Honoring Evil?: The slippery Tightrope of Mass Murder in Popular Culture Part II

Part 2: A Troubling Focus

The notoriety these true crime films continue to provide is troubling. For example, since the 1970s anyone on the street can tell you who Bundy was. But if you ask this same person to name one of Bundy’s victims, you’d likely get a blank stare.

Lynda Ann Healy was just 21, had been a good student at the UW and was on the verge of graduating in 1974 when she disappeared, leaving behind only a bloodstained mattress. Healy worked part time for Western Ski Promotions and did daily radio broadcasts of conditions in the mountain passes. My mother and grandparents used to listen to her reports.

Georgann Hawkins was just 18 years old when she disappeared only steps from her sorority house at the UW in 1974. Hawkins’ family was from my hometown of Lakewood and she went to Lakes High School, the same high school I later attended. From all accounts she had a bright future ahead of her. Then she vanished into thin air in an incident that would become one of the most haunting aspects of the Bundy case. Just before his execution in 1989, Bundy would finally confess to Hawkins’ murder and detail how he had done it. While Bundy did provide details on where he had dumped the body, Hawkins’ remains were never recovered.

Another victim, Susan Rancourt, had a 4.0 GPA at Central Washington University. She disappeared after attending a meeting at CWU. Soon after, other students came forward, saying that a handsome man with his arm in a sling had been walking around campus. After Rancourt disappeared, the campus went on high alert. Women no longer walked the area at night and people in this tiny farming town began locking their doors.

Recently, I gave a speech about Robert Hayward, the Utah State Patrolman who arrested Ted Bundy in 1975. Afterward, a woman who heard my speech came up to me and said that she had been hitchhiking in Washington when she was a young woman and had been picked up by man in a VW bug. When she told him where to drop her off, he drove by it without a word and at the next stop began getting physical with her. She pulled off one of her high heeled shoes, struck him in the groin, then jumped out and ran from the car. Much later, when she saw his face on television news reports of his crimes, she realized the man had been Ted Bundy.

If we are to take away any lessons from infamous murders they should be lessons similar to those we glean from a natural disaster. After every major hurricane, blizzard or earthquake, at some point there is a meeting where people sit down as say, “What can we do better next time?” and, “How can we lesson the damage in the future?” Law enforcement can always learn something about better information sharing and more patrols to certain high-risk areas, but much like the best-intentioned city and state planners who see yet another storm about to make landfall, they can only learn from hindsight, and can never predict something they’ve yet to experience.

Perhaps the best solution in this media driven age is to not remember the killer at all. Why should a school shooter’s face be plastered on TV for hundreds of hours? Why should someone be able to immediately name Bundy, Ridgway and Dahmer, but not the name of one of their victims? Aside from honoring the killer and hurting the victims’ families, the families of the killers are constantly reminded of what their relative did. Ted Bundy’s daughter and Gary Ridgway’s son will have to live with the fact that their fathers did something that was unforgivable and forever cast a pall over their names. Hollywood writers and directors and news outlets need to seriously consider what they are trying to accomplish when they make a criminal famous. I would never call for government censorship of the media, but people within in the industry need to independently decide not to show a killer’s face or say his name after his arrest and conviction. Let them die in obscurity and be forgotten.

If museums would like to have things like Bundy’s car. Rather than mention him, they should talk about Robert Hayward instead and how a wrong turn and a hunch led to his capture. The faces and names of the victims who met their end via that car also need to be part of the display. The lessons that the exhibitors want visitors to take away should also be carefully structured and presented.

Being riveted with the macabre is nothing new, but American media and museums need to present criminal stories with a sensitivity that does not glorify the killer or enhance their legacy. In an age when audiences seem to have become desensitized to everything, it is important to not blur the line between harmless fantasy and heinous acts that had very real, tragic consequences. I wish more people knew about Lynda Ann Healy, Georgann Hawkins and Robert Hayward and less people knew about Bundy.

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Honoring Evil?: The Slippery Tightrope of Mass Murder in Popular Culture Part I

Part 1: Villainous Heroes?

In the summer of 2014, I was in Washington D.C. at the National Crime Museum. One of the main attractions there was a tan Volkswagen Beetle used by serial killer Ted Bundy. One did not have to wait long to see it, as the vehicle had been placed just steps from the entrance and the admissions desk. I stopped and asked my parents to take my picture next to it. Almost as soon as I did this, I had a funny feeling. Thinking back now to all the local connections we have to the Bundy case, I get the same sort of chill about standing next to his car that I felt at the National Holocaust Museum when I stood in a train car that was the same type that took people to the Nazi death camps and when I viewed a rusty bed frame used during the T4 program. 

The whole purpose of museum artifacts is to have the visitor see something and immediately have them imagine the event around it. In 2003, I had gone to the Smithsonian and saw the tiny portable desk that Thomas Jefferson had used when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. As I stood there, I thought of that hot summer in Philadelphia in 1776 and pictured a young Jefferson bent over the desk in a cramped boarding house room painstakingly writing one of the most important documents in history. That same day, I saw the first computer ever built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Again, I pictured two long haired, college aged men working in a garage, assembling this half wood, half electronic contraption that would soon change the world.

When I stood in front of Ted Bundy’s car, all I could think about was the women who had been hurt on those seats, on this floor. This was the car that had transported Debra Kent to her death, along with several others. Later I learned that the August night in 1975 that Bundy was captured, he had actually parked that same car outside a house where two young girls were staying home alone. Only a wrong turn by Utah State Patrolman Robert Hayward spooked Bundy into fleeing. And it strikes me, aren’t places like the National Crime Museum, and any other museum that enshrines the photos and stories of criminals, more monuments to evil than memorial to the victims?

I understand that this type of criminal fame is nothing new. After all. American and British readers were horrified and intrigued by the “Jack the Ripper” murders of 1888. Several times during the 20^th century, the press touted criminal proceedings to be the “Trial of the Century.” Authors like Truman Capote and Anne Rule made millions from their books containing grisly accounts of murder, and lavish details about the murderers.

I don’t begrudge Capote and Rule the money they made; indeed, their accounts are some of the most factual and informative ever written in the True Crime genre. However, while there is a clearly established public fascination with crime, I feel like there is a cost to that fascination. In the years, since their heinous acts, the fame and historic legacy of men like Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and Jeffrey Dahmer who would have been forgotten without the crimes they committed, has been inflated and sustained by recurring media accounts that focus on the morbid details of their crimes for shock value alone. In all the things that we see on TV or read in books, little time is devoted to what the victims’ families have gone through as a result of losing their loved ones. As I write this, four movies have already been made about Ted Bundy and five have been made about Manson. A a film about Bundy, and at least two more films about Manson are slated for release later this year. In addition to this, a new documentary about the Bundy killings has just been released on Netflix.

Often directors and writers say that they are creating these adaptations for the purpose of discovering “Why they did it.” But with a man like Ted Bundy, the answer is darkly simple. Bundy had a compulsion to rape and murder women, and Manson believed a Beatles record was compelling him to start a race war. Nothing more in their later disjointed ramblings will ever serve to give people a better answer. Bundy didn’t murder people because he had a bad childhood or because his girlfriend dumped him in college, Bundy was just evil, as was Manson, as was Dahmer, as was Gary Ridgeway, and there is nothing that can explain away the loss of the people they took. Indeed, the continuing production of such True Crime movies seems to be trying to anesthetize people into viewing them more like the latest fictional slasher movie. But as the families of these people who suffered and died know only too well, their loved ones won’t jump up after the scene is shot, scrape off the prosthetic gore and wash off the fake blood.

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