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3 Investigating the Serial Killer Silencing the Unspeakable He's an extraordinary looking man, yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir; I can make no hand of it; I can't describe him. And it's not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him at this moment. (Richard Enfield describing Mr. Hyde) Patterns of murders committed by one person in large numbers with no apparent rhyme, reason or motivation. (The subject debated by a 1983 Senate Judiciary committee formed to discuss the impact of serial killing on American society) The hunt for a serial killer is frequently described in Gothic terms, and especially as a Gothic quest for knowledge of the "beast." Guy Le Gaufey refers to the vogue in the nineteenth century for vampire novels in which "the aristocracy is always presented as the beast to be destroyed" and in which "the savior was a bourgeois" (Foucault 1980, 1). The saviors/detectives in the serial killer myth can represent a similar antielitism: the FBI rejecting those big words of the psychiatric profession; Clarice Starling as cheap, white trash made good. But the stories about Dahmer generally lack heroic saviors. Instead they recount the inability of the police "to do their job," or the failure of overtolerant or naive psychiatrists and counselors to identify Dahmer's potential for violence. Dahmer is figured as "slipping through the cracks": presumably those cracks appearing in the once-solid and stable society-the less liberal, less wordy, and safer society of old, a society defended by recognizable protectors. An exception is the story told by Anne E. Schwartz. Her book on Dahmer acknowledges "the men and women of the Milwaukee Police Department, whose cooperation with a reporter has always been at considerable risk to their jobs: You are my heroes and I am grateful to your trust" (ix). Her book begins with some of these heroes assuming the aura of chivalric manliness: "For cops on the beat, the sweat would trickle down their chests and form salty pools under their steel-plated 48 Investigating the Serial Killer: Silencing bulletproof vests" (2). Presumably of the Teutonic Order is Officer Rolf Mueller, "of German origin," who "sported a mass of perpetually tousled blond curls on top of his six-foot frame" (1). Playing opposite such heroes is the story's heroine. The author tells us that while other reporters are sleeping with their answering machines switched on, she (wearing "black underwear under white shorts" [6] we are informed, helpfully) was "the last person who was not a police official to leave [Dahmer's] apartment alive" and that "the experience of seeing the apartment and witnessing the horror of the residents that night was [hers] alone" (11). The lonely heroine confronting (male) horror is a familiar subject of the Gothic. But in Schwartz's case, the villain has already been arrested , and presumably wouldn't have been interested in her anyway. And while we have grown accustomed to the idea of such villainy disguised as respectability, Schwartz, unlike Clarice-who seems as much at risk within the confines of Quantico or at a funeral surrounded by police as on the streets chasing serial killers-finds nothing creepy in the ranks of the law enforcement community: villains are villains and cops are cops; heroes and heroine, police and journalist, are as one. The discourse reproduced by the book is one of benign policing: part journalese, part police jargon, a discourse of detection which only reaffirms existing notions of what constitutes social order. The Gothic, that place where we play with the fear of the text's extratextuality, of its unspeakability, is where we find it natural to place the serial killer, he about whom we can't stop talking and he who leaves us speechless. It is in the Gothic novel where ideas central to the way we perceive ourselves and our society seem particularly threatened , and where language itself seems vulnerable to an impending silence. In Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, Gerald Kennedy explores Poe's responsiveness to the relation of writing to this potential void of meaning: Poe sounded the abyss not simply through existential motifs, through scenes of annihilation and expressions of dread. In less obvious ways he interiorized the void of meaninglessness as a problem of writing and explored through his own practice the emergent relationship between the new death and the act of inscription. He sensed a momentous cultural transition and projected...

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