EBOOK
About
In this classic study, Elliott Leyton challenges the conventional idea of serial murderers as deranged madmen. He explores the twisted — but comprehensible — motives of a half-dozen notorious killers: Edmund Emil Kemper, Theodore Robert Bundy, Albert DeSalvo ("The Boston Strangler"), David Richard Berkowitz ("Son of Sam"), Mark James Robert Essex, and Charles Starkweather. In the process of describing their crimes Leyton exposes the cold rationality that underlies their apparent pointlessness. The result is startling: a revelatory text on a deeply troubling topic.
Chapter 1
The Panic
A great wave of anxiety hit the North American public during the mid-1980s. New incarnations of serial and mass killers seemed to be among us everywhere, and we were no longer safe. The newspapers, television, magazines, books, films, and the Internet all dwelt in frenzied detail on these "new" killers while, as always, providing no context for understanding the phenomenon. To compound matters, the hysteria was legitimized by a U.S. Department of Justice proclamation that there were as many as one hundred multiple murderers killing in America at any given time, stealing the lives of thousands each year.
It was as if a bloodthirsty race of space aliens had come to live among and prey upon us. The intensely publicized cross-country rampages of kidnapping and sexual murder perpetrated by Ted Bundy on young university women (or believed to have been committed by Henry Lee Lucas), or by the lesbian killer Aileen Wuornos as she prowled the highways of Florida, or by James Huberty's murderous siege of the McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, all seemed a declaration that what had in the past been a rare and isolated event was now the norm. We lived in an ugly new moonscape in which cold and remorseless killers stalked the land, invaded our homes, and murdered our loved ones.
To make the killers even more memorably frightening, the media, police, and public together often gave them nicknames. To Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, the Boston Strangler, and the Moors Murderers we now added the Nightstalker, the Green River Killer, the Hollywood Freeway Killer, the Son of Sam, the Vampire Killer, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Hillside Strangler, and the Singing Strangler, to name but a few. Thus the names sensationalized the unthinkable and contributed to the emerging national panic about crime—an anxiety that would be skilfully manipulated by both radical special interest groups and conservative "law and order" politicians.
Yet these claims of a new kind of menace were misleading. Far from being a new phenomenon, multiple murder had been with us for centuries; and far from suddenly and exponentially increasing, there had been a modest but consistent increase in rates throughout the twentieth century. But all was now brought to life by officialdom, television, and film.
Chapter 1
The Panic
A great wave of anxiety hit the North American public during the mid-1980s. New incarnations of serial and mass killers seemed to be among us everywhere, and we were no longer safe. The newspapers, television, magazines, books, films, and the Internet all dwelt in frenzied detail on these "new" killers while, as always, providing no context for understanding the phenomenon. To compound matters, the hysteria was legitimized by a U.S. Department of Justice proclamation that there were as many as one hundred multiple murderers killing in America at any given time, stealing the lives of thousands each year.
It was as if a bloodthirsty race of space aliens had come to live among and prey upon us. The intensely publicized cross-country rampages of kidnapping and sexual murder perpetrated by Ted Bundy on young university women (or believed to have been committed by Henry Lee Lucas), or by the lesbian killer Aileen Wuornos as she prowled the highways of Florida, or by James Huberty's murderous siege of the McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, all seemed a declaration that what had in the past been a rare and isolated event was now the norm. We lived in an ugly new moonscape in which cold and remorseless killers stalked the land, invaded our homes, and murdered our loved ones.
To make the killers even more memorably frightening, the media, police, and public together often gave them nicknames. To Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, the Boston Strangler, and the Moors Murderers we now added the Nightstalker, the Green River Killer, the Hollywood Freeway Killer, the Son of Sam, the Vampire Killer, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Hillside Strangler, and the Singing Strangler, to name but a few. Thus the names sensationalized the unthinkable and contributed to the emerging national panic about crime—an anxiety that would be skilfully manipulated by both radical special interest groups and conservative "law and order" politicians.
Yet these claims of a new kind of menace were misleading. Far from being a new phenomenon, multiple murder had been with us for centuries; and far from suddenly and exponentially increasing, there had been a modest but consistent increase in rates throughout the twentieth century. But all was now brought to life by officialdom, television, and film.