While serial killers can be found leering behind everything from cat-eye glasses to horn-rimmed spectacles, the glasses of Jeffrey Dahmer have certainly come to define the look. After the whole.
Movies and TV shows like Dexter are constantly trying to outdo themselves with over-the-top serial killers (a Hannibal episode featured a killer who turned his victims into musical instruments - no, really). But real killers are just boring assholes with crippling mental illnesses and no scary gimmicks.
As we've a few times, the real world occasionally gives rise to murderers so terrifyingly crazy that if we saw them in a horror film, we would instantly write them off as utterly ridiculous B-movie cheese. The following people and their bone-chilling exploits are totally real, and at least three-quarters of them are totally still alive. Had a well-documented history of clownfuck lunacy, beginning when she tried to strangle her first husband to death on their wedding night for daring to only have sex with her three times before falling asleep. When he finally left her, Knight took their infant daughter and dropped her on a stretch of nearby train tracks (the baby was rescued by a hobo), then rampaged through town threatening random strangers with an ax. She later went on another rampage, slashing a woman's face and forcing her to drive to a service station, where Knight took a little boy hostage until the police arrived and beat her into submission with brooms, because law enforcement in Australia is apparently hilarious. None of this is the crazy part of her story.
WARNING: READ AT YOUR DISCRETION - HERE IS WHERE THIS ARTICLE TAKES A DETOUR STRAIGHT INTO HELL. AAP via No worries, mate! Knight eventually met a father of three named John Price and they moved in together, despite the fact that Price was well aware of her explosive fits of inexplicable slobbering Looney Tunes rage. Price wound up kicking her out and filed a restraining order against her, telling his co-workers that if he ever failed to show up for work, she had probably killed him.
He then gallantly allowed Knight back into his house for sex and fell asleep beside her, which suggests that Price perhaps didn't completely understand how restraining orders are supposed to work. Knight underscored this error by stabbing Price 37 times.
When Price didn't show up for work the next day, his co-workers called the police, who showed up at Price's house to discover. Knight had draped his skin, completely intact in a single piece, over an S hook in a doorway like a vanity curtain in Leatherface's house. Price's head was boiling in a pot on the stove, in two place settings with name tags indicating that they were meant for Price's adult children (although the kids weren't expected, so she probably should have covered the plates with tinfoil). Cliff Blank/iStock/Getty Images BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU GET ANTS!
He even creepily typed a message on one 12-year-old girl's computer, thanking her for the evening of boner-flogging her bedroom had provided for him. Gerri Weatherbee/Northumberland Today via You don't get medals by being rude. All told, Williams committed over 80 underwear burglaries, frequently breaking in while the unaware owners were at home (he once sprinted naked into a woman's house to ransack her unmentionables drawer while she was in the shower), and he kept a meticulously organized library of thousands of photographs like these hidden in the basement of his house: These were found filed under 'C' for 'Christ, Jesus Tittyfucking.'
That was when Williams decided to open up the throttle on his crazy and graduate to full-blown kidnapping and murder. He broke into the houses of two different women,. Then Williams broke into the house of, beat her into submission with a flashlight, and brutally murdered her, videotaping every horrific moment of his crime and taking enough photographs to fill an album. He also stole huge amounts of her clothing and underwear, because, as we've established, underwear was his maniac catnip.
Finally, Williams kidnapped a woman and took her out to a cottage he owned, where he terrorized her for an entire day before ultimately killing her with the same flashlight, because apparently he believed 'flashlight' meant 'bludgeon that occasionally helps you see in the dark.' He recorded four hours of video of the crime and collected several more photographs and articles of stolen clothing, strengthening his bid for the title of 'Scariest Canadian in History' (although he's facing stout competition in this very article). Julie Oliver/Postmedia News via No word on a Maglite endorsement deal yet.
A millionaire pig farmer in British Columbia, murdered anywhere between six and 50 prostitutes from the Vancouver area, cut up their bodies, and fed them to his pigs. And once again, that statement is actually the least insane part of his story.
AP via Pickton, seen here sporting the standard issue 'hatchet face' provided by the serial killer union. Pickton would cruise around the seediest areas of Vancouver, luring hookers back to his sprawling pig farm (any invitation that includes the phrase 'Come back to my pig farm, where I butcher pigs' should be immediately refused) with the promise of money and drugs, where he brutally murdered them and dismembered their bodies for creative disposal. Pickton didn't just feed the bodies to his pigs, though. He kept the head, hands, and feet of some of his victims bundled up in refrigerators around the farm. He mulched some of his victims in a wood chipper.
And investigators are almost 100 percent certain that he lumped human remains together with unusable pig parts (like intestines, blood, and bones) and took them all up to a rendering plant in Vancouver to be processed into things like lipstick, shampoo, and soap, which reveals two horrible truths about the cosmetics industry. The point is, Pickton didn't believe in simply disposing of bodies - he liked to spread his evil around like a murderous Johnny Appleseed. Ian Lindsay/CanWest News Service via Lacking a proper saucepan, Pickton settled for wearing a colander on his head. Meanwhile, the Vancouver police department simply didn't give a shit about the disappearing women. They reasoned that all the women were drug addicts and had either wandered off to other cities or died anonymously of overdoses. One of Pickton's victims actually managed to escape the pig farm, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, and prosecutors dismissed the subsequent attempted murder charges against him because the most important descriptor of Robert Pickton at this time was 'millionaire.' Pickton was eventually brought to justice when an employee came forward with damning testimony that led to a full-scale investigation, and he received a life sentence.
Meanwhile, Canadian officials did their part to calm a community repulsed by both the killings and the notion that they might have consumed pork fattened on human remains by,' thereby eliminating the chance of catching any diseases from the murdered prostitutes and confirming that authority figures in British Columbia are terrible at crisis counseling. Darryl Dick/The Canadian Press via They're not there to point fingers. Magdalena Solis was part of an elaborate scam involving two grifters, the Hernandez brothers, who were bilking the small farming village of Yerba Buena, Mexico.
That sounds pretty tame compared to the other stuff on this list, but let's just say that at some point things got a bit. Who had a wealth of Incan gold the gods wished to share with the village, but the only way to appease the gods was to bring regular offerings of money and cleanse their bodies of demons.
And the only way to cleanse their bodies of demons was to have sex with the Hernandez brothers. Like, all the time. LittleBee80/iStock/Getty Images Only someone with no experience cleaning semen stains would choose the word 'cleanse.' The villagers weren't terribly bright (for instance, ), but after a while they did grow tired of having sex with the Hernandez brothers with absolutely no sign of their promised bounty of gold. So the brothers recruited a prostitute named Magdalena to pose as a reincarnated Incan goddess inexplicably fluent in 20th century Spanish. They revealed Magdalena to the villagers in a puff of smoke during one of their cave rituals, and Magdalena immediately fell perfectly into character by demanding that everyone have sex with everyone else and drink from goblets of chicken blood garnished with marijuana leaves. When the villagers inevitably got bored with Magdalena, still wondering where in the blue hell their gold was, she responded by ordering two of her 'doubters' stoned to death in the ritual cave.
And at this point, it went from a cheap 'sex and money for promises of gold' scam to something else entirely. Hell hath no fury like a trio of sociopaths being denied stolen goods and sex. The victims' blood was gathered in the ceremonial ganja goblets and consumed. And thus Solis and the Hernandez brothers had discovered a bulletproof way of perpetuating their scam - kill a villager or two every so often as a blood sacrifice and the others will be too terrified to voice any doubts. Who knows how long the scam might have continued had a random teenage boy not walked by the cave on his way to school and spotted Solis and her absurdly desperate followers. The boy ran like hell to the nearest police station, and a patrolman followed him back to the village to check it out, because he apparently hadn't seen enough horror movies to know what happens to cops when they go investigate strange murder caves by themselves. LaserLens/iStock/Getty Images 'Everything looks to be in order here.'
When the officer didn't return, the police decided to posse up and rolled into the village to discover his body hacked to pieces and his heart removed. The boy had also been killed in the same horrifying Temple of Doom fashion. They cornered Magdalena's cult in the ritual cave and arrested most of them, although the Hernandez brothers were killed in the ensuing shootout. Solis and her surviving followers were tossed in state prison for 30 years. The Incas remained in Peru, where they had been the entire time. Nannie Doss stayed married to her second husband, Frank, for 16 years, during which time she probably killed her newborn grandson by stabbing him through the skull with a hatpin and definitely killed her older grandson with a generous dose of poison. Frank, for his part, was an abusive drunk, and Doss eventually got sick of him and dumped rat poison into his whiskey, which is a recognized but generally frowned upon cure for assholes.
Doss got married three more times, and each husband wound up dying mysteriously. She even killed her third husband's mother, just after poisoning him and burning their house to the ground to keep it from going to his family. In between her fourth and fifth marriages, she moved in with her cancer-stricken sister and poisoned her, too, because why the hell not? 'Might as well kill my own mother while I'm at it,' she presumably thought, before doing exactly that. At this point, the authorities must have assumed that Nannie Doss was shrouded in some ancient mummy curse, because the only other explanation is that they were all terrible at their jobs. The Springfield Union via To be fair, budget cutbacks severely limited the number of Magic 8 Balls made available to police officers.
1 Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo Murdered People for Black Magic /aldegonde/iStock/Getty Images was a former apprentice to a Haitian priest who blossomed into a master-level Crazy Mage armed with the legitimate belief that he had the power to see the future and cast powerful spells, provided he kept his black magic cauldron well-stocked with sacrificial human body parts. He had a cult of devoted followers to fulfill this task for him by kidnapping (mostly) random people and torturing them to death to appease Kadiempembe, a devil-like figure and the bestower of his magical gifts. We assume this same demon was responsible for granting him the handsomest Emilio Estevez mullet in recorded history. And just a hint of Sean Astin. Yeah, that's not how you were picturing him, was it? Constanzo was a warlock for hire, in Mexico. He stewed human brains, blood, bones, and guts in his cauldron alongside scorpions, spiders, and other witchcrafty totems to create spells to make his clients invisible to police detection and invulnerable to gunfire.
You take some arachnids, throw them in a pot, add some water and a brain - baby, you got a potion goin'! Even the drug dealers were afraid of Constanzo - when one cartel refused to make him a full partner after they'd enjoyed so much success with his spells, seven of their members mysteriously disappeared, turning up several days later floating in a river with fingers, ears, hearts, brains, and freaking spines removed, like they'd been attacked by the goddamned Predator. Constanzo had a handful of other rival drug traffickers fed to his cauldron and even had a member of his own cult hacked into dark wizard porridge to set an example for the rest of the team (the example being 'We should probably find other jobs').
The heat didn't really come down on Constanzo until his group kidnapped and mutilated an American college student, at which point the U.S. Government put intense pressure on Mexican officials to solve the crime.
Police followed a member of Constanzo's cult to after the man blew through a checkpoint, and they found remains of 15 people buried along the property. The missing student's brain was discovered floating in a potion in Constanzo's cauldron, presumably waiting to be graded by Professor Snape. Presentation counts, Adolfo. Constanzo's gang was hunted down and arrested, and Constanzo himself was finally cornered in an apartment surrounded by 180 police officers, because magic probably isn't real, but we aren't taking any fucking chances.
Rather than allow himself to be captured, Constanzo instructed one of his henchmen to shoot him. The police discovered the evil wizard's body riddled with bullets, because apparently that henchman wasn't taking any chances either. Reid Ross is a columnist at and mangles comics with friends. Ross is also the proud father of a brand new baby Twitter account that you can coo. Do you have a cell phone with a camera?
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People call him the Killer Clown. While it’s true that John Wayne Gacy Jr. Was both a killer and a clown, there’s no evidence that he murdered any of his 33 victims while wearing a clown costume.
Gacy dressed up as his alter egos, Pogo and Patches, for parties, or sometimes to entertain children at nearby hospitals. “When he was creepy and going to kill you was when he was dressed normally,” says Rachael Penman, exhibits and events manager at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment. An exhibit at the museum displays the clown costumes alongside Gacy’s plain black leather jacket, juxtaposing the two sides of Gacy’s divided nature. “When he was good, he was the best of good,” wrote Gacy’s defense attorney, Sam Amirante, in an email, “but when he was bad he was the worst of evil.”. John Wayne Gacy’s black leather jacket and clown costume represent two distinct parts of his identity.
(Julie Beck) If you were to carefully calibrate your fear of being murdered according to statistics, you should be 12 times as afraid of your family members as of serial killers. Less than one percent of murders in any given year are committed by serial killers, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s report on serial murder; in 2012, 12.5 percent of murders were committed by victims’ family members.
Sadly, tales of domestic violence zoom in and out of the news so frequently that they rarely capture the public’s attention, and when they do, they don’t hold it for long. Meanwhile, Gacy’s story, along with those of other serial killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and David Berkowitz, are remembered even decades later: They’re so well-known that we continue to hear casual references to them in pop culture. For example, in Katy Perry’s recent song “Dark Horse,” Juicy J raps, “She’ll eat your heart out/like Jeffrey Dahmer.” Dahmer, who was known for cannibalizing his victims, committed his crimes between 1978 and 1991, and was, nearly 20 years before “Dark Horse” was released.
In his new book, (out October 28), criminologist Dr. Scott Bonn attempts to solve some of these mysteries. “My question is: What can we learn from these individuals?” he says. “What can we learn about ourselves? People are drawn to understanding the dark side, and the dark side is part of the human condition.” This desire to see into the mind of a serial killer can be a powerful attraction.
At the Crime Museum, I met a 59-year-old tourist named Joanne Marvel who described her lifelong fascination with crime. A recording of a police siren blared around us as she told me how her grandfather used to read crime magazines, and how her father claimed to have met Al Capone once in Chicago during the heyday of organized crime. “For me it’s about how their childhood affected what they did later,” Marvel said. “I think a lot of people think that way—they want to know why the killer got that way rather than what he did. It’s more about why he did it.”. As retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Carbone told Bonn when asked about the public’s interest in serial killers, “The why is the wow.” Or in the words of Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist and author of numerous books including, “It’s not really about the victims. It’s more about the puzzle—the interesting labyrinth of human emotions and human motives.” What made serial killers this way?
Why did they kill, and why did they do it so gruesomely? How are they different from us?
( Please let them be different from us.) These are complicated, compelling questions. But here, at the outer boundaries of the human condition, are realities that resist our understanding.
In the public imagination, serial killers tend to fit a certain stereotype: “They’re all men, all white, all evil geniuses or mentally ill; they want to get caught,” Bonn said, listing the most prevalent myths. Even the serial killer exhibit at the Crime Museum claims, “Over 90 percent of serial killers are white males.” Jewelry made by in prison Albert DeSalvo, the 'Boston Strangler,' who was convicted in the 1960s of killing 13 female victims, in many cases with their own stockings. (Julie Beck) In reality, Bonn says, “they are actually far more nuanced, far more varied than the general public realizes.” The racial breakdown of serial killers is about the same as that of the U.S. Population at large, according to the FBI.
Based on the, which includes data on nearly 4,000 killers, just 46 percent of serial killers since 1910 have been white men. It’s not hard to see why that misconception exists, though: Many of the serial killers who become cultural legends are white men. Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, and Berkowitz were all white, as were Gary Ridgeway (the “Green River Killer”), and Dennis Rader (“Bind Torture Kill”).
The Zodiac killer, while never caught, was described as a white male. Richard Ramirez, or the “Night Stalker,” is one well-known non-white killer—he was the son of a Mexican policeman—but as Ramsland points out, he became infamous largely because he “had the whole Satan thing going.” (He drew pentagrams on his hand and occasionally shouted “Hail Satan” during his trial. Fairly attention-grabbing behavior.). When police pulled over Ted Bundy in this Volkswagen Beetle in 1975, the car was filled with suspicious items including garbage bags, an ice pick, a flashlight, gloves, handcuffs, and a mask made out of panty hose. (Museum of Crime and Punishment) “It’s almost as if we have a canonical group, and anyone who comes after that is just seen in that context,” suggests David Schmid, a professor of English at the University of Buffalo who has studied serial killer celebrity and the popularity of true crime in the United States. Bonn has a few theories about why white male killers get more attention.
Female serial killers tend to kill by less-gory methods—poisoning rather than shooting—which makes their stories less sensational. Aileen Wuornos, the killer portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster, murdered with a gun, and Bonn believes that is a key reason for her fame. Only about 9 percent of serial killers since 1910 have been women, according to the Radford database. But 40 percent have been African American, and few of those have achieved celebrity status.
Bonn notes that most serial killers tend to kill within their own race, and that white victims, especially white female victims, usually get wider media attention. This means their killers, who are likely white as well, consequently get more coverage. Another unfortunate possibility is that killers who target minority victims are just less likely to get caught, due to disparities in police resources. “Serial murder investigations are complicated, time-consuming, and very expensive,” Bonn writes.
“Although it may not seem fair, affluent white neighborhoods are given priority over poor, black, or Latino neighborhoods by state officials in the assignment of valuable policing resources. This negatively impacts the ability of law enforcement personnel to pursue serial murder cases in poor racial minority communities.”. Just as there are misunderstandings about who serial killers are, there are false assumptions about how they got this way. Another prominent myth involves three specific warning signs: bedwetting, cruelty to animals, and setting fires.
The Macdonald Triad, as it’s sometimes called, originated from a small 1963 study in which psychiatrist John M. Macdonald analyzed 100 of his violent patients at one psychiatric hospital. Ramsland calls it a “small, poorly-designed study”: Later research refuted the idea that the presence of these childhood traits necessarily predicts violent behavior. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to identify a serial killer in the making. The FBI reminds readers in its report that there are a lot of factors that go into influencing human behavior.
Just as it would be impossible to describe all of the reasons a person decides to get married—or makes a far more mundane choice, like having pizza for lunch—it’s impossible to explain all the reasons why a person chooses to kill. Yet the stereotypes live on, making it easier for the public to file serial killers away neatly in their mind-cabinets, clearly labeled for easy reference. “I think it comes down to how a seemingly ordinary person can develop into an extreme offender,” Ramsland says. “We’re hoping the answer is that they’re not seemingly ordinary to start with, that they’re set apart in some way that we’ll be able to identify and eventually treat.
We want them to be deviant monsters.”. Zodiac author Robert Graysmith, shown here with a series of cryptographs used by the Zodiac Killer, that his obsession with unmasking the murderer destroyed his marriage.
(AP Photo) The serial killer is a quintessentially American figure. According to the Radford database, there have been more than 2,600 serial killers in the U.S. England, the country with the next highest total, has had 142. Schmid, who is originally from the U.K., says that while there are serial killers in other countries, because the rates of violence in general, and serial killer violence specifically, are so much higher in the U.S., “a difference of degree becomes a difference in kind,” and people are led to “see serial killers as prototypically American.”.
The U.S.’s high rates of violent crime may also be the reason certain killers become more famous than others. When the news is filled with gun violence every day, another murder by firearm doesn’t necessarily stand out. But when killers stab, torture, rape, and even eat their victims, that’s attention-grabbing, even to a desensitized nation.
“I’m so immune to gun violence at this point,” says Penman, the exhibits and events manager at the Museum of Crime and Punishment. “But get out a knife and start stabbing people, and I’m traumatized. It’s different. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”.
These stories also capture the public’s imagination because they have elements of the most gripping fiction: high stakes, danger, mystery, heroes, and a villain who ultimately gets his comeuppance (or, in a case like the Zodiac Killer, eludes the law and remains an enigma). “It’s sometimes difficult to draw a hard and fast boundary between reality and fiction,” Schmid says. “True crime shows often use fictional techniques to dramatize what they’re showing, and fictional shows draw upon real stories to give themselves authenticity.”. Jeffrey Dahmer is escorted into the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in July 1991. Dahmer, who was found guilty of murdering of 16 young men, was sentenced to life in prison. (Reuters) This is why Bonn believes the public experiences no meaningful difference between real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and fictional serial killers like Hannibal Lector from The Silence of the Lambs. “They are equally scary and entertaining,” he writes.
And fiction and reality do bleed into each other: Buffalo Bill, who collects victims’ skin in Silence of the Lambs, was based in part on real-life killer Ed Gein, who kept a collection of women’s body parts. Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic serial killer who was apprehended in 1991, was compared endlessly to Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector, particularly since the film version of Silence of the Lambs came out that same year. Even the news media plays into this tendency to paint serial killers as storybook villains. For his book, Bonn did a little media analysis. He looked at articles mentioning serial killers in The New York Times and Time magazine between 1995 and 2013, and searched within them for the words “devil,” “monster,” and “evil.” In both publications, 35 percent of articles contained one or more of those descriptors. “Even in, arguably, the most credible publications out there, they’re buying into this monster narrative,” Bonn says.
“The narrative of good and evil is something that we are taught, and we fit things into that.” Bonn invokes the sociological concept of anomie, a state in which a society’s norms and rules are broken and confused (in this case, the norm of “not killing people”). When a serial killer is at large, people flail about looking for moral guidance, Bonn says. “We demand answers. What we get back from the media and law enforcement is: ‘Evil has come to our town, but don’t worry about it, we’re going to conquer evil.’ That narrative in some ways is reassuring, but it’s reassuring in a way that’s not real. It’s an oversimplification, but it’s done so that we feel better.”. It’s a reductive story, but a useful one.
The good-versus-evil/monster-hunt narrative is a way to manage the incomprehensible. Evil doesn’t need to be understood, just eliminated. So the desire for answers is satisfied; the burden of parsing a killer’s complicated motivation falls away. All the messy details are composited into a single figure: the serial killer. This boogeyman-like entity has become less of a threat than a stock character, useful for selling publications and spicing up fictional stories. A note found in August 1977 in the car of 'Son of Sam' killer David Berkowitz, then 24 years old (AP Photo) The public fascination with serial killers can seem callous at times—especially when the stories are real, but even when they’re imagined.
However, research suggests that people who enjoy graphic, frightening stories can have a variety of motivations. A 1995 study on why adolescents watch horror films found that “gore watchers,” who professed to enjoy the blood and guts, tended to have low levels of empathy and a strong need for adventure-seeking. “Thrill watchers,” who watched the movies to get the adrenaline rush of being scared, had high levels of adventure-seeking, but also high levels of empathy. Gore watchers tended to identify with the killer and not the victim, while thrill watchers tended not to identify with either killers or victims—they were captivated mainly by the excitement and the mystery. “If the real serial killer comes knocking on your door, then it has real implications,” Bonn says. “But until then, it’s just entertainment.”. David Schmid has another theory about why people find serial killers entertaining, one that’s not necessarily flattering to American audiences.
Procedural shows like CSI or True Detective may attract viewers simply because of the drama and the plotting, he says, but in other recent shows like Dexter and Bates Motel, the criminals are the protagonists—the characters people are supposed to identify with when they watch. People both fear and admire criminals, he says, because they live outside the bounds of laws and social conventions. “For all kinds of reasons, people are not very honest about why they consume these types of products,” Schmid says. “But I really do believe that part of it is this fascination with people who don’t obey the rules and put themselves first, always. It’s not that we want to go around murdering people, but we wonder what life would be like if we could just do whatever we wanted.”. Paints belonging to John Wayne Gacy Jr. Shortly after his execution in 1994, a truck parts dealer in suburban Chicago 25 of Gacy's artworks for $7,300 and then invited relatives of Gacy's victims to watch them burn in a giant bonfire.
(National Museum of Crime and Punishment) It’s been many years since any new serial killers were added to the canonical group. That’s not to say there haven’t been any:., who killed victims he met via Craigslist, and Anthony Sowell, or The Cleveland Strangler, both got some media attention. But none of these recent criminals have attained true celebrity status. There is no modern John Wayne Gacy.
Today, Schmid argues, the fear of being randomly attacked is provoked less acutely by serial killers than by terrorists. Under the right conditions, he says, the public could certainly be whipped into a frenzy by a serial killer again. But for the most part, “post 9/11, terror has come to have a more specific, more political meaning.
That’s why terrorist attacks get a lot of coverage at the moment, because they allow people to ask if this is the defining crime of the time.” As the most infamous serial killers slip farther and farther into the past, people are able to look at them through a more detached, historical lens, as “examples of Americana,” Schmid says. According to Eric Hickey’s book Serial Killers and Their Victims, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were 40 or so films about serial killers, real or imagined.
From 2000 to 2008, there were more than 270, though he notes that more than half of those were straight-to-video releases. These stories get told and retold, calcifying as they go, shedding the pesky details that don’t quite fit into the mold we’ve come to expect, until we’re left with the familiar, archetypal story: that of the white male serial killer whose everyman exterior hides a twisted, violent alter ego. Killers who don’t fit are forgotten or ignored—as are, all-too-often, their victims. This post originally stated that Scott Davis was the name of the Cragislist killer.
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