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The Reality of an Imperfect System

Know why serial killers don’t get caught? Why they didn’t get caught in the past? They’re average people. They’re nobodies who slip through the cracks of a fractured, imperfect, and often biased law enforcement system. They’re our neighbors, our community members, and friends; therefore, we are predisposed to preclude them from suspicion, because TV has taught us that outsiders commit these crimes, and anything else is hard to believe.

Occasionally, serial murderers are transient – homeless; frequently staying with different people; or sometimes in careers that move them around. It’s difficult getting two nearby jurisdictions to coordinate, much less interstate or international jurisdictions; there’s the lack of updated technology, a failure to digitize older crimes in an accessible database, different laws and definitions, language barriers, etc. It will be incredibly complicated and costly to create and maintain a comprehensive database on anything, like M.O., that includes every jurisdiction.

Serial murderers also learn to capitalize on police incompetence; for example, Ted Bundy’s escapes are a lot less impressive when you learn the details.

Then you have the 19th and early-to-mid 20th century law enforcement theories that believed women couldn’t be serial killers, and if a woman somehow managed to killed someone, it was her husband’s/brother’s/father’s fault (whatever man what in charge of her). Basically, you had a system that ignored more than half of the world as potential suspects. The “women aren’t capable of serial murder” theories lost some favor after Aileen Wuornos showed up, but they do persist, supported by the stereotype that women are kind nurturers and that aggressive tendencies from women are somehow more aberrant than from men.

So What’s The Deal?

I think the hyper-intelligent serial killer is a combination of our culture’s relatively recent obsession with anti-heroes and its fear of incredibly smart people. Whether it’s fear of what geniuses and/or highly educated people can do, or fear that their existence negates the average person’s belief that s/he is a special little snowflake, I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is that this fad speaks volumes about the psychology of our culture. Geniuses are to be mocked when portrayed as geeks or nerds, they are to be pitied when portrayed as savants with mental disorders or disabilities, and they are to be feared when portrayed as serial murderers. When we do see serial killers who aren’t geniuses, they tend to be on the opposite end of a binary situation: they are inbred, stereotypically redneck hillbillies. That’s our choice: super-geniuses or inbred morons. They’re never average people.

Average people can't be serial killers, because that's scary, too – there are a lot more average people than there are geniuses. Serial killer plot lines also reinforce the idea that murderers are random people we don't know, rather than the people closest to us. Without a balance, we're just babying ourselves and reinforcing old myths.

I wouldn't mind Dexter, this new guy on "The Following", and TV cop show multi-episode arc serial killers as much if they'd just balance it out with more realistic characters, but even the characters “loosely based” on real people end up affected by the hyper-intelligent serial killer trend. Every serial killer based on Ed Gein was exponentially smarter and more intentionally villainous than he was.

We Continually Have to Top Ourselves in Modern Entertainment

I can’t speak too much for film because I get my drama in 42-50 minute segments, but I think another part of the problem is that modern entertainment media has decided that everyone has to be superhuman to be a "hero" or an "anti-hero". Not just in the sci-fi or fantasy sense, either; people on TV have to be super-smart, or unrealistically good at some skill, or have an inhuman number of skills at which they are proficient (super sniper, super fighter, speaks 30 languages, super genius, super mechanic, super-con man, whatever).

It's a sign of bad writing when you can't make normal people with one or two relatively defining characteristics or skills interesting; Bad Writers have to have these super archetypes to write the story for them. Archetypes can be done well if handled by a talented writer, but I don't think the hyper-intelligent serial killer fad qualifies.

You can have characters with which regular people can identify as long as you have someone who can write (and someone who can act) character development. I'd much rather watch a well-written show about relatively normal cops who try to catch relatively normal criminals than a binary, archetypal show about geniuses who happen to fit the stereotypes that non-geniuses have about them.

Genius Serial Killers Are Low-Tech Antiques

Dexter, Hannibal Lecter, Ghostface, Jason, and Norman Bates: these are not characters set in the far past, like the fictional investigator Sherlock Holmes or the unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper. The idea of a super-skilled serial killer makes much more sense in a low-tech world that doesn’t understand them and that has few investigative resources other than very clever people who are good at pattern recognition. The serial killers seemed like geniuses because the world was less educated and technologically advanced than it is now, and the detectives seemed like super-humans because they were educated and advanced when the local law enforcement agencies weren’t.

The hilarity of it is that very rarely are the “genius” characters written by actual very smart or genius people, and it shows. Part of the problem with modern stories is that the writers don't have the educations to understand the topics about which they're writing because modern technology is so scientifically advanced. The result is that television viewers get crap science mixed with bullshit based on detective shows that aired when current writers grew up.

To Wrap It Up

Bottom line, we need to stop “othering” geniuses. As James Cameron beat us over the head with in Dark Angel (Season 2), “People are afraid of what they don’t understand”. Yoda preached at us that “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering”*. People of average intelligence, who are statistically the most likely kind of people, don’t understand genius – so they fear it. They become angry when forced to face their own mediocrity in a culture that encourages the denial of it. They project that fear and anger through bullying, condescending attitudes, or villainization. People suffer when highly educated, highly intelligent people are ignored and marginalized because they’re so uppity or snobby, or because they’re know-it-alls (or whatever pejorative based in cognitive dissonance happens to be popular).

At the very minimum, we should expect better of our entertainment writers than to simply regurgitate the same tropes about genius that have been around for decades, reinforced by uneducated, ignorant beliefs rooted in pop culture.

*This is one of the only times I’ll ever quote a Lucas movie in the positive.