Beltway Sniper Blues Part II: Why America Likes Its Serial Killers Free and on the Loose
The Beltway Snipers transfixed forever the way we mass murderers could be stereotyped as well as caught. This was a 24 hour news network gold mine, as well; but the (over) exposure wasn’t and shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. It was this constant coverage that, in no small way, led to the apprehension of the two suspects, John Allen Muhammad and his 17 year old protÃ?©gÃ?© Lee Boyd Malvo.
The story of Muhammad and Malvo is beyond a sorted one. Their perception of reality was as warped as any of the more gruesome serial killers in our nation’s history (a cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, or the Oregonian rapist and murder of elderly women, Cesar Barone), but their tactics were far different.
The Beltway Snipers shot and killed their prey like they were hunting deer in an urban forest; indiscriminately through a peep hole cut out of the trunk. It was domestic terrorism at its finest and most deadly. And then on October 24th, they were caught. Their meteoric rise to the national spotlight was nothing compared to their colossal disappearance from the public eye, but this is nothing new in the realm of the serial killer.
Experts have expunged for years that one of the largest motives serial killers have is a desperate craving for attention; mass attention, acted out in the most inhumane ways. They long for the celebrity that their killing creates, often cutting out and keeping newspaper clips. Murdering becomes their drug and the murder itself becomes their theatre and ours; the more creative and fear provoking the better. The “this could happen to me” aspect of following a serial killer story equals big ratings. People will put themselves in the shoes of either the murderer or the potential victim; they’ll do this even if their thousands of miles away. A chance to live vicariously through someone or something else from the comfort of the TV room will never go out of style, no matter how macabre the story might me.
But serial killers have a shelf life. They all have to get caught, a final validation for the weeks, months or years of work that they put in (except for a very small few, San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer simply stopped killing people and was never caught). And once this happens, everyone loses interest. After the country learns the secret identity of the killer(s), like the unmasking of Zorro, we move on; we go back to our lives and rarely even speak of the unfortunate events. Subsequent hearings and court trials are never huge stories because there is no more intrigue. They are often open and shut cases with little mystery as to innocence or guilt. Serial killer trials may as well be small claims court.
So then we wait, as a nation, for the next madman to start killing people. We wait for the next tortured serial killer to start raping and slashing women or we wait for the next domestic terrorist like the Beltway Snipers. It’s actually been a while since a serial murdered has had the national spotlight; this is undoubtedly a good thing, but it makes you wonder how far off the next one is. We wait and we watch; we’ll always be watching.
