Serial Killers In Popular Fiction

In this day and age, serial killers have become part of the American culture. From Ted Bundy to the infamous “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, numerous serial killers have become remarkably well-known for their crimes. So well-know, in fact, that they are now their own kind of celebrities, their twisted stories living on even after their deaths. It’s no secret that we can’t get enough of these individuals as well as the heinous murders they commit, but why is this the case? For many years, researchers have attempted to find out. Through their research, they have found several different explanations to this sensationalism of serial killers. Nevertheless, while there is some truth in all of these explanations, I believe that it is the media, more …show more content…
First, the story-like retelling of the murders made these news stories more interesting to read. Several researchers have described the news articles of this time as reading similarly to popular fiction stories. A newspaper by the name of Evening News even published an article titled, “What Edgar Poe might have thought of the Murders” (34), in which they compared these real life tragedies to the Edgar Poe’s fictional story, “The Murders in the Rogue Morgue”. Article such as this often drifted away from their original purpose of informing the public. In some cases, the news articles were more romanticized than they were informational. Such was the case when a newspaper decided to paraphrase an interview with a doctor. In this interview by The Daily Telegraph, the Doctor was commenting on the similarity of the cases that were being investigated, as well as made predictions concerning the possible characteristics of the person responsible for these brutal crimes. The original response given by this doctor was passive, his assumptions nothing that hadn’t been said before. At one point, for example, he suggested that “these two women may have been murdered by the same man, with the same weapon” (Hayes 30). The rest of his interview equally as simple, lacking that glamour that articles concerning this case generally contained. This spread had perhaps been a little too simple. At least, this appeared to be what other newspaper outlets thought. Not long after this interview had been published, The Agent published a ten-page spread in which they paraphrased the Doctor’s words. Hayes, in her thesis, included a small excerpt from this paraphrased article, which reads as follows, “the audacity and the daring is equal to its maniacal fanaticism and abhorrent wickedness” (Hayes 31). Through reading this, it is