The Cereal Killers Lucky Charm

I'm kind of a serial killer hipster. I was a fan before they were popular.
Well, not a fan, but I was intrigued by the macabre, and now they have absorbed enough American kitsch that they are corn on the macabre. (That pun is for Dave White).

Before I read The Silence of the Lambs I was a gore punk who read about Ed Gein and watched Faces of Death and thought I was so cool because I knew about killers like Albert Fish and had read the journals of Carl Panzram, one of the earliest documented psychopaths. It's a sheltered suburban kid thing. And while I did grow up on the literal wrong side of the tracks (see photo), those tracks were in the town where Martha Stewart graduated high school, so they were relatively cushy, even if we had a superfund site, played soccer on a former quarry capped with landfill, and found gay porn novels and used contraceptive sponges behind our grammar school.

After Hannibal Lecter nibbled his way to America's heart, serial killers were everywhere in movies, books, and TV shows as the go-to bugaboo, and they have stayed at the top ever since. The FBI profiler and self-salesman John E. Douglas wrote a bunch of books with Mark Olshaker expounding his genius, and ignoring all the times his "profiles" failed, like with the Baton Rouge serial killer Derrick Todd Lee, who was able to avoid capture while the police looked for a white man, because the victims were all white women, and we were told that serial killers--ahem, SK's, sorry, gotta use the lingo--preferred victims of their own race. This would later stymie attempts to capture the D.C. sniper, as well. I'm not saying that it isn't a good rule of thumb, but when you use it to automatically exclude suspects, you need to take into consideration that profiling is not a hard science.

I was an acolyte of Mr Douglas for a while, and even began a successful petition to keep a child murderer that he helped capture from getting early parole. So I'm going to talk about two lesser-known serial killer movies, one good, one bad, because at first glance the good one looks bad and vice versa.

The first one stars Charles Bronson in his post-Death Wish days and the second stars Kevin Kline as a brainy police sleuth. See where I'm going? I'm less inclined to think Kevin would star in a stinker, but The January Man is probably one of the most entertaining, yet badly written movies about serial killers out there. Now, the movie has a lot going for it, and if you ignore the serial killer's modus operandi, you can enjoy it. Kline co-stars with Susan Sarandon, Alan Rickman, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and the script was written by John Patrick Shanley, who also penned Moonstruck, Joe Vs. the Volcano, and adapted Doubt for the screen.  He's no slouch!

The January Man was released in 1989, so I can't imagine the screenplay being written to latch onto the success of Silence of the Lambs, which was published in 1988. Where did he get his ideas about how a serial killer behaved?

SPOILERS!

I'm about to ruin the twists of the movie, which really isn't about the twists anyway. It's about spending time with Kline, Sarandon, Rickman, and Mastrantonio, as they hunt a killer who strangles women who live in high-rises, exclusively. How does he choose them? I forgot that, honestly. But I do remember that he chooses the floor that his victims live on by pretending all the high rises in the city are a musical scale, and their windows occupy the spaces that the notes to "Calendar Girl" by Neil Sedaka.

Yes, really. Mastermind Kline manages to predict the building and the floor of the next victim because the previous ones are done to the tune, and Mastrantonio poses as bait, wearing a neck protector so they can catch the killer. And when they pull of his mask, someone asks, Who is he?
"Nobody," Kline replies. Because at this point we weren't overwhelmed with serial killers, and expected the killer to be someone we could deduce from the cast. Aha!
The movie is far from satisfying, but you get to see Alan Rickman play a painter who works in nudes, and Mastrantonio and Kline are always fun to watch. My friend JD at Radiator Heaven wrote a detailed review, if you want to dig deeper. The movie will frustrate anyone who isn't a big fan of The Cell, which was another movie with great visuals and a terrible script, where the killer gets off on drowning women in a box kept in secret locations, on a timer, while Vince Vaughn races against the clock. The part where Jennifer Lopez enters the mind of Vincent Donofrio (the killer) to unravel his psychosis and find the victim is idiotic but beautiful, like a unicorn trying to play the piano.

Oh, Vincent.

So, what's the surprisingly good serial killer movie? 10 to Midnight, starring Charles Bronson. This one was written by William Roberts, who wrote the screenplay for The Magnificent Seven, and it's lurid and sleazy, but portrays a much more realistic serial killer. Gene Davis plays the part and gives it all. He's a often a small part character actor, but this role has him glaring at photos of his mom while sucking raw eggs out of the shell, chasing victims through the park while completely naked, and otherwise gnawing the scenery with his mental torment.
Now, this doesn't mean the movie is a masterpiece. It's an exploitation slasher in the vein of Vice Squad and makes the misogyny of its killer very obvious if oblique, with Bronson scowling as he recites lines like, "this killer mistook his knife for his penis."

Bronson with the killer's jackin'-off-hammer.

To be honest, the most memorable part of the movie is the ending, which I'm going to spoil for you. Bronson catches the killer, after he leaves a bunch of naked young women dead. And being who he is, the killer has to brag that he's sick in the head and will be released soon, and come after his daughter, and "you'll see me again!"
Let me see if you can guess what Bronson says before he shoots the unarmed killer in front of everybody.
.
..
...
....
"NO, WE WON'T!"

Hurray for extrajudicial executions! Who needs laws?

So I spent all this time slamming serial killer stories. I really like Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, and feel that is the paragon of the form. I'm told By Reason of Insanity predates it, but after slogging through The Anvil Chorus by Shane Stevens, I won't be reading him again. The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood is quite good, but even modern serial killer novels often rely on lazy tropes like The Evil Foster Child and The Serial Killer Gene, when it doesn't work that way. I'd be interested in a fictional take on the BTK Killer (other than Red Dragon) now that he has been captured. His family claims to have been completely unaware of his sideline as a family slaughterer, and he was a deacon in his local church. He was able to stop, something we're told serial killers don't do.

You know what they say, sometimes you have to write it yourself.
The next book I'm working on will continue this old story of mine, The Uncleared.

Stop Telling Women How To Feel About Ted Bundy

What are you saying when you lecture women about Ted Bundy?

Last week I expressed concern with the inevitable return of the Ted Head. So it may come as a surprise that I'm deeply uncomfortable with the spate of articles, blogs, and social media posts wagging their fingers at women and girls who think Bundy is handsome or charming. I understand the compulsion, when I first stumbled into the hybristophilia community (looking for modern Ted Heads) my inability to understand attraction to serial killers and violent men colored my understanding of the women and girls who obsessively pined for them both romantically and sexually.

It's difficult to understand if one doesn't experience it, and since I don't, I had to work pretty hard at accepting the women and girls who write serial killer erotica and post collages with Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy surrounded by hearts as people who were even real, let alone worthy of my understanding. In my shock, I also discovered a deep curiosity. I dug deeper and tried to write about the phenomenon itself, and the women driving it, from a different point of view. What I found was - all the people wagging fingers at them, telling them they were sick, moralizing, and pushing them out of true crime communities only served to isolate them. In their isolation, they turn further into these communities and further from society. They don't talk to journalists because even the most open minded publications treat them as atrocity exhibitions. Many of these women see therapists, have "normal" romantic and sexual relationships, and in the current climate, where everyone is watching serial killer documentaries on Netflix, fit right in. Their sexual fascination with dangerous men is the only thing that sets them apart, but it's the thing that makes people flip out the most.

But who among us hasn't lusted for the "bad boy"? Are we judging the teenage girls who crush on Loki in The Avengers the way we're recoiling from our facebook friends commenting that, yeah, actually, Ted Bundy is kinda hot?

Our society romanticizes and dramatizes violence against women so cavalierly that we don't even notice how many of our favorite shows start every episode with a dead woman's body on the screen. We don't step back and wonder why so many true crime documentaries settle around traditionally  beautiful young women and girls as victims. We don't worry too much about the very real problem that women and girls are at more risk from the men in their lives than almost anything.

But we recoil at the idea that straight women might be attracted to dangerous men? Can we at least acknowledge that the moment a woman is attracted to a man she is attracted to someone who, statistically, has a damn good chance of being danger for her? Because when you raise women to accept that a ride home with a stranger may end in rape or murder, but also encourage us to date, marry, and love the same men offering those rides - you create a culture where at least some of us are going to be attracted to the devil we know.

No dangerous man is safer than Ted Bundy. Everyone knows exactly what he is capable of, everyone knows exactly how dangerous he is. And on top of that, the motherfucker is dead. He can be attractive, charming, and everything else because that particular dangerous man is no threat.

Is it any wonder some women find themselves pulled to that promise?


Now for the real talk: Ted Bundy was only able to kill women because women were told to be polite and help the clean cut guy with the cast. Because we still tell women not to trust their instincts, to give the guy a chance, to not be rude, to not be a bitch. So can we just agree that we won't police their feelings about whether Ted Bundy had a nice smile? That's not protection. That's harm.

Define the Crime

Having both a personal and professional interest in crime fiction and true crime can lead to some really off the wall conversations. Last week I talked about The Road To Jonestown, a book I’ve been talking about to literally anyone who will listen. If there wasn’t a line behind me when I went grocery shopping a couple days ago, I probably would have told the cashier some of the thoughts I’ve been having about Jim Jones and the members of The People’s Temple. Having a lot of smart, if sometimes pedantic friends that share the same interests also leads to conversations like “Was Cary Stayner actually a serial killer?” Or “Does a murder become a mass murder at three or four victims?”

I know it’s dark and maybe even a little gross, but it comes with the territory. This morning, after debating the differences between a spree killing and a serial killer, I decided to spend some time digging for answers.

Guess what?

There are none.

I thought I had at least found a definitive answer on Cary Stayner, a murderer from my hometown. He is routinely referred to as a serial killer but I never accepted that label. Stayner killed four people, but there were only two incidents, and two crime scenes. Psychology Today says, that makes him a serial killer in this article. But Psychology Today says it doesn’t, in this one.

All articles about mass murder agree, Stayner didn’t commit one of those - they all refer to the FBI’s definition of four or more victims at the same time and place. He killed three people the first time, and one person the second.

He definitely isn’t a spree killer, a label the FBI has decided doesn’t serve a clear purpose. The FBI believes the difference between a spree killer and a serial killer isn’t enough to change how they solve crimes - though most criminologists agree that the motivations are usually extremely different. In writing about a spree killing or a serial killer, it definitely seems different. Even more so in true crime where an effort is usually made to look at the how and why a perpetrator commits their crimes.

What’s particularly interesting is, one might say someone “went on a killing spree” but that killer may not have committed a spree killing. In 1979 when an escaped Ted Bundy broke into a sorority murdered two women and assaulted three others, it sounded like a spree of some kind. It definitely wasn’t the planned, well organized kidnapping and murder he’d repeated so many times. It was a frenzy of violence. But it wasn’t a spree. Not exactly. Referring back to the two Psychology Today articles, a spree killing has to take place at multiple locations.

I could get lost picking at these definitions and wondering at how these things can be so vaguely defined. It seems odd that crimes so serious could have such nebulous definitions - but the real question is - would knowing for certain whether Stayner was “technically” a serial killer alleviate the pain of his crimes? The FBI doesn’t see the point, from the perspective of law enforcement, of separating spree killers from serial killers, so what point does it serve among true crime fanatics or people at home watching the news? Lastly, is pedantry and debate a ruse meant to make people obsessing over the most horrible things humanity has to offer feel detached, and therefore safe?

I know the answer to at least one of those questions.

Can Serial Killers Stop?

By Claire Booth

Last week, I wrote about the Golden State Killer, a serial murderer believed responsible for a dozen slayings and more than 50 rapes throughout California in the 1970s and ’80s. Authorities recently arrested a suspect in the case – 32 years after the last homicide.

Sketches of what the suspect looked like at the time of the crimes. This poster was released as part of a huge push by law enforcement in 2016 to bring more publicity to the decades-old case.

Joseph James DeAngelo was taken into custody at his nondescript suburban home in Citrus Heights, California, a suburb of Sacramento. The 72-year-old has been charged with the 12 murders and is currently being held without bail. He hasn’t yet entered a plea to the charges.

Even before the arrest of a suspect, this case prompted an extremely intriguing question. Why did he stop? Why was the 1986 killing of Janelle Cruz the last one? The killer had an MO (premeditatedly casing and then breaking into homes, binding victims, raping them, and then killing them) that indicated he was motivated by serial desires. He perfectly fit the “classic” definition of a serial killer. 

Strong theories at that point included that he was dead or that he was in prison for other, possibly unrelated crimes. He also could have moved, out of state or even out of the country. Any of those reasons would explain why the killings stopped in California.

DeAngelo fits none of these explanations. He’s not dead, he was not in jail or prison during this time period, and he worked for almost 30 years at a grocery distribution center that was mere miles from where the first East Area rapes occurred in the ’70s. 

So what happened? If DeAngelo is indeed the Golden State Killer, why did he stop? It’s a bigger issue that experts have given a great deal of thought.

“It has been widely believed that once serial killers start killing, they cannot stop. There are, however, some serial killers who stop murdering altogether before being caught. In these instances, there are events or circumstances in offenders’ lives that inhibit them from pursuing more victims. These can include increased participation in family activities, sexual substitution, and other diversions.”

This comes from an FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit report that is based on a symposium with investigators, mental health professionals and forensic specialists. Other experts interviewed in response to DeAngelo’s arrest agree.

“These are not acts that a person is compelled to do,” University of California, San Diego, forensic psychologist and psychiatry professor J. Reid Meloy told the New York Times. “They are intentional and predatory. There is choice, capacity and opportunity that is exercised.”

There are a few examples to point to:

• Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, murdered ten people from 1974 to 1991 in and around Wichita, Kansas. He wasn’t caught until 2005. During police interviews, he admitted to engaging in auto-erotic activities as a substitute for killing.

• Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, killed 48 women in the Seattle area during the 1980s and 1990s, leaving their bodies near the Green River south of the city. He had been married three times. During the first two marriages, he killed regularly. During the third, which was a happier union, the killings dwindled. One pause between murders lasted eight years. He was arrested in 2001 and later confessed.

DeAngelo’s first daughter was born just after the 1981 killings of Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez in Goleta. The next Golden State Killer-linked slaying didn’t happen until five years later. If DeAngelo is guilty, would that life event have played into the gap between murders?

Of course there is another, darker, question hovering over all this. What if he didn’t stop? What if he just changed his MO enough to make connections to past crimes more difficult? Now that they have a suspect whose history and whereabouts they can comb through, authorities assuredly are looking into that very carefully.  

The Golden State Killer

By Claire Booth

The nation has been riveted lately with the arrest of a suspect in the case of the Golden State Killer, who raped and murdered his way through California forty years ago and then disappeared more completely than almost any other serial killer in history.

But the rest of the country’s got nothing on the Sacramento area. This is where he started, breaking into homes and raping women. Known then as the East Area Rapist, he eventually upped his game by deliberately choosing houses where a man was home as well. In all, he was suspected in 27 rapes and five additional attempts here from 1976 to 1979.

If you lived in the eastern suburbs of Sacramento during that time, you have a story. Fathers kept baseball bats by the side of the bed. Families slept together in the living room, thinking it was safer. Gun sales skyrocketed. Children weren’t allowed outside. Each story is personal, not abstract. The fears were well-founded, and present night after night. The monster could quite literally be at your door.

And it turned out he was that close. Joseph DeAngelo lived mere miles from the scenes of the first reported rapes. The 72-year-old was arrested on suspicion of murder April 25 after law enforcement traced DNA left at crime scenes to a familial match in a database. And Sacramento reeled. The alleged killer lived here quietly for decades. And so a whole lot of us – including me – turned out on Wednesday to hear more about the only major book to be published on the case: Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone In The Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer.

The event was held at ground zero – the Barnes & Noble only miles from where DeAngelo lived in the suburb of Citrus Heights. More than 450 people packed the place. I got in line at 4:30 p.m. for the 7 o’clock event. The prime chair seating was long gone, but I ended up with a semi-good standing spot. 

As everyone who’s paid even a bit of attention to all this knows, McNamara died in 2016, before she was able to finish I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Her widower, comedian Patton Oswalt, has been on a publicity tour for the book, which was doing pretty darn well when it was released in February. (I’ve started calling this time period B.A. for “before arrest.”) Then DeAngelo was arrested. And now in the A.A. (after arrest) time period, the book and anything associated with the case has gone through the stratosphere.

Oswalt appeared Wednesday with the two collaborators who finished the book after McNamara’s death, researcher Paul Haynes and journalist Billy Jensen. They answered a wide range of questions from the audience, with Oswalt differing the more technical queries to the other two. He focused on his late wife and smiled when asked what he thought she’d be doing with DeAngelo under arrest.

“I’m a clown speaking on behalf of a crime fighter,” he said. “I can’t even begin to list what she’d be doing right now.”

I think she’d absolutely be following the DNA aspect of the case. Because, wow. This has such huge implications. A Contra Costa sheriff’s investigator created a fake profile on an open access DNA website called GEDmatch and uploaded the suspect’s DNA profile, which came from bodily fluids left at multiple crime scenes. (This is very different from well-known sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, which require an actual saliva sample and not just a on-paper profile, to help ensure fake profiles aren’t created.) There was enough of a familial match in the GEDmatch database for authorities to start tracing a family tree. That eventually led to DeAngelo.

The people who spoke Wednesday night were all clearly for using this kind of investigation to solve crimes. One person blithely dismissed privacy concerns. “Do you think people who feel that way will cause problems?”

“I think there will be some push back,” Haynes said, but within five years he thinks it will become standard. Okay. Having that opinion is one thing, but then he said this: “Who wants to be on that side, waving the flag for privacy and defending a monster like this?”

This is where I pause to catch my breath at the staggering incongruity and conceit of that statement. Being for privacy means you’re defending a rapist/murderer? Um, no. And one more time – hell, no. One does not equal the other. Haynes flat out demonized anyone with a legitimate concern about where this kind of genomic access is headed. This is pretty much brand new legal territory, and no one is served well by such blanket, inflammatory statements.

We’ll all be hearing a lot more on the DNA issue as DeAngelo’s charges proceed to trial, because I guarantee it will be litigated for years. As will the rest of the case. The crimes DeAngelo is charged with make him eligible for the death penalty, although no decision on that has been officially reached. Capital cases in California typically take years to reach a verdict, and this one has the added complication of involving four different counties and four different elected district attorneys with high stakes in where the case is tried and who takes the lead.

DeAngelo is charged with 12 murders. He is not charged with any of the fifty rapes attributed to the East Area Rapist. This was another subject many in Wednesday’s crowd were eager to address. In the 1970s, when the rapist began his serial attacks, the statute of limitations on those kinds of crimes was fairly short. This was, which Oswalt pointed out and I agree with, a generational thing. Those kinds of assaults were not treated as seriously as they are today. Now they’re considered quite serious, and there’s the recognition that technology continues to evolve and could one day crack a case that was unsolvable before (much like DNA has already done).

Haynes said he thought the statute of limitations on rape would change or be done away with in the next 10 years. I wish he’d had the right information, because time limits on rape cases have already been wiped from the books in California. The new law went into effect Jan. 1, 2017, for rapes that occur after that date, or any such crime that occurred before that date where the previous 10-year statute of limitations hadn’t expired. It would’ve been great for the overflow crowd hanging on his every word to have learned the correct information that night.

Afterward, people lined up for signed copies, still talking about the surrealness of a suspect being found almost within walking distance of the bookstore. One woman said she’d read the book at night and was scared by it. Then DeAngelo was arrested. “Then I was more scared knowing he had lived a mile from me my whole life.”

Have questions about this case? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter @clairebooth10, or on my Facebook page, and I’ll answer them next week.