Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer

PART II. Dreaming the Serial Killer

PART II Dreaming the Serial Killer For the FBI, Ted Bundy "personifies [the] ruthless breed of serial killer who leaves a perceptible signature at the crime scene" (House 5). The serial killer's "signature" connects random events. It tells us what to read. The connected events become text produced by an unnamed author hoping to be read, a mystery whose solution lies in identifying its author. And yet it soon becomes much more. It teases the reader, challenges the reader to identify why such events are connected. It locates the burden of constructing meaning with the reader. The reader is forced to "write" the text, to assume authorship in order to anticipate what comes next. The signature is both a sign of the author's existence and an invitation into the mind of the serial killer which we show few signs of wanting to refuse. The serial killer who leaves his mark and invites us to see things from his perspective knows that what we see will not necessarily catch us completely unaware. In the first chapter of Graham and Gurr's Violence in America, Richard Maxwell Brown identifies the denial of a dependency on violence as a central component ofAmerica's cultural psyche : "We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since become a trigger-happy people. Violence is clearly rejected by us as a part of the American value system, but so great has been our involvement with violence over the long sweep of our history that violence has truly become part of our unacknowledged (or underground) value structure" (Brown [1] 41). A central theme of part 2 is that the writing of serial killer mythology is increasingly contextualized by the surfacing of that "underground" value structure, by its going public, becoming central to the public spectacle. ...