Anyone who claims to possess total immunity from embarrassment is suffering from a nasty case of either dishonesty or derangement. Still, I like to think I have a higher threshold than most, if only thanks to years of intensive professional training. The sort of reporting I do often requires an unavoidable degree of social mortification, of inserting myself into places I’m not wanted or needed, and have no real business in being.
But even a high threshold has its upper limit. I discovered mine on arrival at the Vaults, Waterloo, on a muggy Thursday afternoon in late October. The entrance to “Serial Killer: The Exhibition” squats a fair way down Leake Street’s run of subterranean board-game cafés and American sports bars. I was glad for the alley’s relative gloom on approach, though not for its neatly tended approximation of urban seediness, all council-approved street art and dressed-down craft-beer spots. The darkness would, I hoped, eliminate any slim chance of bumping into a friend or acquaintance. “What exactly are you doing here by yourself in the middle or the working week?” I imagined them asking, eyes flickering between pity and alarm.
“Well,” I saw myself spluttering, “I’ve actually spent the thick end of 30 pounds in the hope of passing the next few hours leering at Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge freezer, Ted Bundy’s battered old Volkswagen Beetle and a selection of artefacts once belonging to several other of recent history’s most reviled mass murderers. To ‘debunk’, as the online promotional copy puts it, ‘the mysteries behind the century’s most twisted minds… from a scientific, historical and educational perspective’. I am hoping to achieve a unique insight into their minds and heinous criminal acts, as well as the chance to empathise more completely with their victims. I am particularly looking forward to the Jack the Ripper VR experience.”
What can be said about the global true-crime boom that hasn’t already been relitigated into overfamiliarity? The last decade and more has witnessed the remorseless rise and mainstreaming of a genre once considered the subcultural property of troubled suburban adolescents and bored housewives with overdeveloped macabre streaks. A revolution occurred in the early 2010s, beginning – goes the dominant narrative – with the arrival of the glossy American investigative podcast Serial and its many offspring of varying legitimacy and prestige.
The rise of the whodunnit, or did-they-do-it, industry has been accompanied by a parallel mushrooming of serial-killer content, from two-bit podcasts to big-budget Netflix documentaries and dramas. Dahmer, Bundy, Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer. Name a killer, and they’ve likely had the limited series glow-up.
Our collective obsession with this “fraternity of sweating mutes and blood-spattered inverts”, as Martin Amis once put it, knows few apparent bounds, despite wishful recent suggestions of an imminent slowdown in consumption, caused by mass murderer fatigue. In 2022, the co-hosts of My Favourite Murder signed an Amazon distribution deal worth a reported $100m. Ryan Murphy’s execrable TV show Dahmer was released the same year, reaching a billion viewing hours within a couple of months of release. His latest show, the hyper-sexualised, fact-phobic Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, pogoed straight to the top of the global charts on release in September.
Life inside the true-crime industrial complex is lucrative work, for its ruling caste at least, whether on TikTok, or lodged in the major streamer machine. We know what any apparently right-thinking person is supposed to make of this kind of thing. It is exploitative and voyeuristic, a form of shameless rubbernecking at the limitless pain and grief of others. It “stokes paranoia”, as per the New York Times, and desensitises us to real-world violence. Even the best and most morally sensitive true-crime practitioners are hamstrung by the moral price paid “in enriching our understanding” of crime, as the New Yorker recently worried.
It is no longer enough, at least for work that aspires beyond the genre’s lowest common denominator, to justify its existence in terms of pure entertainment or shock value. Further refinement is now required, usually in an appeal to the audience’s more tender nature. The ubiquitous invocation of “the victim(s)”, whether those murdered themselves or the devastated friends and relatives left behind, is its logical development. This vaguely ethical window-dressing makes sound business sense. According to a recent “True Crime Consumer Report” carried out by Edison Research, more than three quarters of regular true crime podcast consumers are interested, or very interested, in consuming “victim-centred” content. Like any other creative endeavour, it can be done well or badly, with great earnestness or desperate cynicism. There are many sincere, genuinely innovative offerings like Hallie Rubenhold’s 2019 book The Five, which outlined the long-ignored lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, and the impressively restrained 2021 anti-procedural TV drama The Investigation, based on the disappearance and murder of the journalist Kim Wall, which potently declined to show either victim or perpetrator on screen.
We are also offered more than our fair share of supposedly “victim-centred” cash grabs. Though perhaps I am not the right person to scold anyone about taking an active interest in the genre. Much of my 2022 passed in the reporting and writing of a book on what became known as “the Bible John murders”, a series of three apparently interlinked – and still unsolved – killings which rocked Glasgow in the late 1960s. The murders were attributed to a scripture-quoting, red-haired folk devil created by the city’s tabloid press: his spectre caused a burst of city-wide paranoia and has spawned a minor cottage industry of speculation which endures to this day, in the form of narrative podcasts, TV documentaries and – yes – books.
When asked why I’d chosen to devote myself to the subject, my answers were unvaried. It was an attempt to illuminate why certain killings or acts of violence are remembered, drawing on the work of the great Gordon Burn and others. An attempt to interrogate our obsession with uncaught killers and relative lack of interest in the lives of their victims. All of this was true. What I couldn’t say, or perhaps admit to myself at the time, was that the story’s horror was interesting in and of itself. That its darkness had its own magnetic pull.
Is a plea to victimhood really much more edifying than a straightforward fascination with serial killers? In August 2022, I made my way to CrimeCon Glasgow, which I’d seen advertised online earlier that summer. An American invention, it was the first of its kind to be hosted in the city, following a few years of thriving London events. Its premise was simple enough, whether located in Las Vegas or the towering Hilton yards from the M8 motorway which cleaves through Glasgow’s city centre.
“True Crime,” as the official website put it in giddy advertising speak, “is so much more than murder recreations and dramatic courtroom showdowns.” Here, “the victim” was sacrosanct. Perhaps more than anything, the convention would, it was assured, offer a reflection on the way we live now. I suppose it lived up to that promise. The £230 tickets came with access to an all-you-can-eat buffet and some talk of Bible John. Panels of handpicked experts ranked Scotland’s Most Evil Killers. A range of CrimeCon-branded merchandise was on sale (£14 would get you a water bottle, though a bookmark could be purchased for a third of the price) and seemed to be selling steadily throughout the day.
That day’s weirdness came back to me as I prepared to shuffle across the exhibition space in Waterloo. What kind of tasteful offerings would the curators have in store? Certainly, it was difficult to understand what an intensely gratuitous, gore-covered reconstruction of a Jack the Ripper murder scene had to do with honouring the memory of the slain women. Or precisely what the poster offering a Top Trumps-style ranking of Britain’s Worst Serial Killers – Harold Shipman took pole position, with 1930s “Acid Bath Murderer” John Haigh coming in a disappointing tenth – did to further our collective understanding of criminology. Did the lovestruck young couple who stopped to coo at every glossy print-out and serial-killer biography really have sombre thoughts of victimhood in mind? Did the giggling adolescent German tourists who shrieked in delight at the plaster-cast model of John Wayne Gacy, clad in full clown suit?
At the makeshift shop, I contemplated a block of Dennis Nilsen fridge magnets and an Aileen Wuornos poster emblazoned with the legend “DEAD MEN DON’T RAPE”. Whether any of the proceeds were being syphoned off to their victims remained unclear. On exiting the gallery, even the heavy late-afternoon sky felt like disinfectant.
Francisco Garcia’s book “We All Go into the Dark: The Hunt for Bible John” is published by Mudlark
[See also: When women fight back]
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