Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (29 page)

The 1960s also, of course, represented a revolutionary period during which the struggle for minority and women’s rights registered significant gains. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act ensured African Americans the franchise, while acts of civil disobedience had crippled, if not destroyed, Jim Crow’s hold over public life in much of the nation. In 1966 the National Organization for Women (NOW) became instrumental in defining the political program of second-wave feminism that found expression in struggles for reproductive freedom and economic justice. By 1965 the small but growing gay and lesbian rights movement held public political demonstrations for the first time. The escalation of the Vietnam War in 1968 galvanized college students into mass protest of every aspect of American institutional life.

By the early 1970s even those who had participated in the revolutionary struggles of the 1960s felt a growing sense of unease over the direction of American society. Incremental change had come with great effort and yet many elements of American life remained essentially the same. The desegregation of public schools proceeded slowly with many parts of the American South only moving to unitary school districts in the early 1970s. Controversy and violence erupted over busing and housing in the urban North. The pace of change seemed glacial to a generation that had sung of wanting a revolution.
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In the midst of the seemingly glacial pace of change, the feminist movement won a major victory in the 1973
Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court decision. This decision can also be regarded as the beginning of the “culture wars”
and the birthday of the “Religious Right.” The newly enthused Right created the Reagan Counterrevolution of 1980, a movement that fused a libertarian ideology of limited government that pleased big business with a raw, ahistorical assertion of “traditional values” that appealed to Nixon’s silent, and often very religious, majority.
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Shadows quickly fell on the landscape despite Reagan’s assertion of “Morning in America.” Although serial murder has played a significant role in the history of American crime since the founding of the nation, an uptick in its frequency is noticeable in the 1970s. Many analysts have argued that this was a return to the normal number of seemingly random homicides after a brief post-World War II decline. Others have noted that the growth of media—print, televised, and electronic—simply made statistics gathering easier. Even with the surge in serial murder cases, they only represented between 1 and 2 percent of the total number of homicides in the United States each year during the 1980s. Given that the United States has the highest murder rate of any industrialized nation, this still accounted for a significant number of deaths.
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Although statistically tiny, serial homicide and its perpetrators became, during the Reagan years and beyond, the subject of a mountain of books and films. Sociologists and criminologists examined the phenomenon from every angle. Probably the majority of material on serial murder came from so-called true crime authors, such as Ann Rule, and from FBI agents who sought to publicize Bureau efforts at hunting down psychotic killers. These accounts often portrayed the serial killer as a monster who threatened not only the lives, but also the values, of middle-class Americans. These accounts, sometimes purposefully, provided ammunition for conservative proponents of a return to traditionalism.
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By the Reagan years, FBI profilers became the most prolific source of popular information on the serial killer. In 1988 FBI agent John Douglas, a significant figure in the Bureau’s efforts to profile serial homicide, appeared in a television special called “The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper.” Douglas claimed that he had profiled the Whitechapel killer “as an asocial white male, perceived by others as a quiet shy loner and probably with a heavy-drinking promiscuous mother.” Douglas’ description represented the FBI’s basic template of a serial murder, one that defined it exclusively as a male activity with its origins in oedipal drama. Profilers held onto this definition with ferocity as the Bureau increasingly defined itself as the American institution best able to deal with this new American monster. Douglas inculcated future FBI agents with his views through a coauthored training manual called
Sexual Homicide
. He also
became a best-selling author with books like
Mind Hunter
,
Journey into Darkness
, and
The Cases That Haunt Us
.
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FBI agent Robert Ressler did more than any other public figure to invest the serial murderer with traits the uneasy public would fear the most. Ressler organized a decade-long study of serial murder in the 1970s, and in October of 1983, helped put together an FBI-hosted press conference that announced his findings. At this conference, Bureau officials declared a firm link between serial murder and sexual sadism. For reasons not at all obvious, alternative sexuality had to be a part of the serial killer’s profile. The definition of a serial killer, Ressler argued, could not include any murders or series of murders that took place because of “greed, a fight, jealousy or family disputes.”

The Justice Department’s highly restrictive definition excluded all but a very tiny percentage of homicides in the United States. The 1983 news conference, however, had the effect of generating a panic over an alleged epidemic of serial murder. Roger Depue, head of the FBI’s behavioral science unit, promised that the FBI would give closer attention to open and unsolved cases. He noted that 28 percent of the nation’s 20,000 murder cases went unsolved each year, and that the percentage was rising. Depue at least implicitly suggested that these unsolved cases were the work of serial killers. Media sources immediately began to suggest that serial killers were responsible for 4,000 murders every year.
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In the wake of skewed reporting, wildly inflated statistics began to appear everywhere.
Newsweek
and
Life
magazines speculated about “hundreds” of serial killers at large. At least one novelistic account of an FBI training session had a Bureau official make the absurd claim that the typical middle-class American has “about a 37 percent chance” of crossing paths with a serial killer. In truth, the small number of Americans who did become the victims of serial killers came from groups marginalized by American society, including sex workers, drug users, and the homeless. The typical middle-class American had about as much chance of being in an airplane crash over the ocean, surviving it, and then being killed by sharks as falling into the hands of a Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy.
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Panic over serial murders created an appetite for stories about their adventures, making “true crime” authors like Ann Rule immensely popular. Rule had written on mass murderers since working for
True Detective Magazine
in the late ’60s. During most of the 1970s she wrote pieces on brutal murder for a number of unlikely venues, including
Cosmopolitan
,
Ladies Home Journal
, and even
Good Housekeeping
. Her 1980 book
The Stranger Beside Me
detailed the crimes of Ted Bundy, a prolific serial
murderer who beat and strangled at least thirty-five women between 1974 and 1978. Rule continued to write accounts of serial murder as public interest crested in the late 1980s and literally hundreds of imitators put out their own chilling accounts of serial murder.
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These narratives gave America a new creature to fear. Images of the serial killer in true crime, television police procedurals, films, and even official police accounts invariably used the term monster to describe the killer’s activities. In her book
Lust Killer
, Rule notes that “convoluted medicalese” might seek to explain the psychological underpinnings of serial murder but that to “the man on the street,” they are “always a monster.” Robert Ressler has portrayed himself again and again as a “monster hunter,” writing books with titles like
Whoever Fights Monsters
and
I Have Lived in the Monster.
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While asserting the inherent monstrosity of the mass murderer, almost all popular images simultaneously used the language of sickness and psychosis, tracing the emergence of the murderous impulse to childhood trauma or oedipal confusion. Ann Rule, so insistent that we see the serial murderer as “always a monster,” finds in Ted Bundy’s unstable childhood the seed of his crimes. Two books on Ted Bundy, one by Stephen G. Michaud and the other by Hugh Aynesworth, share a similar contradictory stance. On the one hand, they assert that Bundy had an inner madness that he hid with “a mask of sanity.” On the other hand, they take issue with a Florida attorney who had argued that it is too common for our culture to think of the criminal as a “hunchback, cross-eyed little monster slithering through the dark” rather than a human being. Michaud and Aynesworth disagreed, writing that “the slithering hunchback” did live inside of Bundy, uncontrollable and irredeemable.
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Serial killers in popular culture appear as both evil monsters and insane maniacs who have suffered childhood trauma. This obviously represents two warring discourses united in the same terrifying figure. Insanity suggests a severe mental disability, one that could perhaps receive and respond to various therapies. A monster is, however, beyond the ken of human experience. Monsters cannot be treated and rehabilitated, only destroyed.

The term monster seems remarkably imprecise if we want a word to describe people like Gein, Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, and other well-known criminals. After all, the monsters Americans have encountered include sea serpents bubbling out of the ocean, Bela Lugosi in eveningwear, Lon Chaney Jr. in yak hair makeup as the wolf man, and goblin-like extraterrestrials in flying saucers. The term has been elastic enough to include all sorts of phenomena beyond the normal range of
expectations and experiences. The friendly sea serpent would seem to have little to do with Ed Gein happily sewing his skin suit by firelight on a wintry Wisconsin night.
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The serial murderer, sick psycho and malevolent beast, is very much like these earlier monsters in one very significant way. Mass murderers as “monsters” takes us back to Judith Halberstam’s argument that the monster is a meaning machine. The monster absorbs meaning out of its historical context and, in turn, invests that context with meaning. In the case of the serial murderer, we have a new sort of creature that owes its existence to the struggle to define the cultural direction of America in the wake of revolutionary social change.

The definition of the serial killer as “sexual deviant” offered a new cultural image on monstrosity, a powerful tool for emerging forces in politics and society that sought to counter the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and the emerging struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Combining a discourse of madness and monstrous evil made the serial killer into a powerful symbolic construction of all that had gone wrong since Woodstock. A “sick” and “degraded” society produced monsters.
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Sex and the Single Serial Killer

In the 1984 presidential race, Ronald Reagan made an assertion of allegedly traditional moral values central to his campaign. Reagan declared that “promiscuity” had become “stylish” and transformed a “sacred expression of love” into something “casual and cheap.” This claim went hand in hand with Reagan’s rhetorical war on poor single women (he coined the term “welfare queen”) and his opposition to abortion. His supporters in the Christian Right, represented by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell, asserted that America had gone into social and political decline because of the gains of the social protest movements of the 1960s.
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Descriptions of the serial killer phenomenon reflect this deeply conservative representation of America’s plight. Ann Rule, for example, suggested that the seed of Bundy’s sexual murders had been planted in the unstable environment created by his unwed mother who moved frequently and pretended to be his older sister (allegedly to be more attractive to sexual partners). This alleged connection between a “sexually promiscuous society” and the serial killer persisted. By the 1990s even dating guides hinted at a connection between being sexually active and serial murder. The enormously popular 1995 dating and relationship guide for women entitled
The Rules
not only argued for a neotraditional relationship in which “the man must take charge,” but told young women to “never get into a car with a man you meet at a party;
you might end up in his trunk.”
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The FBI profile of
the serial killer as sexual sadist invited conservative commentators to connect the dots between the dangers of sexual revolution and the brutalities of wanton murder. A 1984 article in the
New York Times
reported that “many officials” believed that an increase in serial murders had some link with “sweeping changes in attitudes regarding sexuality that have occurred over the past twenty years.” A 1984 article in
Omni
described the possible profile of a serial killer as “homosexuals who kill their anonymous partners after sex.”
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Conservative commentator Joel Achenbach in the
Washington Post
went even further. Achenbach saw the serial murderer as a kind of divine judgment, “the price we pay for slavish devotion to individualism, mobility, the right to buy smut, the right to ignore one’s neighbors even when they seem weird.” Achenbach’s latter comment is especially revealing. While suggesting that Americans needed a more communitarian spirit, he implies that the primary reason one might want to pay attention to the neighbors is to keep tabs on their weirdness. Increasingly, this weirdness would be read in sexualized terms.
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