A Fine Line, article by legal-thriller-writer Joel Goldman in Web Mystery Magazine, Summer 2005

A Fine Line

The public has a gruesome fascination with serial killers, at once frightened and enthralled with the specter of someone who feeds an inner frenzy they cannot fathom. Cops use the words serial killer reluctantly, knowing they conjure celluloid monsters whose exploits are big box office when, more often than not, the murderer appears as ordinary as margarine until the need to kill overwhelms. Serial killers, both mythical and real, are drawn to prostitutes like tornados are to trailer parks.

My town, Kansas City, has its own history with serial killers, one of whom kept his victims locked up in his basement, torturing them before killing them; caught when a boy escaped through a window, running naked for help. One practitioner who preyed on prostitutes dismembered their bodies; legs and arms catching on fishing lines and drifting debris in the Missouri River. A suspect was arrested, convicted on bad check charges when the evidence linking him to the murders fell short. He denied the crimes but the killings stopped when he was sent away.

Whether real or fictional, we fantasize, analyze, and mythologize these predators, catching or creating them with dizzying diversity. Hannibal Lector gave culinary meaning to the royal dictum off with their heads. Ted Bundy was found irresistible by some of the women who knew and survived him. Dennis Rader, the accused Wichita BTK serial killer, was the proverbial quiet man, a bit difficult to get along with perhaps, but never suspected by his church. Jeff Lindsay brings us Dexter Morgan, the anti-hero of Darkly Dreaming Dexter, a blood splatter analyst who splatters the blood of criminals in his own self-righteous serial spree.

What does all of this mean for us as mystery and thriller writers and readers or, for that matter, as regular folk who step on bugs with the equanimity these characters display toward their victims? It means that we are drawn to that which repels and frightens us. Perhaps these stories, real or imagined, confirm our own sanity, reminding us that we aren’t like them.

Then again, how finely is that line drawn? As reported in an AP story posted on CNN.com, serial killer Michael Ross was executed recently by the State of Connecticut after waiving his appeals and asking to be executed. He sent a posthumous letter to a psychiatrist who advised against executing him, claiming that Ross was not mentally competent to waive his appeals. The letter read “Check, and mate. You never had a chance!” Asked to comment, Ross’s lawyer said of his killer client, “He always had a good sense of humor.”

Just what we need. A killer who knows how to deliver a punch line from the grave. What’s not to like?