My project was born, rather fittingly, out of a twitter thread on the Christchurch shooting, as well as our conversation regarding online mourning. The thread stood out to me in the fact that it did not name the terrorist, but rather gave a tweet to each victim, filling the timeline with information about the deceased without even referencing how they were killed. Normally, we know so much about the terrorists themselves rather than the victims, and it was refreshing to see such an inversion. The thread got me thinking about what other victims could use such a treatment, what people have been buried by history in favor of their killer. My mind immediately turned to serial killers. As a casual true crime fan, I’m guilty of preserving the legacy of a murderer and paying the victims only lip service. I know the names of many serial killers, and not a single name of one of their victims or even what their victims looked like.
As I began to work on my project, I became interested in why we, as a culture, are so obsessed with serial killers. Many theorists have already turned their attention to this question, thinking both about actual serial killers and media depictions about serial killers. I think it is important to state that “killing is invested with a high degree of sexual significance” (Hantke 179). While this significance is usually expressed through a man killing a woman, reinforcing and reenacting the trauma of misogyny, the sexual significance can be found in crimes committed for and against any gender. Our obsession with serial killers mirrors our cultural obsession with sex, reified by the sexual crimes many serial killers include in their modus operandi. The voyeuristic element of serial killer entertainment should not be overlooked either, as “we were seduced by being permitted to see, while we were assured of our safety by being kept from seeing it all” (Hantke 178). We are protected by the knowledge that we are not the serial killer’s victims and reclaim power through that—perhaps indicating why so many true crime fans are women. Perhaps we are also interested in the idea of a troubled psyche as “the serial killer is far more fantastic than the murderer in conventional detective fiction; one is ostracized for what he did, the other for what he is” (Hantke 181). Serial murderers represent to us both a taboo and an intellectual conundrum, two ingredients which are sure to lead to cultural obsession.
The media depiction of serial killers naturally follows our obsession in a way that begins to feel wholly American. Not only have “Americans, in particular, developed a fascination with both real and imagined stories about serial killers,” but the overwhelming majority of serial killers have been active in the United States (Roy 90). Perhaps the tensions between individual and community that the American Dream fosters has created a perfect environment for our obsession to flourish. Linnie Blake argues that
mass cultural representations of mass, multiple or serial killer as a means of exploring the contradictions that lie at the heart of culturally pervasive models of American national identity […] set out to explore ideas of murderous criminality as a psychological dysfunction predicated on the individual’s inability to reconcile his personal perceptions, motivations and desires with the democratically agreed empirical norms of the cooperative and conformist society that surrounds him. (Blake 103)
One might even argue that the American Dream is actually realized in the actions of the serial killer as “these criminals give a certain subjective clarity, a certain down home, grassroots ‘I can kill too’ – and therefore ‘I too exist’ – scenario to what has become an increasingly abstract, fragmented, and dysfunctional project: the American Dream, freedom as the Founding Fathers conceived it” (Conrath 145). Is serial killing an inherent part of the American experience? Blake argues that serial killers are only the latest iterations of our violent and exploitative history; “he is a monster who evokes the complicity of the American people with the nation’s history of genocidal slaughter while retaining a certain aura of individual freedom existing putatively beyond the bounds of civilised life” (Blake 112). Blake’s point is emphasized by the fact that many victims of serial killers are in some way marginalized or exploited, which the murderer is able to take advantage of.
When creating this project, I was conscious of the notion that “in some ways any form of media coverage of serial killers glorifies hatred and violence in their most extreme forms” (Roy 90). Despite purposefully not putting any mention of the serial killer onto my twitter, all the victims were still connected by a thread, and that connection was an unnamed person who killed them. Media has created a fascination with serial killing which has in turn lead to a “wound culture: the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 3). As mass media has become more pervasive, so has the graphic presence of serial killing. “If television is the social subconscious, a sort of serialized super ego that reflects our hopelessly linear cultural stasis, then the serial killer, who functions in the same mode of repetition, is the most logical, dysfunctional, psychotic extreme of which we, serialized victims, are capable” (Conrath 149). Just as serial killing is uniquely American, so too is it uniquely ties to mass media, feeding off the media frenzy to fulfil the cyclic nature of the news. By refusing to name the serial killer which tied the victims together, along with only including information about the victims unrelated to how they died, I hoped to break the cycle of media glorification of serial killing. There were many difficulties, mainly involving how few information we have on the victims I was looking at.
Serial killer narratives, much like horror films, “can help us to articulate the fear of transgression” (Hantke 193). We’ve dealt with such transgressions in class, both regarding horror as well as in the space of grieving. “RIP pages are often open to anyone interested in participated, making them ostensibly private but effective public social spaces” (Phillips 2). By focusing on how the victims died, we as a culture are taking a personal/private event and turning it into a public spectacle, adding to the transgressive and taboo allure of serial killers. “Serial killing has its place in a public culture in which addictive violence has become not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public space cross” (Seltzer 3). Mourning and remembrance on social media involves taking something private and making it public, which becomes exacerbated and twisted when the deceased is dead at the hands at someone famous. Their death is further publicized and then made all about their murderer. While “most memorials mentioned survivors of the deceased,” memorials for victims of serial killers talk almost exclusively about how they died and the serial killer, rendering the actual victim a mere plot point (Graham et al 39). Graham et al refers to personal memorial sites for a friend or family being “performed online with a potentially sizable living audience,” but the idea of a performance of grief is also weighty when considering all of the sites which I found that were ‘dedicated’ to the victims of serial killers, while in fact only spoke of the manner in which they died (Graham et al 50). Though such performances are not limited to famous murders not just our country, “we here in the U.S., as families, as communities, and as a nation try to forget death and the dead, try to forgo mourning by ritualizing it” (Naas 86). Prior to the Christchurch shooting, every news outlet seemed to cover tragedy the same way—by focusing on trying to figure out the mentality and life of the perpetrator and potentially lionizing one or two of the victims while ignoring the rest. I wanted to break out of this cycle intentionally, and I believe I was able to do so by highlighting victims who are already highly marginalized and erased by the media.
The first victims I looked at were killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys in the Wisconsin area in the late 80s and early 90s. The majority of men he killed were black or brown and many of them were picked up outside of gay bars. Due to the fact that his victims were queer men of color, it took a very long time for the police to take the crimes seriously and catch Dahmer. In fact, at one point, a 14 year old boy escaped Dahmer’s apartment and the police were called, but the police believed Dahmer’s claims that he and the boy were lovers and so they let Dahmer take the boy. Konerak Sinthasomphone then became his 13th victim. Sinthasomphone was victimized by Dahmer, who knew no one would believe him, and marginalized by the police. “The media discovered that Glenda Cleveland, the mother of one of the girls who had called the police on Konerak’s behalf, had followed up on the case when she heard news reports that a Laotian teenager was missing by calling law enforcement authorities to report what she and her daughter had seen. No officer ever returned her calls” (Roy 105). Dahmer understood that as a white man, he had power over his victims and exploited that. And still, it is Dahmer’s face we recognize in photos, not Sinthasmphone’s. Indeed, Jody Roy further explains this point;
Yet what did we ever really know about his victims? At most, we remember Hicks as the first, Konerak as the one who nearly survived, and Edwards as the one who brought a halt to Dahmer’s killing spree. But that is virtually all we know about them, and even that is tenfold more than we know of the other fifteen lives Dahmer brutally cut short by feeding his insatiable hunger for perverse sexual fulfillment. (Roy 107)
The only things we know about the victims are the aspects of them which are central to their death. How can we remedy this? Narratively, “we need only to glance at the standard spin on the Dahmer story to realize that Jeffrey Dahmer himself is cast in the role of active character” (Roy 11). Clearly, we need to reframe the story that the news media is telling. By casting Dahmer in the lead role, we further remove agency from his victims. By reporting on the full life on the victims, rather than how they met their demise, we can humanize the victims instead of the killer.
I chose to put photos of the victims in my tweets, believe I would be able to further humanize them. Sontag identifies photographs as tools of power, though she places the power in the photographer’s hands, rather than in the hands of the subject being photographed. While I agree that in many cases, “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed,” Sontag fails to acknowledge the cultural power of the iconic (Sontag 14). Most people could recognize Jeffrey Dahmer from a picture, or at the very least Charles Manson, but it is unlikely that they could identify any one of Dahmer’s victims. By granting Dahmer iconic status, we have granted him influence which we have denied his victims. In this way, photos of the victims are not artifacts of violation, but rather a response to Dahmer’s cultural legacy. Because my main focus has been Dahmer, I feel I must mention his own photo collection of his victims—by refusing to acknowledge those pictures in my project, I hope to reinscribe agency to the victims by portraying them as they wish to have been seen, rather than how their killer wanted them to be looked at.
My second twitter thread contains victims of a serial killer who has yet to be identified, known as the West Mesa Bone Collector. Very few people know about this tragedy, both because there is no serial killer to glorify in the news, and because his victims were predominantly Latina sex workers. I found very little information online, both about these victims or Dahmer’s, to the point that I was unable to add any additional information to some of their memorial tweets. I did, however, make a point to only include positive information, not in an attempt to erase their lives, but in an attempt to lift up what other outlets ignore. I hope the positive spin did not reduce them, but rather counteracted what the media has done. I left the Twitter itself rather blank, allowing people to inscribe whatever identity they wanted onto the writer. The grey background allows the photos to really stand out, giving readers something to focus on without getting distracted, as they might on Facebook. Twitter felt like the right medium for this project given the limited information that I had, as well as the fact that I hope Twitter continues to be a space to honor victims, as it was for the Christchurch shooting.
Works Cited
Blake, Linnie. “All Hail to the Serial Killer: America’s Last Frontier Hero in the Age of Reaganite Eschatology and beyond.” The Wounds of Nations, Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 101–20.
Conrath, Robert. “The Guys Who Shoot to Thrill: Serial Killers and the American Popular Unconscious.” Revue Française d’études Américaines, no. 60, 1994, pp. 143–52. JSTOR.
“Dahmer Victims and Their Stories – Non Graphic.” Imgur, https://imgur.com/gallery/MrmJn. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 37–53.
Hantke, Steffen. “‘The Kingdom of the Unimaginable’: The Construction of Social Space and the Fantasy of Privacy in Serial Killer Narratives.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 1998, pp. 178–95.
Jeffrey Dahmer | Victims | Murderpedia, the Encyclopedia of Murderers. http://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/dahmer-jeffrey-victims.htm. Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.
“Jeffrey Dahmer, Part 5- 924 North 25th Street Murders.” Silence Unhinged., 11 Feb. 2018, http://silenceunhinged.com/serial-killer-files/jeffrey-dahmer/part5/.
Journal, Albuquerque. Victims of the West Mesa Murders. https://www.abqjournal.com/community-data/west-mesa-murder-victims. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.
Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 33, 2003, pp. 75–96.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 12, Nov. 2011.
Roy, Jody M. “Glamorized Hatred: Our Obsession with Serial Killers.” Love to Hate, Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 89–113.
Seltzer, Mark. “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere.” October, vol. 80, 1997, pp. 3–26.
Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, 1977.
“West Mesa Homicide Investigation.” City of Albuquerque, https://www.cabq.gov/police/contact-the-police/west-mesa-homicide-investigation. Accessed 28 Mar. 2019.