re never asked to consider misogyny as a social issue.

One theory about what had caused Dennis Rader to become the BTK strangler that John Douglas details in Inside the mind of BTK was that Wichita had been founded by a cruel colonialist searching for the city of gold who tortured a Native American slave for information, and that ever since Wichita has been a place that turned people cruel and violent. I mean, it’s obviously nonsense, but if you wanted to make a connection between the violence in society then and the violence in society now you could. Moreover, if you’re going to talk about Dennis Rader’s mental health, his fixation on women, his fetish for causing them pain and suffering, and ignore the deeply misogynistic society we live in, maybe you might as well go with the theory a spooky ghost turned him evil with magic.

An answer that stories won’t give because stories are about dramatic tension, is perhaps to form a society that doesn’t produce serial killers.

In Madness & Civilisation Michel Foucault details the history of sanatoriums and mental institutions, and how they removed the mentally unwell from society, a practice previously very unusual. Now if you’ve read any Foucault you can probably guess ahead that he goes on to compare this to a prison. I think this is a pretty interesting comparison, especially as policing in general treats criminality so much like a disease, and psychological profiling quite literally merges criminality and mental illness into one thing.

As Foucault points out, before the sanatorium people with poor mental health simply existed in and amongst the rest of society. We can see something analogous in the contrast between the evolving militarised modern police force and the methods of community policing, conflict resolution, mediation et cetera that people practiced for thousands of years beforehand, and even that indigenous groups still practice today. In The End of Policing Alex Vitale writes about how some places are moving to adopt replacements to policing that are inspired by indigenous practices.

Reductive and flippant opposition to this idea might say something like right so we’re just supposed to have violent killers live with us, and there are a few things to consider about this point. Firstly, it takes a village, right - or to explain better, and take the crime-as-disease metaphor a little further, maybe individual psychology is just treating the symptoms and not the cause. Secondly, we already have violent killers live amongst us. The common mythology of the police is that they have to be tough to deal with the bad people - to fight the monsters, you need to become a little monstrous, sometimes when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also, right?

But how does this square with the fact that serial killers really commonly seek out positions of authority and power, either in the military, police, or any lower station they can achieve? Ted Bundy was a Lawyer, BTK and Son of Sam were in the army. BTK was a city code enforcer who would whip out a ruler and measure people’s lawns to insist they mow them. He would force people to euthanize their dogs unnecessarily, for the sick power trip. How do we reconcile the idea that we need big scary monsters to protect us, with the apparent trend that this just attracts more monsters?

In Douglas’ writing he repeatedly talks as if it’s surprising that serial killers would like rules and order, but I think to someone who isn’t - pardon my rampant bigotry here - a cop, it isn’t that weird. Douglas’ basic assumption is that on one side sit orderly folk, upstanding citizens and police, and on the side stand anarchists, criminals and serial killers. To non-cops though, it doesn’t seem all that huge a leap to understand that connection.

John E Douglas ends out the book with some musings on the death penalty, explaining how someone who he had just played the tape recording of a rape-tortue-muder to changed their position to agree with the death penalty. Big win in the marketplace of ideas.

He goes on to talk about how crime can never be eliminated completely, and “if neurology could one day identify violent impulses as morphological structures or electrochemical impulses, would that remove personal responsibility completely? And if it did, what kind of moral society would we be living in?”

Personal responsibility might never be completely removed, but societal influence can be looked at, and is currently almost totally ignored. It’s funny, Douglas repeatedly focuses on the narcissism of serial killers - on their tendency to look outside of themselves for explanations as to why they did what they did. Obviously this is worth pointing out. When for example a man blames a school for not quickly reporting children missing and not himself for abducting those children, that is ludicrous, but I find it an amusing contrast that we so casually look at men who feel a compulsion to murder women and almost never ask if we’re doing something that contributes to that.

Individual psychology puts so much focus on the way that mothers, especially single mothers, raise men who turn out to be serial killers. We’re more inclined to blame the mothers of serial killers than the misogynistic society they exist within, because it’s quite an uncomfortable thought, that to a radically different mind, misogynistic violence might be a kind of rational response to an extremely misogynistic society.

Ultimately it feels like our cultural obsession with serial killers, and in particular with psychologically profiling them contains a sort of existential horror. Forever pushed forward by contradictions: the need to understand serial killers more deeply while simplifying them into monsters; the need to figure out what made them this way while ignoring systemic reasons - we move from case to case, crime scene to crime scene, forever unable to scratch an itch that we can neither forget nor comprehend.