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Saturday, 30 July 2011 16:51

Puke In My Mouth

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Puke in my mouth - and by that I don't mean that I puked in my mouth but that someone else did. I'm talking about this little gem I caught on the PR Wire:

In Investigation Discovery's new series DARK MINDS (wt), non-fiction crime author M. William Phelps and criminal profiler John Kelly revisit unsolved homicides believed to be the work of serial killers. Joining them in the hunt for answers is an unlikely and anonymous source: a convict serving multiple life sentences for a series of murders. Known only to audiences as "13," the source offers his "expert opinion" about potential motivations behind these chilling cold cases, using his own personal experience to formulate theories.  
 

I'm vomiting now.

Two people who would purport to know better, a profiler and a writer whose sister-in-law was reportedly murdered by a serial killer, are combining to work cold cases of serial murder with the help of a serial killer.

Oh? Really? Just like the movies?

Wrong.

I'm not against stories about serial killers - I've written them and explored their crimes quite a bit. In fiction they're smarter, more articulate and more clever than the real thing. And they have these over-arching "agendas" like in the movie "Se7en" when the killer has a manifesto he wants to deliver to the world and uses the murders to create notoriety. As we now understand, most actually aren’t

smart and don't have these over-arching agendas. Theodore Kazinski and the maniac in Norway aside (who isn't actually a serial killer by the FBI definition) these guys - and it's overwhelming a male archetype - want nothing more than to rape and murder their helpless victims. They choose children, lonely women, or low-risk victims like prostitutes who they murder as part of their violent fantasies of control or at the very least to avoid detection.

When there's a sexual component to the actual murder - in other words, when they orgasm during the act of torture or murder like the BTK Killer, they often take a souvenir and masturbate later using it to relieve their depraved fantasies. They may take photos, shoes, used underwear or body parts that will help them have yet another orgasm over terrorizing and perhaps mutilating a person while they were still alive.

Depraved sex is the motive nearly 100% of the time.  Does that surprise you?  Jeffrey Dahmer was trying to create a willing sex slave of his victims - he drilled into their foreheads and poured acid into the drill holes to destroy their frontal lobes; John Wayne Gacy slowly strangled his fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boy victims while anally raping them. Arthur Shawcross raped and murdered children and then masturbated over their dead bodies when he couldn’t find a fresh victim - that’s actually how he got caught. Harvey Murray Glatman had a foot fetish so he tied, raped, photographed, and then cut the feet off his terrified victims.

Do you get that Hollywood has carefully avoided mentioning most of this as part of the stories they're telling? Because it’s too disgusting. And, again, I confess I did the same. I never went deep enough into the research to understand that there was no "motive" to these men beside some sort of sick, aberrant sexual release.

But at least it was fiction.

Now Investigation Discovery (ID) Channel is taking our morbid fascination with serial killers to another level. A level that frankly makes me deeply concerned.

If you do nothing else, watch "Forbrydelsen" a Danish mini-series that (fictionally) brilliantly captures the devastation caused by a serial killer. The lackluster American version is called “The Killing” and even it drives home the devastation to families of victims.  Only one victim is studied but the impact is astoundingly detailed as the parents and their other children try to cope with the torture, rape and murder of their oldest daughter who was buried alive in water in the trunk of a car. Her body exhibits wounds that indicate that she was alive for days while the serial murderer cut, burned, and used torture implements on her.

Most of us can’t imagine how anyone can hurt someone this way - these sick men can’t imagine anything else.

And now we're going to use them to help "solve" crimes?

Here's comes the contents of my stomach again.

But why am I so opposed to this?  Let me give you one example.

Serial murderer John Wayne Gacy. You've killed for many years, had your sick, brutal way with more than thirty-three young, male victims. Become a media star once you were caught and adjudicated. Basked in the glow of the notoriety. Been interviewed by the police and FBI. If you can't kill anymore, this is the next best thing. Attention.  Control.  

But all that goes away as you begin the long process to the gas chamber and the endless appeals that are not nearly as interesting to the press so they basically go away, taking their bright lights with them. The only people really paying attention to you now are the prison guards, psychologists and twisted fans who still have a stake in you. You settle into a rather dull monotony of daily prison life while working though the judicial system.

One day, you get a letter from a 16-yr-old boy who wants to communicate with you. He’s a seemingly bruised boy - you can tell because you're good with that - you can suss out lost kids like a hooker can her next John. Now suddenly, your drab walls fall away and you become fascinated with this young boy who is doing a class project and is giving you his attention. Eventually, you establish such a rapport with him that he agrees to see you. You prepare well by bribing the guards to disappear when he arrives to visit. Once alone, you pull down his pants and...yes, this did happen. Supposedly, nothing more happened because the victim, Jason Moss, was semi-aware of Gacy’s motives, thinking he was actually manipulating him (Moss wasn't - Gacy had other plans.) But Moss was able to get away and out of the isolated cell before he was raped. Or did he?  

Moss wrote a book detailing his adventure with Gacy called "The Last Victim." He stated firmly in the book that he wasn't raped or molested by Gacy and everyone accepted that. Even the psychologist who “treated” Jason said he had only a “healthy fascination” with murders from a criminal justice standpoint and was sound mentally.  

Unfortunately, a year after publishing, when a movie based on the book was being negotiated, Moss committed suicide. Perhaps the story of whatever happened in that prison wasn't told in full or honestly. Only Jason and Gacy know and they’re both dead. Moss was indeed Gacy’s last victim - and what joy Gacy would have exhibited had he known. He was able, from beyond the grave, to kill again.

I tell this story to illustrate the point that these men live to victimize and to be recognized. The serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer, wrote a self-help book called "How To Be A Serial Killer" that was quickly pulled from circulation. Undaunted, he then collaborated on a book called "I: The Creation of a Serial Killer" which was written with his full cooperation using diaries about his life as a serial killer. In fact, the author, Jack Olsen, was roundly criticized for allowing Jesperson to contribute directly to some chapters and Jesperson relished the attention and the forum he was given.

Ego, it's what drives a great many of these men, makes them feel superior to the police, to us. Allows them to rationalize why they kill in such horrendous fashion because their victims aren’t anything to them. Ego is never far from their horrendous crimes and that’s a problem when you ask one of them to help you solve other crimes and there is no actual, legitimate connection with the crimes you’re asking about. You’re just giving vent to what makes them feel good about themselves, the sickness that drives them. While the families of the victims agonize over the last minutes of their loved-ones’ lives, these men are having the time of their lives re-living those moments.

The show "Dexter" has always bothered me. My friends, knowing that I've done some study on serial murderers, are always puzzled by this. But "Dexter " does something that most works of fiction or non-fiction about serial killers don’t do - pretends, in its massive conceit, that there is actually a way to mitigate and focus the serial (sexual) compulsion to kill. Or even that that compulsion is a desirable thing in any way. And that’s why I will never watch more than the first few episodes I did.

Please understand this: there is a 100 percent recidivism rate among serial murderers. In other words, these men always continue to kill if released from prison. We know this in part because Ed Kemper, The Coed Killer, murdered his grandparents when he was fifteen. He was put into Atascadero State Prison for the Criminally Insane until he was released at the age of twenty-one to his mother's custody. Psychologists felt he was okay to release because he was a “gentle giant” in prison, followed the rules, and was seemingly cured. What no one realized or understood at the time was that Kemper, as with most serial murderers, did well in a controlled environment like prison. Once released from prison however, free to do what he wished, he murdered and dismembered at least six coeds, his mother’s friend, and his mother whose headless body he had sex with and whose larynx he tried to put down a garbage disposal.

Similarly, it’s never been proven that these men are “trainable” to focus the compulsion to kill only “bad guys.” But isn’t that an interesting fantasy? Let’s get serial killers to do the dirty work - after all, these are all people who deserve to die anyway and serial killers like to kill so... 

I had the distinct honor to interview legendary FBI profiler Robert Ressler - the man who coined the term "serial killer" - for a script about his life. I talked to him for many, many hours, sat in his home office and looked at slide after slide of his cases of broken, mutilated bodies of men, women - and to my continuing horror, children. Body parts were removed on these victims. Burns and torture marks were evident. The look of pain and horror was writ large on all their faces. Most of them died in incredible agony and emotional pain. 

Ressler had no romantic illusions about the men he tracked. My whole outlook changed after sitting with him for those five days and talking about and seeing his cases. He felt the disgust for these men and he made me feel it too. My writing changed dramatically and the script I wrote from that experience became “unfilmable” according to the well-known producer who hired me to write it. Unfilmable because I pulled no punches - I told the truth and that truth wasn’t to anyone’s liking in Hollywood. And I really do understand that because that truth is horrible, disgusting and beyond comprehension to most of us. It’s not clever, or funny even in a small way - it’s massively disturbing.  It's not this fantasy that we can somehow "control" the compulsion to kill that these men exhibit.

But at least shows like "Dexter" are fiction.  

This show on ID is not fiction (supposedly) and it is wrong on so many levels that I can't properly write this article because my brain is outpacing my fingers. My outrage is firing my neurons off into a hundred different directions. These victims deserve better than to have some writer and a so-called profiler make light of their lives and deaths by allowing a man who has no reconizable humanity to participate in "solving" crimes. Crimes that he had nothing to do with but will most certainly use to relive his own, twisted maturbatory fantasies.

I truly support anyone's freedom of speech and freedom to earn a legitimate living. I'm a writer and understand that not everything that's written conforms to mine or anyone else's standards of good taste or appropriateness.  

I’m drawing a line in the sand, similar to the one I drew with “Dexter.” This show is beyond the boundaries of common sense. If it’s true that the producers are accepting guidance from a man who is shit, scum, and any other word you might use to describe human offal then I will continue to speak out against it.  This killer has no direct connections to these cases as far as I've been able to determine and he should not be given any sort of public recognition even if he's unidentified and called only by the number "13."  Is that perhaps the number of his victims?  Lord I hope not.  It would be different if this was part of an investigation by legitimate police entities but it's not.  It's set forth as edutainment. Utilizing this criminal as part of any faux investigation condones - even tacticly - what this monster who cares nothing about his victims or the humanity which gave him birth has done. That it places any value on his contributions is an affront.

I won’t watch it. Not one frame of it.

For the sake of victims who died in the most horrible fashions imaginable and for their families who have to live that horror every single day of their lives...

 ...I will not let Investigation Discovery Channel puke in my mouth.

Read 1851 times Last modified on Wednesday, 05 August 2015 16:16
Published in Front Page Item - old
Mark Sevi

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