SERIAL KILLER MYSTIQUE

Serial-killer syndrome; marks of Cain; horror; poisoning; the criminal classes

Jul 30, 2025

Othering

This is the name given by psychologists to the process by which outgroups come to be seen as different from and inferior to Our own group. If Our group is varied, interesting, and law-abiding, what does that say about Them?[i] And can we identify Them before they become a threat?

In 1988, the psychiatrist, Joel Norris, published a book with the slightly embarrassing title Serial Killers: The growing menace. I bought my copy online. I couldn’t see myself going to an actual bookshop.

Norris’s impression was that serial killers had as much in common with each other as patients who share a hospital ward. In fact, he thought of serial killing primarily as a public health concern. Like any other disease it had its own markers. They included parental neglect, trauma of every kind you can name, malnutrition, and substance abuse.[ii] Serial killers had genetic defects, limbic-system malfunction, epileptic symptoms, and an inability to control their impulses. Their life histories had left them feeling powerless. They compensated by controlling the lives of others.[iii] The final stage of the syndrome was suicide.

There were certain genetic disorders, too. A psychiatrist might be able to spot them, because they were linked to distinctive physical appearance.

It is a venerable thought, that we might identify criminals by their physical characteristics. Certainly it is one of the oldest thoughts in criminology (think of the mark of Cain, inflicted by God on the first murderer). The Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, built not only a career but even an entire School of followers on the notion that, because criminals were evolutionary throwbacks, they not only behaved differently from law-abiding citizens, but looked different, too. Lombroso identified certain physical stigmata that distinguished goodies from baddies. You can read more about him here.

Norris, like Lombroso, identified stigmata. Among them he included flyaway hair, eyelids that join the nose, large spaces between the tear ducts, mismatched ears, speckled tongues, curved fingers, and long toes. If Norris was right, it ought to make serial killers pretty easy to spot. It would also obviate any need for criminal trials: simply measure your man and see whether he’s guilty! Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know how seriously to take Norris’s list, because nowhere in his book does he provide hard data or even references.

In fact, the most remarkable thing about these particular monsters may be their lack of stigmata. It has often been remarked just how terribly ordinary many serial killers appear. One striking example is the slight, shy, diffident, and remarkably bland murderer and grave-robber, Ed Gein. Another is Dennis Nilsen:

‘I am not full of self-pity, just amazed that all this [...] could ever happen. I should feel like some two-headed monster - all I see in the mirror is me, just the same old respectable, friendly, helpful, responsible me. I do not feel mentally ill. I have no headaches, pressures or voices, nothing in my thoughts or actions to suggest insanity.’[iv]

If Nilsen is the criminal Other, not even he can recognise himself.

One newspaper headline about the notorious, appalling Ted Bundy read ‘Charming killer seems ‘one of us’’. Bundy committed murders by the dozen. If anyone should bear the mark of Cain, surely it is him. But apparently not. Bundy was, well, ‘an average-looking person with a family, a job and a home just like yourself’.[v] There is something here to recall the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous comment about ‘the banality of evil’.[vi]

There was nothing whatever in Bundy’s appearance to reveal his crimes. Cut that sentence short: ‘There was nothing whatever in Bundy’s appearance...’ In a book called Monstrosity, Alexa Wright presents six different pictures of Bundy side by side. And when I say different, I really mean different. No picture resembles any other. There’s nothing to see: Bundy’s face slides from the eye like grease from the fingers. By his appearance, Bundy was no one. That’s another way of saying that he was everyone. Perhaps he was no more than what his times made him.[vii] It’s the same for Us all.

‘I am the man in the mirror,’ Charles Manson once said. ‘Anything you see in me is in you.’[viii]

Category-jamming

Comments like Manson’s contribute to the strangest phenomenon in modern crime, (and also our title): the serial killer’s weird mystique. No other criminal has quite the same – what’s the right word? - allure. For fear that they will attract people suffering from so-called Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome, Denmark has passed a law preventing murderers from advertising their crimes on social media.[ix] Remember the copy-cats in the movie, Natural Born Killers? Like that.

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The serial killer is an Other, for sure, and yet, at the same time, he’s not, not quite. It’s a puzzle, and nothing is more fascinating than a puzzle. That’s because a puzzle is two things at the same time. It may look like jumbled nonsense, but we know that, with a degree of effort, we can transform it into something altogether different. In this sense, a puzzle is impure.

‘Impurity’ is an idea central to a book by Noel Carroll, called The Philosophy of Horror. Impure phenomena are those that resist or defy categorisation. A meal made from rotten ingredients, for instance, is both food and not-food. Mucus, saliva, faeces, blood, nail-clippings: they are both Me and Not-Me. Or take the threats from horror fiction. Zombies, ghosts, mummies, and vampires are simultaneously dead and not-dead. Haunted houses, robots, and Chuckie from Child’s Play are simultaneously animate and inanimate. Demoniacs, doppelgângers, Jekyll-and-Hyde: all have two souls, yet, at the same time, just one.[x] All of them are puzzles, and we return to puzzles constantly, repelled yet oddly attracted, trying to make things fit. When you try to divide an odd number by an even one, there is always a remainder, something that won’t go. The serial killer is normal (weirdly normal - isn’t he? - that nice quiet boy from down the road) apart from one thing, the vital thing that defines who He is. Ted Bundy is neither Us nor Them.

The technical term is category-jammer. Let’s think about a single case. William Palmer – known to the Victorians as the Rugeley Poisoner - was accused of killing no fewer than fourteen people. Here is the New York Daily Tribune: ‘The nineteenth century, in spite of its enlightenment, can do a little in the way of villains; and when such a one as Mr P arrives, it appears [...] that the devil is still extant, will travel by rail as readily as by old coach, and hides his hoofs, jauntily, in patent leather’.[xi]

Palmer was both more and less than he seemed. Victorian readers used to look forward to an agreeable sense of polite shock when the newspaper arrived alongside the morning toast, filled with excitingly-horrible details. The ‘criminal classes’ were getting up to all kinds of mischief. Many of them almost seemed designed for titillation. Even so, they always had the courtesy to confine their activities to the rookeries and warrens into which newspaper subscribers never ventured. If the criminal classes belonged on the wrong side of the tracks, at least they had the decency to stay there, out of sight, at arms’ reach. You wouldn’t have to touch them with a barge pole.

How then to respond to a two-faced villain like Palmer? Unquestionably, he was from the right side of the tracks. When he wasn’t gambling, womanising, or murdering, Palmer was a reasonable and respectable church-goer. Here was no secretive foreigner or lower-class servant, but a proper paid-up professional – a surgeon, no less. People’s lives were literally in his hands. And how terribly ordinary those hands appeared! Palmer might be standing right beside you, but you’d never know. He was a devil in disguise. What could be more frightening than the Other who wasn’t? The Palmer case blurred lines that everyone wanted to remain clear. He was a category-jammer. We know now that far more, and far worse, were to come.

Category-jammers are like the wasp’s stripe, or the witch’s hat. Evolution has designed us to recognise them. They warn us of danger. Fear isn’t our only response. There is loathing, too, that ikky kind of hatred. One type of category-jammer is the monster. Monsters are everything we loathe: oozy, sticky, badly-constructed. Monsters are made of fetid flesh, old bones, animal bits and pieces. They don’t quite fit. Ted Bundy doesn’t quite fit, either.

Where exactly do monsters come from? Not from here, that’s for sure. They come from outer space, underwater, the tomb. They come from a mad scientist’s laboratory, a lost island, Transylvania. Like Lombroso’s Criminal Man, they may even come from pre-history.

That’s it for this week, Crime & Psychology fan. But keep those seatbelts buckled, because next week we’ll be looking into several more elements of Serial Killer Mystique. Will we get to the bottom of it? Who can say? – there’s only one way to find out.

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SERIAL KILLER MYSTIQUE

Serial-killer syndrome; marks of Cain; horror; poisoning; the criminal classes

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