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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