Posted on 10/20/2014 5:31:17 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
What was your prime inspiration and motivation behind creating your new book, "Why We Love Serial Killers The Curious Appeal of the World's Most Savage Murderers"?
As far back as I can recall I have always loved monsters. While growing up in Ohio in the 1970s, I loved horror movies, including the definitive and iconic Frankenstein (1931) and the now classic Halloween (1978). In more recent times I have come to love the Hollywood tales of fictional serial predators such as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and John Doe in Se7en.
I have always rooted for my favorite movie monsters to prevail although I knew they would not. Now, as a criminologist living in New York, I am fascinated by real-life serial killers. I study the crimes of infamous predators such as Jeffrey Dahmer and I have had the opportunity to actually meet and/or correspond with two of the most notorious serial killers of the twenty-first century—that is, David Berkowitz, the so-called Son of Sam and Dennis Rader, known by the moniker BTK which stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill.”
2. Why do we love serial killers so much?
The public loves serial killers for a number of complex and interrelated reasons. First, they are rare in the business of murder with perhaps twenty-five or so operating at any given time in the U.S. They and their crimes are exotic and tantalizing to people much like traffic accidents and natural disasters. Serial killers are so extreme in their brutality and so seemingly unnatural in their behavior that people are drawn to them out of intense curiosity.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
He isn’t glorifying them.
I’m no fan of serial killers.
Somehow I don’t think Kermit Gosnell will have fans.
What do you mean «we» idiot? speak for yourelf.
He misses the key feature in attraction to serial killers (almost exclusively a female attraction) which is that they make women feel sexy, and instigate identification with the aggressor.
I worked with a young woman in the 1990s who was went so far as to use the company computer and printer to find and print stuff about serial killers. This was NOT for any course work. She also had an a**hole boyfriend,an abusive ex,insisted her young son had to be on Ritalin or she couldn’t handle him,was chronically late for work and unapologetic about it,.....in other words,yet another of the all too many women with messed up heads.Another followed the man who beat her up halfway across the country and married him.
Some people have a sick linking of violence and sexuality.
Anyone who loves serial killers is stupid.
Then again we have millions of killers who say they are women deserving respect for murdering their own child.
Indeed. A few years ago I unfortunately viewed a movie called Mr Brooks (2007) starring Kevin Costner as a serial killer who is the lead character. The movie tries to paint him in a sympathetic light. One of the movies which to me was a milestone in the ongoing descent of so called culture of liberal Hollywood.
The most prolific of serial killers never get caught, and often as not, nobody knows there is a serial killer because they don’t know that anyone, much less dozens or hundreds of people, have been murdered.
For example, Dr. Harold Shipman, who it is known murdered 250 people and likely many more beyond that. Ironically, had he been murdering people today, many of his murdering colleagues in the NHS would make him look like a piker, racking up death tolls in the thousands. Shipman would still be commended for his high quota of euthanasia victims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman
Other murderers can be more subtle, such as touting a quack cure for a dangerous medical condition, steering their victims away from conventional medicine until it is too late.
Then there are those that are more direct, like abortionists.
Rose and Valerie,
screaming from the gallery
Say he must go free
(Maxwell must go free)
Dude I loved Bonn Scott. He rocked!
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