Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE
Serial Killing
on Screen
Adaptation, True Crime
and Popular Culture
Edited by
Sarah E. Fanning · Claire O’Callaghan
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
Series Editors
Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University
of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University
of Essex, Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for
research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and
punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing
recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascen-
dant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break
down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of main-
stream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural
studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into
cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and
suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber
bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and
insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circu-
lation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a
powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become
versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented
in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of
global media networks is now unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale
of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and
new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and
tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm,
culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information
flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing
relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality,
and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and
culture nexus.
·
Sarah E. Fanning Claire O’Callaghan
Editors
Serial Killing
on Screen
Adaptation, True Crime and Popular
Culture
Editors
Sarah E. Fanning Claire O’Callaghan
Mount Allison University Loughborough University
Sackville, NB, Canada Loughborough, UK
ISSN 2946-3912 ISSN 2946-3920 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-17811-5 ISBN 978-3-031-17812-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other
physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer
software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: © Wayne Stadler/Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland
AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
There’s been 11 hardback books on me, 31 paperbacks, two screenplays, one
movie, one off-Broadway play, five songs, and over 5000 articles. What can
I say about it? […] I have no ego for any of this garbage. ~ John Wayne
Gacy.1
According to case histories and psychological profiles, serial killers themselves
are often avid consumers of films and books about serial killing. At the same
time, the fictional monstrous murderers in popular culture, from Norman
Bates to Hannibal Lecter, are often modelled on historical figures.2
…when Jeffrey Dahmer’s house of carnage was discovered in Milwaukee in
1991, television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour.3
Notes
1. John Wayne Gacy cited in Christopher Barry-Dee, Talking with Serial
Killers 2: The World’s Most Evil Killers Tell Their Stories (London: John
Blake Publishing, 2005), p. 70.
2. Brian Jarvis, ‘Monsters Inc.: Serial Killers and Consumer Culture’, Crime,
Media and Culture 3:3 (2007), 326–344, p. 328.
3. Robert Conrath, ‘Serial Heroes: A Sociological Probing into Excessive
Consumption’, in European Readings of American Popular Culture, ed.
by John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1996), pp. 147–158 (p. 156).
Foreword
I am delighted to have been asked to contribute a Foreword to this
important, international contribution to the study of the phenomenon of
serial murder—part of the Palgrave Macmillan series Crime, Media and
Culture—and I want to begin by offering two anecdotes from the last
twelve months of my professional work as a criminologist and, increas-
ingly, as a TV presenter. These anecdotes illustrate themes which are at
the very heart of this co-edited collection, which brings the criminolog-
ical and the socio-cultural to bear so as to understand how real-life serial
murders are adapted for the screen.
Almost a year ago, I was advising police on a live murder investiga-
tion when, over a coffee break, discussion drifted onto the 2021 BBC
series The Serpent about the crimes committed by the French serial killer
Charles Sobhraj. When I explained that I had interviewed Sobhraj—who
is currently incarcerated in Nepal—the various detectives with whom I
was working immediately inundated me with questions such as ‘What
was he like?’ ‘Were you scared?’ ‘How true is the drama to what really
happened?’
vii
viii Foreword
A few months later, an interview that I gave to Vanity Fair about the
media portrayal of serial killers—both fictional and real—to publicise a
TV series that I had co-presented and which was to be shown in the
United States generated over one million views within a week of being
uploaded onto YouTube. This time I was inundated with emails and
tweets asking me about other serial killers—both fictional and real—
whom I had not discussed in my interview, but whom people wanted
to know all about. As a phenomenon, serial murder might be rare but
the public—including real police detectives—seem endlessly fascinated
by those murderers who are prepared to kill and kill again.
It seems to me that these two anecdotes perfectly capture some of the
issues that inspired Drs Claire O’Callaghan and Sarah Fanning to want
to bring this edited collection to life: how are real serial killers portrayed
on screen—specifically TV and film (although there are also chapters on
musicals and docu-series)—and what ethical issues must be negotiated
when adapting the crimes committed by actual serial killers for screen
audiences? How “true”, in other words, is this “true crime”—a question
that is answered within this collection not just by criminologists, but also
by film, literary and cultural scholars from across the globe.
Having offered two anecdotes let me also make a confession. When I
first returned to the academy after leaving HM Prison Service and started
to write about serial murder, I detected an undercurrent from my peers
that I could not be a “serious” scholar, given the nature of my interest
and, at worst, that I was pandering to popular sentiment. Serial murder
was simply not worth considering, no matter how fascinated people—
including our own students—might be by the phenomenon, as serious
criminologists had other “demons” to slay, such as endlessly debating the
latest public policy initiative. Only a few British scholars, such as the
late Professor Keith Soothill and, more recently, Professors Steve Hall
and Elizabeth Yardley, wanted to harness this public fascination with
the phenomenon of serial murder and to try to make sense of it more
academically.
Foreword ix
Not that I was writing “true crime”—at least at that stage—but was
instead engaging in a debate with the Canadian social anthropologist
Professor Elliott Leyton and the arguments in his seminal book Hunting
Humans (2005). Here is not the place to revisit his hypothesis but in
my early work I wanted to see if what Leyton argued could be applied
to serial murder in the UK. This focus inevitably made me concentrate
not on the motivations of the serial killers (or at least what they said
was their motivation) but on their victims, and, while I concluded that
Leyton’s argument could not be applied to the situation in this country,
I remain convinced that focussing on those groups that are regularly
targeted by serial killers can tell us a great deal about the society in which
they operate.
This victim focus appeared in both my applied and academic work and
was seemingly all the more unexpected because my work in prison had
meant that I had encountered many serial killers and, with one or two,
had long-established relations. I found them neither “supermen”, nor of
much interest—I have often described serial killers as “losers”—and as
such I knew only too well that it was naive to take what they might say
at face value. This institutional insight set me against a prevailing popular
and applied idea—specifically advanced by the FBI—that you could
understand the serial killer by “entering their mind” through listening to
what they might tell you—a belief that is hard to counter and has even
been given new life by the Netflix TV series Mindhunter (2017–2019).
Without doubt, what has changed since I first started to research,
write, and talk about serial murder is the growing confidence to take
this subject area seriously and the theoretical sophistication that scholars
now bring to this territory. I am delighted that students now study
serial murder at Masters and Doctoral levels—indeed two of my former
students are included in this collection—and that a number of disci-
plines now regard this phenomenon as worthy of academic scrutiny.
This splendid collection with contributions from Austria, Australia,
x Foreword
Canada, America, and the UK can only add to that confidence, and Drs.
O’Callaghan and Fanning are to be congratulated for skilfully managing
the process of steering it to publication.
David Wilson
Emeritus Professor
of Criminology
Birmingham City University
Birmingham, UK
Professor David Wilson is Emeritus Professor at Birmingham City Univer-
sity’s School of Social Sciences. His prolific and acclaimed publication portfolio
includes such titles as Mary Ann Cotton: Britain’s First Female Serial Killer
(2012) (which formed the basis of the BBC’s 2016 miniseries Dark Angel ); My
Life with Murderers (2019); and Signs of Murder (2020). He has also featured
in numerous television documentaries, including Killers Behind Bars (Channel
5, 2012–2013); Interview with a Murderer (Channel 4, 2016); Jack the Ripper:
The Case Reopened (BBC, 2019). He also hosts a BBC podcast entitled David
Wilson’s Crime Files and has a forthcoming true crime series In the Footsteps of
Killers (Channel 4) with Emilia Fox (Silence Witness, BBC 2015–2017).
