I’m still looking for my own version of America’s Most Wanted: Young, Beautiful and Murdered. It’s not a good thing, this obsession with making the public shiver over how much we love to watch sad young girls die. (It’s worse when these shows are for grown women, but let’s not go there.)
My husband came up with a great slogan for this week’s show: “They’re just hookers.” The girl that was killed last week, was just a hooker. Last week’s murder was “just another dead stripper”. Last month’s victim is just a hooker. This is the media’s constant argument: “This time, it’s just a little different.” It’s not a little different, it’s as different as can be from a serial killer. This is nothing like anything you’ve seen before. You’ve killed hookers before. Hookers are not like this girl. I know why you’re saying this, and you’re wrong.
“Oh, I know the difference,” says the father of a missing woman from a local television news broadcast. I can imagine that little girl’s mom crying. I hate that. “They’re just hookers. That’s all they are.”
A friend of mine works for the media, and she is going crazy over this news. Her response when I ask her why the media is so intrigued by people who kill prostitutes is: “People think that serial killers are horrible, and we need to show them that they are evil. The only thing that makes any sense is that maybe they want the media attention, so they commit the crimes.” I told her that was horrible, and that it’s not how the media should work. But as long as a large number of people get their jollies from watching violent crimes, the media will continue to feed them.
That’s what makes the serial killer the media’s favorite bogeyman, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. They never mention that this behavior is a rare abnormality, that most serial killers are not sexually sadistic. It’s not about the money for most of these killers. It’s just that they want to see people die, and then they want more people to watch it, and a story about someone missing or murdered is just as good as one about a murderer who slaughtered two women in their homes. And it makes some of us who despise this behavior feel better if they’re shown in a negative light, and if they’re seen as “different.” This is just another way of saying we prefer black monsters to white ones. It’s all that we see from the media.
I know that all the talk of the media is just a way to avoid my main question: “Why do these men hunt prostitutes?” If this behavior is so rare, why did I know as much about it as I did? I didn’t grow up reading pulp fiction, so how did I know about “Wolfman, Wolfman?” (A pulp name for the Zodiac Killer.) I wanted to know who those men are, and why. My ex-husband has always told me that the best stories in history are the ones you never heard about, and I think he was right. When I was sixteen, I found out about “The Green River Murders,” (a serial killer who killed about twenty women in Washington State in the 1970’s and 80’s). People were saying the media created the Green River Killer. I think the media only helped by creating the legend. This kind of thing happens all the time. In 1988, a British serial killer nicknamed The Backpacker was on the loose for six months, killing mostly hitchhikers. It took a documentary film crew to figure out that he was actually a man who preyed on boys with drug problems, who picked up kids on the road and beat and murdered them, and then dumped their bodies down ditches. It happened in the United States as well, of all places. There’s a serial killer (although the press has never seen fit to call him that) in Texas, who has killed girls at biker hangouts and drug deals, and he’s never been caught.
We don’t read about the crimes we don’t understand, so if a serial killer is murdering women who are hookers, we know something about them. For a young girl who wants to be a hooker, there are easier ways to make money than by whoring herself out. She could get a job or she could do what this man in Seattle did, and sell her body for drug money. She’s no more a whore than those men are serial killers.
The first of the men, John McCann, had a problem with prostitutes. He beat one in the course of committing a robbery, and she talked. People started looking at her and her friends. The cops picked her up on drug charges, and that made her a snitch. The police kept her alive, so they could make her give them information on other prostitutes. John McCann thought the girl was telling him things he didn’t want to hear, so he shot her. She is dead now, which is the only thing he’s done right so far. So far. I found out all about that incident in a short piece in Time magazine.
I’ve found plenty of evidence that serial killers are not some sort of twisted new phenomenon that’s happening for the first time. “Oh no, my dear, I’ve seen the like before in a pulp novel.” Do you?
The first man to be caught by the police has called a newspaper from the county jail. He says he’s innocent, that he’s got a history of beating up people who talk to cops. The police say that since he knows the case, he can’t get a deal with a plea bargain. He says he’s given them all the names they need. He says that he didn’t have to shoot that woman, but he did. I don’t know where this guy lives, but I plan to send him a greeting when I find out what his address is.
The man who has done a lot of my thinking about this subject is Charles Ray Hatcher. His story was told by Mark Lunsford in the book, A Southern Gothic: The Life and Crimes of Charles Ray Hatcher, who was the killer who came to epitomize the Southern Strangler. I didn’t know much about him until I read this book. His mom had been a prostitute, and had died in a drug related incident, and the man who was her pimp put a pillow over her face and smothered her. I couldn’t figure out why he did that, but I kept reading, and Lunsford mentioned that Hatcher didn’t want anyone to come in between him and his mother. I’m sure this is a familiar story to all of you, but I was amazed by it. Hatcher was so enraged by the fact that he had lived with his mother, and didn’t know his father, that he wanted a way to be free of everyone else.
Serial killers always try to make people feel guilty for what they have done, or for letting them do it. That’s why you always read that the wife knew the husband was beating her, or that the parents knew their son was gay, or whatever. The media makes it so much easier to feel guilty than to feel compassion. That’s why people go into mourning when they hear that someone has been taken away by a serial killer. The last thing people do before they take a life is to take away someone else’s. In the case of the media, we have seen enough of our favorite serial killer to know that he’s a bad person, and we’re willing to turn him into the villain to the hero for the moment. If we kill him, he was a bad person. If we save him, we’re good people.
If we don’t know the answer to our own question about why killers hunt hookers, then maybe they should stop being called serial killers. Serial killers should only apply to people who have killed people for no reason other than the fact that they just do it for the thrill of killing and all the attention that it gets them, like a teenager would. These are the true monsters.
I remember about five years ago being at a bar in Hollywood with a few friends, and talking to this woman. She told us that she thought the recent craze for serial killers was because of movies and books about Ted Bundy, who was finally caught after the press made him famous.
She said that he looked like some sort of “hunk.” That was in the days when serial killers were considered sex symbols. Like most men of the times, he was supposed to be glamorous, but in this case it was because he was a murderer. He had a “good face” to attract the press, even if his smile came across as vacant in the courtroom. He wasn’t like other serial killers; he did it all for himself. But he wasn’t trying to save anyone from anything; he just killed because it was easy to do. He actually thought he was smarter than the cops. He was the most popular murderer because he made the press drool, and they couldn’t take their eyes off of him.
It was a very uncomfortable conversation, but I guess it had to be said. If there
