Killers on the Loose - Crimetime (original) (raw)

Hypnotist , Philosopher, Serial Killer, Friend: A Critical Review of Ian Brady's The Gates of Janus

The Gates of Janus, a confessional-philosophical book by the British 'Moors Murderer,' Ian Brady, presents one of the very few prose offerings by a "serial killer." Stephen Milligen mentions a manuscript supposedly penned by John Wayne Gacy and submitted to Doubleday titled A Question of Doubt (149) but along with Charles Nimo, Milligen doubts that anyone ever actually published the work. 1 Brady's The Gates of Janus, in large part, attempts to smash certain cultural illusions about serial killers, while contradictorily arguing for our recognition of the importance, if not necessity, of the serial murderer in contemporary society. In this way, Brady takes the enlightenment of his reader as the goal of his text, and the book functions paradoxically as both an expose and a how-to guide. Nonetheless, Katherine Ramsland dismisses Brady as a "postmodern nihilist" (166).

Capote's Ghosts: violence, media and the specter of suspicion

In 1959, on the Kansas high plains, two ex-convict drifters fell upon a defenseless farm family, slaying them ‘in cold blood’. As the subject of a book widely regarded as the first of the modern true crime genre—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood— the murdered and murderers live on in the spectral, haunting the minds of the public as the horrors of random crimes and senseless violence. Paying close attention to the cultural production of both the present and absent, this paper considers how violence haunts commonplace geographies and the imaginations of everyday actors, through the lens of banal crime reporting and celebrated true crime novels. Doing so, it offers unique context and insight into the production of suspect identities and the social insecurities that underpin everyday life. http://www.travislinnemann.com/capotes-ghosts.html

Why was Myra Hindley evil?

As a young woman implicated in the torture, sexual abuse, and murder of children, Myra Hindley is frequently described as ‘the personification of evil’ and as ‘pure evil’ itself. However, despite her status as ‘the most hated woman in Britain’, she has received little sustained academic attention. Similarly, the issue of evil more generally has largely slipped under the radar of contemporary sociology. This paper aims to contribute to both these areas by exploring why, even after her death, the image of Myra Hindley has remained fixed in the public sphere as ‘the feminine face of evil’. It is argued that her position as the ‘icon of evil’ was the result of a process that included: the social, cultural, and political context that both followed and preceded her crimes; the public reaction to the uncertainty that this provoked and the need to rationalise that uncertainty; and, the need maintain and reify moral ideals of both good and evil within wider society. Therefore, the labelling of Hindley as evil was both a product of its time and, by providing the contextual cues from which to read the evidence, a means of understanding any potential uncertainty around the case.

Serial Murder, Serial Consumerism: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991)

Bret Easton Ellis is a representative blank fiction writer whose novels deal with violence, indulgence, sexual excess, decadence, consumerism and commerce. In American Psycho (1991) he focuses on the phenomenon of the serial killer. The aim of this paper is to look into the ways in which the seriality of the serial killer’s murders is linked to the seriality provided by different forms of mass culture: talk shows, daily news, advertisements, pop music, magazines and consumerism in general. Our society’s never-ending serial consumerism is mirrored by the serial killer’s never-ending killings. Taken to its last consequences, consumerism includes everything, which dehumanises people and blurs the difference between consuming objects and consuming human beings. The concept of seriality is deeply embedded in our culture, and is shared by serial killer fiction, mass cultural productions, and by consumerism, which may account for the current popularity of the serial killer.

Inside/out: private trauma and public knowledge in true crime documentary

Screen 45 (4) Winter: pages 401-12, 2004

This article examines Our Father the Serial Killer (Court TV/Everyman, 2002) as one example of a growing number of 'true crime' documentaries that focus on the 'fallout' of crime, attending to its victims, bystanders or witnesses as the victims not simply of crime but of the traumatic event in the heart of the community.The phrase 'true crime' is usually used quite broadly to include any true accounts or case studies of real crime and its aftermath. It often refers to documentaries using an investigative mode either to 'solve' or to recall the details of notorious murders or other atrocities. In this context, however, I am referring to a far smaller band of films and programmes that explore the aftermath or 'fallout' of the crime and its status as traumatic event. The latter type would include films by Errol Morris such as The Killer Inside Me (2000) and Joan Dougherty, Crime Scene Cleaner (2000), Nick Broomfield's Aileen: the Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) and, most recently, Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans.