Multiple killers as monsters in american true crime narratives of the second half of the 20th century

Abstract

This PhD dissertation focuses on four American true crime narratives of the second half of the 20th century about multiple killers: (1) Harold Schechter’s Deviant: the shocking true story of Ed Gein, the original psycho (1989); (2) Don Davis’s The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: an American nightmare (1991); (3) Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me: the shocking inside story of serial killer Ted Bundy (1980); and (4) Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (1965). I develop my argument through a discussion of these offenders as they are transformed into monstrous figures to excite the affect of fear in readers. This analysis necessarily brings three elements together: multiple killers, monsters, and the rhetoric of monstrosity. A multiple killer is a person who commits more than one murder, a phenomenon divided into (i) mass killers; (ii) spree killers; and (iii) serial killers. In horror fiction, monsters are scientifically non-explainable beings compounded by three ingredients: (a) abnormality; (b) lethality; (c) impurity. Finally, the rhetoric of monstrosity relies on the narrative strategies true crime authors of multiple killer accounts use to foreground monstrosity, and consequently arouse fear. So far, four strategies have been identified: (1) locus horribilis; (2) gothic qualities; (3) graphic descriptions; and (4) people’s reactions. Noël Carroll (2009, p. 16) defines fictional horror monsters as extraordinary creatures in our ordinary world, powerful enough to affect human characters physically (for being a threat to life) and cognitively (for being made of opposed categories: animal/human, dead/alive, animate/inanimate, etc.). The hypothesis made is that, although not marked by those inexplicable features which shape horror monsters, multiple killers (for they exist in our very real world) are equally monstrous; not for their abnormal bodies, but for their abnormal actions. However, these offenders do not present themselves as naturally horrible; on the contrary, they are as ordinary as any other human being. Thus, to offer readers an entertaining account, true crime authors make use of narrative strategies of the rhetoric of monstrosity, in order to shape an ordinary murderer into an extraordinary figure, as frightening as a fictional horror monster