The Sensationalizing of Serial Killers Avoids the Source Problems

Content Warning: This piece contains discussion of rape, and other extreme violence toward women, with some instances being less vague. 

Netflix just released a documentary about Richard Ramirez, colloquially known as The Night Stalker. A lot of the different horror outlets and associated groups, Twitter accounts (etc.) I follow have had long comment threads about it and him. I was about to post this in one of those, but I'm not wading into those threads because they're overwhelmingly weird mythologization, and I don't have the energy to deal with the need for turning reality into illusion, so I'm just making a post about it. Given the resulting conversation, I can't bring myself to indulge in the documentary. 

I've always been fascinated by what scares us, collectively, and it just happened that in my formative years, serial killers scared the shit out of us. There were tons of serial killer movies and books, fiction and at least nominally, non-fiction. I read a lot about serial killers, into my 20's. As a kid, vampires and werewolves, demons and face sucking aliens were of course fiction. Serial killers were monsters from reality, so I was genuinely curious about where monsters came from. People thought it was weird. I thought it was weird people so easily accepted the idea that monsters were real, though I couldn't articulate it that clearly until I stopped caring to try and articulate it.

Richard Ramirez is possibly the best example of the thing about serial killers, and the kind of celebrity they acquire, which is most infuriating. With very few exceptions (Jeffrey Dahmer being the most glaring), serial killers come from backgrounds which include strong dedication to patriarchal gender ideals (even when it's a female figure who is instilling a strict patriarchal sense of gender) and exposure to real life violence as children. This is also overwhelmingly true of serial rapists, who are statistically the most likely people in the world to become murderers AND serial killers. It's also true that most rapists are serial rapists, but because of the nature of the way we deal with and talk about rape as a culture, the majority of them are never prosecuted. Sit with that one for a second... It's genuinely terrifying... Among the people least likely to be apprehended by police or tried in court are the people most likely to commit the most violent crimes in a serial fashion. But ya know, we have to deal with broken windows in protests and all that, so I guess it's a wash. 

With Ramirez there's a connection between the easily sensationalized aspects of his case which make him an obsession of media and therefore people obsessed with serial killers, and also what made him comparatively easy to catch. He was as dumb as a box of rocks trying to mate with a bag of hammers. Ramirez wasn't some kind of evil genius, by any stretch of the imagination, despite the shadow he casts on popular culture. Of all the portrayals and representations of Ramirez, it's amazing American Horror Story which got it most correct. The guy was dim. 

In extremely rare instances, someone is caught and prosecuted for this variety of crime who does seem to be an example of some kind of genuine evolutionary or environmental anomaly. They don't come from a background with strict enforcement of patriarchal gender norms and there isn't a readily known example of being exposed to violence. They are the exception to the rule. The majority of the people who commit these serial crimes are made by parts of our society which have been acceptable and a not insignificant portion of society is currently fighting to make more acceptable. They are made by people who instill patriarchy, patriarchal gender roles and believe in violence as an acceptable method of social control.

It's really rare to see any of this dealt with directly in examples of popular media dealing with serial killers, including the documentaries. It gets some kind of passing mention or is part of the subtext for people who are interested in subtext. You have to be the type of obsessive who reads or watches the popular media, and then starts looking at what kind of academic material you can get your hands on, but the anti-intellectual streak which also accompanies patriarchal masculinity tends to frown on that.

We don't have much real conversation about the level and different types of violence which are produced by that simple combination of strict patriarchal gender norms (specifically the norms and taboos of masculinity), and exposure to violence in childhood. It's even generally avoided where we do have representations of one of the things which speaks to this primal fear in basically all of us, the serial killer. That's how hard we will work to not recognize and address the waterfall of issues which come with patriarchal masculinity, and its violence.

The majority of serial killers and serial rapists are never connected with the serial nature of their crimes. They often end up in jail related to other crimes or even a single instance of their serialized crimes. They get arrested for a rape or a murder or an assault, and the other instances just never get connected or if they do, it's not unusual, especially in rape case, for it to be after the statute of limitations runs out... And we're not talking about evil geniuses. Ramirez stands out and we know who is he is because of the sensational pieces of his story, but things like his obsession with Satanism are really more about Ramirez being pretty dumb than they are at all connected to his crimes. Ramirez wasn't a Satanist, driven to his crimes by is beliefs. He was a serial killer who happened to pick up some emotional attachment to Satanism, because he was too dumb to realize that all it really said about him was that he hated his religious family and community.

Turning Ramirez or really any of these guys into Monsters of Mystery is how we avoid dealing with the fact that a really central part of our culture is directly responsible for creating them, while at the same time, the reason we know they exist and see them as monsters is because the level of violence they unleash is deadly real.

We focus on the aspect of serial killers which is "these monsters hide among us," but we don't ever get around to the fact that people who hate women this much, can hide among us because the tolerance for that hatred is already so high, much less ever really getting around to the levels and kinds of other violence this same patriarchal belief system produces. 

Ramirez most especially, wasn't really hiding, but a lot of them don't. Samuel Little, at this point believed to be the nations most prolific serial killer admitted to strangling 93 women to death, told the FBI he never thought he'd get caught because of the profile of his victims. Little began in 1970, and wasn't caught until 2005. It's believed that like Little, most serial killers target women who are also from other marginalized parts of society, for this reason.

Here's another real shocking fact... During the period Ramirez was active in LA and California more broadly, there were five other active serial killers, occasionally creating problems of overlap in investigations, where police were investigating a murder as part of a serial, which wasn't part of the serial they were investigating, but was instead part of a different serial. The Southside Slayer, turned out to be five different people. Lonnie David Franklin Jr., AKA The Grimm Sleeper, was one of them, and it's estimated he killed more than 25 women. All Black women, with histories of drug addiction. Franklin was bringing women back to his home, in the same area he was hunting women, and wasn't apprehended until 2010. 

Franklin had been dishonorably discharged from the military after being court martialed for participating in the gang rape of a 17 year old in Germany. One of the rapists took pictures during. Franklin would go on to take pictures of his victims.Ramirez uncle had served in Vietnam, and showed Ramirez pictures of people he killed, and Vietnamese women he raped when Ramirez was a child. Predators making predators....  

The thing which should be most frightening about serial killers isn't in examples like Ramirez, but in the number of them which exist, the number of victims they kill and the number of them who operate under the radar because their victims aren't recognized and nothing about their killings is as easy to sensationalize as someone like Ramirez. It's how many we're creating and how easily they're able to hide because we have the social conditions which are ripe for creating them. Some people who would read this will come up with the readily available, most well known examples of serial killers who don't target women specifically. Dahmer, although he almost exclusively targeted gay men of color, who at the time were even more marginalized than they are today. One of Dahmer's victims, escaped after being drugged. Police let Dahmer take him back to his apartment, despite already knowing someone was targeting gay men of color. Dahmer was a clean cut white guy though... Gacy specifically targeted young boys, but again, patriarchal gender roles and violence were part of his childhood. The same with Albert Fish. The thing is, we know about Gacy and Fish in part because they targeted children. The overwhelming majority of serial killings are men killing women, by a lot, but that is so common a phenomenon, their names don't become enshrined in celebrity in the same way, because it's hard to sensationalize something which isn't as uncommon as the crimes of John Wayne Gacy or Albert Fish.  

Let me be 100% clear... I'm not saying every single piece of popular media about serial killers needs to wade all the way into this. 7 is still a film I consider a near perfect example of pulp cinema. I unreservedly love that movie, and it only barely touches on any of this, and it does so in the most indirect way. Silence of the Lambs is a movie which awes me as a technically perfect example of its genre in my eyes, but it did take the easy road out by leaving the easily misconstrued motivations of Jame Gumb to be consumed by an already transphobic public, even as it so deftly represents with the misogyny Starling is navigating in every other part of the film. 

What I'm saying is we need some of the media dealing with serial killers to address this, directly, especially the documentaries, and not many of them do. This acceptance of patriarchal gender norms, especially patriarchal masculinity has a cascade of consequences, the mind boggling number of dead women is only one. This being the case, we shouldn't be shocked to see it's the glue holding together a far right movement which gets more deadly and more violent by the week, much less that it would be the most common throughline in groups committing a coup attempt which results in deadly violence.