Criminologist Reviews Serial Killers From Movies & TV | Vanity Fair

I ate his liver with some broad beans and a good chianti. I have never encountered a

serial

killer who behaved in such a pantomime manner. I encountered

serial

killers

who tried to scare me, but I wouldn't be scared. anthony hopkins I would have laughed outright if he had told me about broad beans and a good chaonte hello my name is david wilson I research, write and work with people who have committed violent crimes, specifically murders and serial killings, today we are I'm going to break down clips of TV shows and

movies

about serial

killers

. This scene is from the zodiac.

Do not get up. I want him to tie you up. What's interesting about this clip is that you start to see one of the basic original FBI binaries. The classifications that serial killers are organized or disorganized by organized simply mean that the serial killer brings with him those things that he will need to incapacitate his victims, so in this scene the zodiac killer brings with him a rope, He wears gloves, he is masked. Typically, we would also say that if you are an organized serial killer, that will imply, for example, that you are employed, that you have superior intelligence, that you are sexually competent, that you are able to drive a car, the other aspects.

The type of organization we see in this particular clip is how much control the serial killer has over his victims. In my experience, serial murder as a phenomenon always begins from a sexual fantasy and I think we have something of that sexual fantasy in this particular one. clip about slavery being powerful being in control not only is he masked and wearing gloves he also wears black clothes he also has a symbol on his black clothes all of these things are about instilling fear in his victims it is also about how he can make your fantasy come true.

Really, he has fantasized about what he is going to do for a very long period of time. I always say that no one wakes up overnight and decides they're going to be a serial killer. A serial killer has been in the making for a long time. this is simply a The way you now want to make the fantasy real once they have engaged in the fantasy once or twice is no longer fantastical and therefore the type of things they will do within the scene crime will become stranger, more exaggerated, more extreme, it's interesting. who also brings a gun but chooses not to use the gun initially ties up his victims he is going to threaten them with the knife this is the difference between serial killers who focus on acts and serial killers who focus on processes Focused serial killer simply wants to kill his victims.

End of the bang. They are dead. The focused serial killer. He is interested in extending the time he has with his victims. He wants to tie them. He wants to see the fear they have. you're experimenting, he wants certain words to be spoken, he wants them to beg for their lives before he kills them, that actually makes him feel sexually powerful, sexually in control to be the person he wants to be, get on your stomach so he can tell your feet. . we hear the monotony in the zodiac killer's voice, I'm going to take your car and go to Mexico, which is often characteristic of an underlying personality trait called psychopathy and an inability to show empathy, show sympathy, walk in another's shoes person, it's very cold here. at night we might freeze of course we see the male victim in the scene trying to strike up a conversation in my experience working with serial killers they just aren't interested in that kind of relationship they don't want to see you as another The Human beings are generally psychopathic and therefore cannot walk in your shoes, they do not care about your suffering, in fact your suffering is actually what they seek to do.

Next up is a fictional serial killer named Dexter, your mind now. Should do exactly what I say, Dexter fits a type of serial killer called a mission-oriented serial killer. He is a serial killer who is on a mission to rid the world of other serial killers and that is very typical of several real serial killers from a criminological point of view. I definitely Understand, see, I can't help it either, kids, I could never do that, not like you, ever, kids, he establishes very quickly that there is some kind of moral hierarchy in the phenomenon of serial murder, of course, there isn't such a thing as a moral serial killer.

Whoever takes the life of another person is, by the very nature of the act, immoral in Dexter, we have the most organized serial killer, he has a garage that can control his victim, ultimately, he will inject his victim so that he remains paralyzed, Dexter has a very elaborate mo and a unique signature mo stands for modus operandi, it is the means by which the serial killer or murderer kills the mo would change due to how the victim might react, while the signature is a particular form in which a murderer will leave the crime scene that will be unique to that particular individual dexter is someone who is going to torture and the context of that torture is almost medicalized usually he is making poisons he is in a particular medical room his murder room that guy of medicalized signature is not as common in My experience with a particular warning because, of course, a significant number of health professionals have been serial killers.

This next clip is one of my particular favorites. The silence of the lambs. You're one of Jack Crawford, right? Yes, can I see his credentials? Hannibal Lecter certainly does something that is very true to real life, in my experience, when I interview killers. They are only prepared to talk to me once they have my CV. They love knowing that they are being interviewed by the top guy, you use skin cream and sometimes you use lead, but not today. I've never had a serial killer mention my aftershave, but that seductive behavior is something I have to deal with on a regular basis, so, for example.

I had to talk on the phone with an infamous serial killer who is in jail. He was sometimes known as the bikini killer or the snake. He said you look much younger than your 64 years. It was the first thing he said. It just screamed like psychopathy the next scene is from david fincher's seven this was found on the wall behind the refrigerator the obesity emergency the longest and hardest road out of hell leads to the light is from milton paradise lost some serial killers leave evidence clues if you want Call them clues and often in my implicit work I get asked that because they want to get caught right, that's not why clues are left, that's not why any evidence is left, usually it's just al end of their killing cycle.

We're operating in a completely parallel moral universe that's different from the moral universe that you and I inhabit and they just don't understand that what they're doing is so strange, so extraordinary that, of course, this kind of thing went down in crime. The scene can be collected to identify who the murderer is; However, there are some serial killers who do want to be caught, ultimately a very small number because of course they want to stand out, they want to be seen as extraordinary and therefore they cannot be seen as extraordinary if they are not. catch, have you ever seen anything like this?

What we have in seven is the sense in which the serial killer is super intelligent, he is a super predator and, again, this is playing on one of the stereotypes that the media has about serial killers that they will be super intelligent and they will try to outdo Fox almost as if they were playing a game of chess with law enforcement. The other thing about seven that I think is an interesting spoiler alert if you haven't. Seven have been seen, but the head of one of the film's main characters is severed. Serial killers often take body parts as trophies and we tend to say that in my world, the killer uses much more violence than necessary to get what he wants. is what he wants to achieve, which is to affect the death of his victim.

I saw you with the box. What was in the box when I started in my professional world? I had only encountered one man who had decapitated his victim lately. "I've seen hype during the pandemic become much more common. Now I encounter hype and mutilation all the time. The following scene is from Alfred Hitchcock's extraordinary film Psycho. Is anyone home? No, everything. There's someone sitting at the window. No, no, no, there is." Oh right, check her out, oh, that must be my mother, she's a badass and a bullet, uh, it's practically like living alone, oh, I see, and Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins is wonderful as a particular guy o a trope of who we are.

We have come to understand that the serial killer is someone who is a transsexual transvestite and wants to disguise himself as his mother. What Hitchcock gets wrong is the sense in which it is these transgressive sexual identities that are the motivating force behind the serial murder, and of course he also wants to present Norman Bates as effectively psychotic, he wouldn't necessarily describe Norman Bates as a psychopath, he probably has some psychopathic traits as a character, I would see him as having some type of psychosis, in other words, he hears voices, he has visions, he is operating in an unreal world if norman bates had actually existed norman bates would have behaved so strangely and aberrant that he would have been caught very quickly because he would have stood out, of course, another media trope is used here which is that the detective is actually interviewing the serial killer, but he doesn't realize it, but he might suspect that he is interviewing the murderer serial, which doesn't really happen in real life, although one phenomenon that does occur regularly is that the murderers often return to the place where they committed the murder, sometimes I just like the risk they are taking, which is a of the reasons why crime scene photographs are often taken because there could be the perpetrator inside that photograph, let's say just because of the years, just to argue that she wanted you to bravely protect her, you would know that you are being used, You wouldn't be fooled, right?

But I'm not a fool and I'm not capable of being fooled even by a woman. In my real work with people who have committed serial murders, I often say that they are beta males trying to become alpha males, they are often losers and we have that loser feeling, I think in norman bates he is someone who doesn't seem to be able to be competent in any way that one would expect from a grown man and therefore, to me, Bates spits out that pattern I see in much of my applied work that the serial killer, far from being a super predator, is often just plain old loser our next clip is from the movie ma played by octavia spencer i can feel those big ones eyes looking at me maggie you're anything else too much diazepam can knock out a great dane for five hours ma really it's just a Hollywood genre movie about a serial murder but the really interesting thing is that we tend to think of serial murders as men white professionals as super predators and rarely do we portray a character who is a different gender and a different ethnicity and yet the reality of Serial Murder in America is that about 20 of the serial killers will be women .

I bought us a beer pong table and a keg of bud light is on ice. The other thing about Mom as a character is that she is desperate to be liked. fit in but of course fit in she is also secretly desperate to stand out and that actually has a grain of truth in it, it seems to me that they want to be seen like you and me but secretly they also want to be different, they want to be stand out from you and from me because they want to be seen as a special group of victims from Mars, of course, they are also students, we tend not to see students as particularly vulnerable actually to serial murder if a serial killer started attacking a group who had social capital and certainly had parents who probably had social capital that serial killer will be caught much quicker than serial killers who would target sex workers the homeless the elderly the following clip is from the american psychopath howard es bateman patrick bateman you're my lawyer so I think you should know that I've killed a lot of people, some of my girls in an apartment uptown, some homeless people, maybe five or ten, one nyu girl, I meant , in Central Park, I left her in a parking lot behind a donut shop and killed Bethany, my old girlfriend with a nail gun.

I have never encountered a white person calling an investment banker a serial killer. They will often be delivery drivers. Taxi drivers. They will often have experience in law enforcement. I encountered several white investment bankers who were undoubtedly psychopaths and if I met a real-life Patrick Batman I would simply find him very fetishistic. He wears a particular clothing. He has a particular appearance. It's very superficial. It is very bright. He doesn't have any deep emotion. I would think of him as a psychopath and, frankly, I try to avoid them. I don't want to leave anything here. I guess I killedabout 20 people, maybe 40.

I've encountered serial killers in real life who just couldn't remember. they certainly wouldn't remember the names of their victims, they certainly wouldn't remember what they did with their victims and that's partly because often by the time they were arrested they had been killing for such a long period of time and with so regularly that I literally don't remember with one or two serial killers who were willing to talk about the murders they committed I felt like they were talking to me about them because they wanted to relive the moment they took someone else's life and I It became a vehicle for them to relive their fantasy and you see a sense of joy in this particular characterization of Patrick Batman.

You know he goes from being repentant to one where he is boastful. I killed Paul Allen with an ax to the face. His body. he's dissolving in a bathtub in hell's kitchen bateman ends this clip having this kind of insight i mean i guess i'm a pretty sick guy he's a pretty sick guy and of course he is, but in general i've never had murderers in series talk about themselves in that derogatory way, I've had serial killers, we've considered ourselves supermen, extraordinary human beings and you think, my God, they have no idea what they've done and the answer to that question is Of course, no.

They have no idea what they have done or they wouldn't have done it in the first place. The following clip is no country for old men. Hello, what's this about getting out of that car? Please sir, what do I need? Get out of the car, sir, what's that for? Hold still please, we are really dealing with a characterization of the serial killer that is not based on reality at all, this is the serial killer as the super predator, the bogeyman. What is accurate about the film is the sense in which many serial killers who are able to kill repeatedly without being caught have to be geographically transient have to be mobile are often engaged in occupations that allow them to legitimately be in different places in Different moments. you see instrumental reasons expressed by Javier Bardem's character and also psychological reasons that are shown, he simply wants to steal the car, that is instrumental, while the psychological thing will be when he plays cat and mouse with the owner of the gas station, he is simply expressing his power, he is simply expressing. the control of him, what is the most he has lost when flipping a coin?

Sir the most he has lost and according to us but here is the downside I think the coen brothers are completely wrong if someone like javier bardum's character existed in real life he wouldn't need him. kill because he's very powerful and in control he'd be running multinational corporations anyway he'd be running for president he doesn't need to have fun killing people in gas stations I'm just not convinced by the following The clip is from the show Riverdale, can any of you guess what they have in common all the murderers? Nothing, that's not the point, actually, they all have one thing in common, a specific set of genes, they discovered that you have maoa and cdh13. let's immediately get rid of the idea that there is a serial killer gene, it's an attractive idea and of course it has come up repeatedly in our history, so we need to nail that down now before we start filling in all the details, any conjectures about which one of these men is the killer, it's the third man, the idea that there could be someone who can just look at pictures or walk down the street and identify who the serial killer is is complete nonsense, I hope so.

It doesn't disappoint you too much, but it is complete and utter nonsense. Serial killers are banal and run-of-the-mill serial killers are never spectacular. They are always too human. If the serial killer really wants to be effective, he has to fit in because he does stand out. They will not be able to have access to the people they want to kill. The following clip is from an impersonator. 9 out of 10 serial killers are white men between the ages of 20 and 35, like these. I love this movie because they both play. some of the clichés I've been talking about, but it also provides enough authentic information to be believable.

The FBI estimates there could be as many as 35 serial killers searching for victims even as I speak. The truth is good. The FBI has said. that there are between 25 and 50 active serial killers what Sigourney Weaver's character doesn't say is that they will only kill about 1 of all murder victims in the United States, it makes it seem like there are a lot of serial killers killing a lot . of the victims the act of killing makes him feel intensely alive what he feels next is not guilt but disappointment it was not as wonderful as he expected maybe next time it would be perfect the other thing that she captures and that seems absolutely authentic to me is what the serial killer gets by having killed and how he probably feels disappointed after killing because he wants to kill again because it is time to kill what he seeks.

That scene sounds a lot like scenes in my own life where I've had to do it. I address public hearings and I had to have security at those conferences because I had to deal with some pretty strange things. The following clip is from the television series Mind Hunter as we see the real serial killer Ed Kemper being interviewed. You see, Bill. I found out a week before she died that he was going to kill her she went to a party she put on salsa she came home alone I asked her how the night was she just looked at me she said for seven years she said she hadn't had sex with a man thank you to you my murderous son so I got a hammer and beat her to death I cut off her head and humiliated her I said there now you've had sex it's true that the fighter and douglas interviewed 36 convicted serial killers, which was the beginning of understanding of the FBI on serial killers and one of the serial killers that they interviewed was Ed Kemper and of course what we see portrayed there is a very chilling picture of the kind of things that he did and did in fact do. killed his mother in the way that he was describing and in fact decapitated her and in fact had sex with her decapitated body, so there's a lot going on here that is completely and absolutely accurate, even as a child he had a kind of rich fantasy life You had fantasies about real women, oh yeah, and my mother was yelling and screaming at me, tell me she was sick.

The one thing that seems to connect all serial murders is that there is an underlying sexual fantasy that is a seed that then grows and grows and grows until that particular individual serial killer wants to make that fantasy a reality and why he chooses to do so. it will be specific and unique to that individual in this modern society, what do we do with the ed kempers of the world, death by torture of course? Kemper requested the death penalty. many serial killers I have worked with can be quite moral in other aspects of their lives, they will have standards of behavior that they insist that I should have in my life, a serial killer would constantly correct my grammar or my punctuation and the letters I I sent them they made your mother humiliate you and the interesting thing about this series is that it also deals with that other trope that we see in many Hollywood

movies

and that people like me would try to introduce into the mind of a serial killer I'm not interested in what What motivates a serial killer I am much more interested in who the serial killer is capable of killing if we focus our attention on the groups that serial killers constantly target we would do much more to reduce the incidence of serial murder in our cultures, unlike any number of criminal profilers who claim they can get into the mind of a serial killer if we really want to do something to reduce the incidence of serial murder in our culture, let's challenge homophobia, have an adult debate about how to please those young men and women who sell sexual services and, above all, let's try to find out why older people are so vulnerable in our culture because they have no voice or power, thank you.

Thank you so much for watching and thank you Vanity Fair for having me.