The Obsession with Evil : Why we are transfixed by serial killers

What are we to make of our current mesmerization by violent crime, in particular, our fixation on the serial killer? Those two words--serial killer--so rarely heard a few short years ago, now hiss from the lips of everyone from student to sociologist, bartender to news anchor.

Novelists and movie makers have turned the phenomenon into “material”--although their interest predates the general outbreak only by the usual head start that art has over pop idiom. Television crews too numerous to count have followed police, jamming their cameras into America’s streets, motels and living rooms, hoping for usable footage on that greatest of criminal trophies: the serial killer. This newspaper, just Tuesday, featured on its front page a color photograph of confessed serial killer Jeffrey L. Dahmer; on Page 2 was noted the questioning of a Colton man in connection with 19 murders in Riverside County. A news conference held by the Riverside Country sheriff was broadcast live on some stations that afternoon. Feature articles abound in glossy, upscale magazines (Vanity Fair on Dahmer); entertainment factories in Hollywood and New York are scarfing up serial-killer material as fast as writers can put it out.

But it would be both convenient and wrong to blame the media for our current hypnosis by serial killers--a classic case of shooting the messenger. No, we are talking of a primal appetite, something that flirts with the borders of obsession. The murder of John F. Kennedy continues as our nation’s preeminent obsession, because obsession flourishes best in a soil of falsehood and concealment. Obsession leads finally to the cozy comforts of paranoia, but that is a topic for another day. Let us posit, then, that the media function merely as the lips of our appetite, not as its rumbling, unfilled belly.

To understand the belly we should be at least conversant in the physiology of what our appetites nourish--our souls. Because it is the soul itself that draws such morbid sustenance from the proximate horrors of the Dahmers, the Krafts, the Ramirezes (you know their names, don’t you?) just as the same soul draws transcendent sustenance from art, music, poetry, nature. At present, our souls--whether national or individual--crave news of a serial killing even more than an experience of beauty and transcendence. Why?

Because the concept of evil is the most terrifying and thrilling concept in our language. We need terror by which to measure and enjoy our comfort; we need thrill to ameliorate the tedium. We need evil to locate our good. And evil is a concept that has been increasingly undervalued and ignored. We require a devil with whom our gods can do battle, lest our gods become reduced to mere royalty--splendidly clothed, gossiped about, but superfluous.

Consider a brief survey of the Western literary faces of evil. In Genesis, it was given a name, a voice, cunning. In the early Anglo-Saxon mythologies, it was given great strength, an unquenchable lust for blood (“Gilgamesh,” “Beowulf”). The Greek tragedians, and later Elizabethan dramas, located evil largely in the conspiracies of fate and, to a lesser extent, in the nature of particular individuals (“Oedipus,” “Macbeth”). Edgar Allan Poe--perhaps our first truly modern portrait artist of evil--gave us the notion that evil lives, to larger or smaller degrees, as composite bits, in many a human soul--a virtual IdentiKit sketch of the devil.

Move forward, however, to a more immediate, more manipulable age--our own--and consider the “Evil Empire” of Ronald Reagan; the satanic qualities attributed to--and by--Saddam Hussein, and what is perhaps our most successful image of evil in the recent political arena--the pudgy, pock-marked, serpentine visage of Manuel A. Noriega.

Something has changed. Something has gone wrong with the face of evil.

Quite simply, it has become falsified. Yes, the face itself has become more specific for us, but the resonance, the credibility of the image, is gone. We have a wanted poster with a picture of the wrong man. Who among us can legitimately call the former Soviet Union evil? Who among us--after CNN finally yanked Charles Jaco’s shellshocked nervous system from our TV screens--can locate convincing evil in Hussein? Who can subscribe to the image of a hapless, petty tyrant like Noriega as a genuine personification of Satan? Few, indeed.

For our face of evil we do not need--and will not accept--politics. For our image of evil--a powerful, soul-battering, god-challenging evil--we need a face that can reflect the secret grimace of our times.

Enter the serial killer. A man more terrifying for his apparent “normalcy.” A man inevitably characterized as shy, nice, private. A man who is, for all practical purposes, best described as nondescript. The man next door. There goes the psychic neighborhood!

Now, I can already feel the ire of pop sociologists as I reduce these mentally faulted individuals to “simple” evil, but to deny their evil is to obscure the point. Do misfiring synapses, amok biochemicals, horrendous childhoods and severe dislocation replace evil? Annul it? No, those are the symptoms, the adjuncts of an influence exerted by fates, history, gods, devils and man himself--for which we have somehow lost the name. Our souls have not betrayed us--only our words.

So the Dahmers and Krafts and Ramirezes continue to stalk the dark underworlds of our souls, as surely as they once did our neighborhoods and streets. They are creating the new pantheon in the temple of our fears. With the charging of one William Lester Suff, described as 41 and “beefy,” in two of the 19 slayings that have taken place in Riverside County in the last five years, we may be witnessing the birth of a new anti-Christ for our imaginations. We will certainly not forget to note that Suff is indeed innocent until proved guilty, although his previous conviction in Texas for beating to death his infant daughter might qualify him as a minor demon in the legions of tormentors we so desire, so welcome, so need.

Many of the victims of this latest serial killer were dumped in or around a dreary lakeside town that has billed itself as “Playground of the Inland Empire.” The name of the town is Lake Elsinore. Elsinore! What resonance, what a diabolical lineage of metaphor. What better nativity for a fresh horror demanding entry into our waiting psyches? We are preparing a welcome for the perpetrator of those deeds, as surely as we embrace the splendor of a sunrise, the harmonic glories of music, the stillness at the heart of poetry, the beauty of a painting. A new fascination can begin to grow as we witness, spellbound, the first movement of the beast’s slow thighs.

Our collective soul has many rooms, and some are reserved for darkness. I offer my respects to those assigned tenancy in the suites of evil.

The vacancy sign is eternally lit.