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Geraldo: Jack Olsen: Geraldo: Jack Olsen: Sondra London: Geraldo: Introduction Jack, in the old days were there many of these guys-many Jack the Rippers out there? Or is this a modern-day phenomenon? There was Jack the Ripper and hardly anybody else. It is a modern phenomenon and it's an American phenomenon for the most part. The FBI feel there's more than three hundred of them going at any given time. Right now? Yes, caught and uncaught. I think it depends on your definition. If we look back in history we had the gunslingers who would be called serial killers today. Dan Rolling likes to go back to the knights of old when a man was revered for his prowess with a double-sided sword. Danny was quite a chivalrous fellow. (Geraldo, 29 March 1993: "Inside the Mind of Serial Killers and the Women Who Love Them." Jack Olsen is the author of a book on Arthur J. Shawcross, convicted of killing ten prostitutes. Sondra London has written on-and, at the time of the show's airing, was the fiancee of-Dan Rolling, "The Gainesville Killer.") Although society has always produced for itself a plentiful supply of monsters to choose from, it seems to me that contemporary monstrosity assumes its most compelling form for us as the serial killer. Whether or not the number of people who kill repeatedly has risen in recent years, the idea of the serial killer seems to be increasingly important to the way we perceive our world. Whether or not our contemporary construction of the serial killer is a new way to represent an old phenomenon , or whether it represents a new reality, it is one with which we seem particularly fascinated, one which seems to require continual rewriting or-in a period which has seen the release of The Silence of the Lambs, Jennifer Eight, Henry: Portrait ofa Serial Killer, Sliver, Natural Born Killers, Seven, and numerous other serial killer epics-rescreening. Our construction of the serial killer, the construction of ourselves as audience to that spectacle, and the relationship between spectacle and audi3 Introduction ence are the subjects of this book. The figure of the serial killer I draw is blurred: a figure conflated with an irnage of its representer. Several commentators support Jack Olsen's claim that serial killing is all-American. For Robert Ressler, it "has become something as American as apple pie" (in Davis 1991, 166). For Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, serial killing is "the (as yet) specifically American phenomenon" (Cameron and Frazer 27). Jack Levin and James Alan Fox use "America's Growing Menace" as the sub-title for their book Mass Murder (1985). However, while we may begin with an idea of serial killing as being specifically a part of American or Americaninfluenced culture,1 or even, in moments of deepest cynicism, as being an American Dream come true, the more we talk about it, the more we want to universalize it, to describe it in ways which imply that the mysterious, conveniently indescribable thing we call "nature" is really what's behind it all. Noting that "in the last twenty years the United States, with only five percent of the world's population, has produced seventy-five percent of the world's serial murderers", Joel Norris suggests that "as the influence of American culture spreads to less developed countries, the fear is that, unless checked somehow, the disease of serial murder will spread as well" (my italics; Norris 1988, 19). While Norris can hear Bundy, Berkowitz, and Gacy humming "The StarSpangled Banner" as they work, fears that our value-system might be connected to what they do are assuaged by putting such behavior on a par with a viral infection. With other diseases we're quick to provide a social context, but here we're quite happy to allow nature free play. We'd rather not ask why the "disease" seems to infect only the dominant , or once-dominant, social nexus, white men. While we may accept figures from the FBI telling us that "over the years, it's become clear that most [serial killer] offenders are white males" (Newsweek, 5 August 1991:41), we fail to explore correspondence between the meanings we give to serial killing and the meaning of masculinity and of whiteness in modern America. In his book on Dahmer, Norris remarks that serial killers "represent an attack on the entire moral structure of a community" (Norris 1992, 264...

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