October 20, 1994: Vol26n7: SerIal Killers... Mad, Bad, Dangerous

A researcher at UB says that the public identifies less with the
victims of serial killers than with the killers themselves, and that
this identification is served by lurid, often inaccurate depictions of
the killers and their crimes churned out by the popular culture.
	David Schmid, a scholar of cultural representation and
lecturer at UB, is the author of a forthcoming book, the working title
of which is "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Serial Murder in
Contemporary American Culture."
	The book looks not only at who serial killers are, but who we
think they are and why we may need to hold specific assumptions about
the killers and their victims.
	The serial killer, a character unheard of 20 years ago, is now
part of our social mythology, says Schmid. While serial killers are
real, he says, the publicly held "idea" of the killers often is not.
It is a creation of our popular culture as represented by tabloid
television shows, horror novels, true-crime books, newspapers, news
magazines, television movies and talk shows.
	These vehicles grossly - and erroneously - generalize about
the motives, proclivities and psychological makeup of serial killers,
Schmid says, and, in doing so, concentrate on crimes that are
particularly perverse and have odd sexual twists.
	He also has found cases in which the body politic and the
popular press apparently created serial killers out of the whole
cloth, refusing to examine evidence to the contrary, and then pitched
the story to the public.
	After reading reams of popular accounts of this crime and
watching hundreds of hours of television and film depictions, Schmid
says it seems very clear that although the public and the authors in
question claim to identify with the victims, they actually identify
very strongly with the killers.
	He says this may be because we can enjoy a vicarious
expression of our own rageful impulses through the constant
reexamination of such acts. In order to help us accept these feelings
without guilt, however, we need to reassure ourselves that "we" are
nothing like the killers themselves.
	Schmid says this is where popular culture steps in again,
taking discrete pieces of information from many cases and
"constructing" serial murders and serial murderers as a unique
phenomenon. It describes characters not like us, but like a phalanx of
cannibals who wander the landscape randomly snatching young,
attractive victims.
	 Such terms as "sex-crazed," "maniacal," "sadistic loner" and
"torturer," he says, describe only some of the country's serial
killers. They don't describe mundane and often more prolific members
of the group, like Donald Harvey, the health-care worker who smothered
57 elderly patients, or Dorothy Puente of Sacramento, who killed many
of her lodgers.
	 "Actually," says Schmid, "serial killing has the same causes
as other forms of violence. It's on the extreme end of the sexual
violence continuum, it's true, but we're all on that continuum
somewhere, and so are our fantasies.
	 "Lurid terms and gross overgeneralization paint the subject
in terms that promote feelings of helplessness and fear, but give us a
certain amount of release for our own craven urges toward our fellow
man."
	 Schmid's book looks at historical and socio-political aspects
of serial murder, concentrating on popular culture representations of
four sensational and particularly disturbing cases. They are the
Aileen Wuornos case (which he calls "a railroad"); the Atlanta child
murders (Schmid does not believe Wayne Williams is guilty, but a
victim of class bias and Atlanta's loss of convention business );
Jeffrey Dahmer ("called a sadist but was much kinder to most of his
victims than many male heterosexual serial killers"), and Ted Bundy
("a principal model for our popular culture construction of the serial
killer").
	Nobody knows for sure how many serial killers there are, but
estimates are down from what he calls the "wildly inflated" figures
reported in the popular press just a few years ago. Nevertheless,
Schmid expects to see an increase in such killings because an increase
in vulnerable groups like runaways, the homeless and itinerant workers
has increased the population of available victims.