On Murders Especially Heinous, Atrocious, or Cruel
The death-sentence trial of the Parkland shooter was an exercise in finding explanations where none existed.
Lately, it has felt difficult to evade the late-’80s countenance of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, an ordinary-looking and affectively blank man with neither the dramatic Jim Morrison locks of his fellow murderer Richard Ramirez nor the sleazy, sinister showmanship of their compatriot Ted Bundy. Rather, Dahmer’s recent has emphasized his utter plainness as a kind of counterpoint to his inhuman, almost otherworldly violence—a familiar formula in serial-killer cultural production, in which the criminal’s charm, looks, or evident mundanity are balanced against their deeds to provoke a question: What can we make of the fact that such a person could do such things? I suspect that solving this riddle is the honest, if lurid, intention of
