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7 Supercops and Superkillers He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) I was. real close to Sheriff Boutwell: we were like father and son. Me and [Texas Ranger] Prince were like brothers. We'd go places, we'd do things, we'd do anything, anytime. It didn't matter what time it was, day or night. (Henry Lee Lucas, Confessions of a Serial Killer) The FBI is not shy in telling us that serial killers often identify with instead of against the law enforcement community. (For police officer Gerald Schaefer, the killer of twenty or so men and women, such identification evidently proved relatively easy). In the House of Representatives hearing on serial killing, an FBI officer notes that when the FBI interviewed convicted serial killers in order to construct personality profiles, "a majority of offenders viewed us as associates who had interests (crime) but only from different perspectives" (26). It is also noted that "they look like you and me. They are gregarious, they are outgoing . Almost without exception they are always police buffs. They never could make the grade, so they do the next best thing. They may seek an occupation close to the periphery of law enforcement. It could be as a security guard, a private detective, or as a volunteer in a hospital where they would drive an ambulance" (20). Apparently, "the next best thing" after that periphery is violent crime. We have grown accustomed to stories of the pursuit of justice, of the arrest of the criminal and of his crimes, that take the form of conflicts between rivals, conflicts involving mimetic gesture, conflicts which correspond to manly rivalry mythologized in the cinema and the novel, conflicts, in other words, which do not threaten the underlying bond between combatants. And in our stories of serial killers, of their crimes, and of the chase involved in their capture, the identification of the per109 PART II. DREAMING THE SERIAL KILLER son doing the chasing, the controlling, and using the weapon may lose relevance. As Leyton notes, liThe Son of Sam was not so very wrong when he thought the public was urging him on during his killing spree, for the media chronicled his every deed in a state of mounting excitement " (Leyton 24). In fictional representations, prbblems of narrative are solved invariably through the use of violence. The story becomes a perpetual cycle of the shifting of power, and what we seem to find thrilling are these expressions of power for their own sake. Before Dahmer's death, Larry King asks attorney Gerald Boyle whether his client will write a book as a way of raising funds for his victims' families (Larry King Live, 17 February 1992). If a movie had been made based on Dahmer's own version of events, how strange would it appear to us for the drama to depend on Dahmer's pursuit of victims as well as the police's pursuit of Dahmer? The continuum between law enforcement and violent crime evidently identified by serial killers is commonly translated in our representation of cops and killers as a rivalry for the same kind of power, a rivalry which transgresses boundaries between "civilization" and its others. Ironically, by supplying information about the psychology of unconvicted serial killers, the police buff who becomes a serial killer after failing to join the FBI-or in Dahmer's case, after failing to become a military policeman-sometimes assumes a position of power within law enforcement once he is convicted. Hannibal Lecter's promotion to official expert repeated Ted Bundy's in 1986: "We justinterviewed Theodore Bundy approximately two weeks ago. He wants to assist the FBI in our research project. He doesn't want to talk to anyone else. He has read some of our research. He likes what we came up with, and he wants to help us, he says, on the Green River case" (House 20). After Dahmer is convicted, he is similarly praised for cooperating with police with regard to his own crimes, for solving "unsolvable crimes" (Larry King Live, 17 February 1992). Meanwhile Westley Allan Dodd, convicted of murdering three boys, two of whom he raped, writes articles from jail offering advice for children on how to escape sex attacks (Murder by Number). The FBI's pride in the fact that Bundy respected their research and...

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