TITLE – Stranger Danger?: Sadistic Serial Killers on the Small Screen
Stranger Danger?: Cultural Constructions
of Sadistic Serial Killers in US Crime Dramas
Abstract
This chapter analyses three U.S. television crime dramas, Criminal Minds, Dexter and Law & Order: SVU, to demonstrate how popular culture distorts understandings of gender and violence through the lens of sadistic serial killers. Popular cultural fictions of violence often involve serial killers who seek out random victims, perpetuating the ‘stranger danger’ myth. Recently, a more terrifying killer has emerged within television crime dramas; the sadistic serial killer. Sadism is interpolated as a metaphor for torture, furnished on characteristics which bear no resemblance to sadomasochistic desire as defined by those who practice it. Instead, sadism is an allegory of strangeness, staged upon criminal, cultural and sexual difference.
Key words
gender; serial killers; sadism; television; violence.
Act One, Scene One – Culturally Violent Strangers
This chapter examines the most gruesome of crime fantasies which is now commonly portrayed on American television; the sadistic serial killer. It will analyse episodes of American crime dramas, Criminal Minds, Dexter and Law and Order: SVU, which feature sadistic serial killers in the plots. By examining these representative crime dramas, the manner in which television narratives of violence are disconnected from the corporeality of gendered, heterosexual violence through imaginations of sadism as a form of criminal violence will come clear. However, popular cultural constructions of fictional sadistic serial killers do not recognise the differences between sadomasochism and criminal violence. Rather, the criminally violent offences depicted are often fused with elements of sadism, especially sexual sadism, to produce a neatly defined culpable body.
The label ‘sadism’, especially sexual sadism, is attached to popular cultural profiles of serial killers as part of a social construction that insists expressions of violence are foreign and strange. This identity is based on visual imagery and evidence of torture, rather than on recognition of sadomasochism (s/m) as a mutually consensual form of desire (as defined by those who practice it). Sadism becomes a metaphor for torture, a simplistic formula of extreme cruelty displayed by inflicting corporeal suffering on non-consenting and random victims. Other times a character’s sadism is loosely signified by certain traits, which have little or no relation at all to the practices involved in actual sadomasochism, but rather embody extreme anti-social or egotistical behavior. This distorts the image of sadomasochism as not only pathological, but as an excessively inhumane form of criminality/violence. This hyper-pathology of criminality creates, for the viewers of these crime dramas, a terrifying monster, one that is sexually, socially and psychologically terrifying.
most women are at a much greater risk of violence from someone they know, most especially an intimate partner or family member (Hunter, 2006). Sadomasochism depicted in crime dramas bears little resemblance to s/m as a form of consensual desire, as discussed in the recent and relevant literature (see Edwards, 2008, Langdridge and Barker, 2007, Moser and Kleinplatz, 2008, and Langdridge, 2008). Instead, s/m as a trope deployed in these types of shows functions as a hyperbolic spectacle of violence intended to titillate.
Sadomasochism and Moral Panics
As Moser and Kleinplatz write, in ‘Themes of SM Expression’, ‘SM is consensual by definition. Just as the difference between consensual coitus and rape is consent, the difference between SM and violence is consent. Non-consensual acts are criminal’ (Moser and Kleinplatz, 2008, 38). Sadism refers to personal desires involving various practices including the giving of pain for pleasure (Langdridge, 2008). Sadism is not only about pain, but the infliction of pain is perhaps the most troubling aspect of sadism for its dissidents. These dissidents rely on exclusive categorisations of pleasure and pain as entirely separate concepts, but also the extension of neat classifications of pain as bodily injury/harm in criminal law.1
Pleasure and pain are not exclusive categories. They share many intersections and overlaps. S/m represents the seeming paradox of pleasurable pain, which can be socio-legally confusing. Popular culture is littered with references to the interconnections between pleasure and pain. Examples range from explicit references, such as John Cougar’s 1982 song titled ‘Hurts so Good’. Burr (2003) outlines how the pain/pleasure nexus was also celebrated in the
television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which contained sub-textual elements of s/m. The pain/pleasure nexus has also featured in movies including Secretary and 9 1/2 Weeks, which contain explicit s/m references. More recently, Rihanna’s pop single S&M directly references s/m themes and the video features s/m costumes and paraphernalia. The music video for 30 Seconds to Mars’ Hurricane also features s/m apparatus and clothing. Both of these videos have received special censorship classification and been banned in many countries because of the depiction of s/m, highlighting the social prevalence of discomfort with s/m.2
The categories of pleasure and pain have been debated and explored within philosophy, perhaps most famously by Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of ‘Phenomenology’. In this work, he suggests that sadism is an expression of a failed desire, which occurs when mutual incarnate love is unsuccessfully reciprocated (Sartre, 1943/1993). While he recognises that love and desire are imbued with tension and conflict, offering that sexuality is fundamentally sadomasochistic (Burr, 2003), there are problems with his treatise. What is troubling about these types of theories about sadism is that s/m is rendered strange, a failure or something lacking. Another issue with this outlook is that sadism is treated as a metaphor for absolute pain. There is an assumption that sadism is about one being wholly selfish and cruel, as expressed through the television dramas discussed in this chapter, rather than recognising the mutual, consensual and desirable aspects of sadomasochism between selves. Sadomasochism is the giving and receiving of pleasure, at times through pain, but it is also a complex set of desires infused with, and expressed through, intricate modes of consent.
Sadomasochism makes the interconnectedness between pain and pleasure explicit, and highlights the complex nature of desire. Essentially, s/m celebrates pleasure as multiple and diverse. This is troubling for socio-legal histories of sexualities, which have demonised sexual difference (Dalton, 2007, 83-106). These works often express perspectives on sadism
2 See the following media articles that discuss these bans and censorship: www.mtv.com/news/articles/1657144/rihanna-s-m-video-banned.jhtml
that represent socio-legal panics about the stranger who does not fit the mold of procreative heteronormativity. There are still numerous legal prescriptions about desires and procreative heteronormativity (Thomson, 2006). This is where narratives about sadistic killers gather their meaning, from these histories which have criminalised and pathologised desire. But, the demonising of s/m extends to other realms, including psychology, psychiatry and medicine.
The historical pathologisation of sadism is grounded in psychiatric discourse. There is an entry for sadism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV), and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), despite a lack of evidence to support s/m as psychopathology (Langdridge and Barker 2007). This pathologisation informs legal discourses and judgments, which criminalise s/m. 3 Sadomasochism is celebrated globally with annual events (eg Leather Pride Week in the US city of San Francisco, Leather Pride Week in the Netherlands city of Amsterdam and Leather Pride Week in Sydney, Australia). Yet, many people still view sadism as deviant, dangerous or illegal, and it is these constructions and understandings of s/m that underpin popular cultural constructions of the sadistic serial killer.
These imagined boundaries between pain and pleasure and sadism from normative sociality underpin popular cultural narratives of violence, discussed in this chapter. The argument made here is that popular culture relegates violence to the foreign, imagined realm of television drama. Violence, like s/m, is socio-legally positioned as something deviant and unusual, something that is both strange and unfamiliar. While s/m may be unfamiliar (strange) to many people’s lived experience, especially those who do not practice s/m, violence may have a more familiar place. Violence has a presence in popular cultural imaginations (eg television, film, gaming), the dissemination of current affairs (eg newspaper, television, the internet) and the actuality of violence in our familial, social and
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professional lives. The examples of violence shown through the fantasy of sadistic serial killers overshadow the more usual occurrences of violence, diverting our attention away from probable corporeal instances of violence to fantastical imaginations of crime. The concept of domestic/family violence is silenced within popular cultural narratives of criminality by associating violence with the extreme, the bizarre and the imaginary—that being, sadistic serial killers.
Criminal Casting Call: Sadistic Serial Killer and Ideal Victims
Popular cultural crime narratives (ie film and television) are cluttered with serial killers. However, an even more terrifying killer has recently emerged within popular culture; the sadistic serial killer. These criminals pose a threat of even more harm than the serial killer because they commit several crimes: abduction, serious assault, grievous bodily harm, torture, sexual assault and murder. This couples a slow and painful death with particularly heinous assaults. Yet, the sadistic serial killer identity is based more upon notions of torture, which bear little or no resemblance to sadism as a consensual identity-choice.
Criminal Minds, Dexter and the Law & Order franchises include murders with sadistic serial killers as offenders. These cultural constructions of victimology reflect a fictionalised landscape, more than the actuality of violent offenders and their victims. This chapter outlines numerous examples of female victims who have been murdered by allegedly sadistic male serial killers in episodes of Criminal Minds, Dexter and Law & Order: SVU. It will argue that this construction of violent crime attempts to bifurcate bodies into unusually exaggerated deviant offenders and their idealised victims.
on consensual sexual practices involving domination and submission, control and/or pain for pleasure, but on torture and death. This gives rise to depictions of a sensationalised violent offender based upon moral panics concerning the unknowable stranger, rather than the embodied risks of gendered and sexualised violence. The collocation of sadism with the murder usually occurs through a post-mortem examination of a female victim and crime scene. Devoid of clues and without knowledge of the offender, criminal justice professionals scrutinise the victim and her location. This analysis leads to a hunt for a sadistic serial killer based upon imagery of torture or offender profiles.
Describing offenders as sadistic has many thematic functions, such as constructing a complex ‘otherness’ based on much more than mere criminality. The sadist serial killer has a perverse sexual deviance, as well as layers of sociopathy and psychopathy. These popular cultural constructs of deviance and victimology reflect social and legal discomfort with sadomasochism. The naming of torture is almost absent in television crime dramas. Instead, it has been replaced with these lingering notions of sadism. Also, domestic/family violence rarely occurs in television scripts. Depictions of these types of violence have been washed away, and replaced by extreme conceptualisations of serial killers and xenophobic notions of the dangers posed by strangers.
fleeting contact. Simultaneously, the killer wears the mask of the social outsider (eg criminal, loner, single/unmarried, childless with few relatives and friends—the non-familiar). These narratives also rely on the construct of ideal victimology, as the sadistic serial killer seeks out idealised targets as his victims, and they are almost invariably unsuspecting, Caucasian and female.
Christie (1986, 18) describes ideal victims as ‘a person or category of individuals – who—when hit by a crime—most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’. He also suggests that exaggerated criminal caricatures of offenders inform ideal victim status. Extremely violent (and viscerally frightening) offenders make the victim seem more innocent and less deserving of victimisation. Employing these caricature-like tropes of sadism within depictions of the imaginations of violent criminals exaggerates the offender’s criminality and the victim’s undeserving status.
Dowler, Fleming and Muzzatti (2006) highlight idealised gender stereotyping of victims within popular culture, whereby female victims are categorised either as innocent and undeserving or corrupted and blameworthy. Female victims who symbolise innocence and moral goodness are more likely to be seen as victims. Dowler, Fleming and Muzzatti also suggest race influences social imaginations of victims, asserting that Caucasian victims are assumed to illicit more public sympathy. Therefore women of color are cast less frequently in the fictional role of victim. In film and television narratives, serial killers mostly target Caucasian females who are young and attractive. While the serial killer may have preyed on sex workers in previous crime-drama depictions, the focus of each story that currently airs is usually framed around a victim who is law-abiding and innocent (or, rather, an idealised version of ‘normality’).
described by Christie. Victimology developed out of the emergence of criminology in the late 19th Century. Victims were previously silenced, as their injuries were absorbed by the ‘law and order’ regime, which acknowledged only the state as the injured party, as each individual was but an extension of the state. Initially, citizens and workers began to claim rights during the French and American revolutions (Beauchamp, 2001). Then, individuals started asserting socio-legal recognition of their rights when employment shifted from agricultural to dense industrial workplaces. Further, the victim’s movement also reflects developments in international human rights, such as civil rights, women’s liberation and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer rights (O’Connell, 2007).
While academic victimology refers to the study of victims and to victim services, support and advocacy, popular cultural victimology has rather different meanings. Television programs have implicit and explicit definitions of victimology. In Criminal Minds the term ‘victimology’ refers to victim characteristics and methods of harm. Dexter and Law & Order: SVU create more implicit meanings of victimology and do not use the term ‘victimology’ in the same way. In these two shows, victimology implicitly refers to specialised forensic investigation. Violent victimisations evidenced by dead, and often mutilated, bodies are integral to their plots and the immediate and overarching quests for justice. The figure of the victim is seemingly omnipresent in narratives of violence, and in most cases the plot revolves around one or several dead bodies.
Press Play—The Episodes and Analysis
the series by the same name (season 1, episode 1). Finally, the Law & Order: SVU episode was titled ‘Uncle’ (season 8, episode 4). That said, while sadistic serial killers frequently feature in crime dramas, this chapter does not attempt to quantify the existence of sadistic serial killers in popular culture depictions. Instead, it seeks to explore these fictional narratives and how they are dislocated from gendered, heterosexual victimologies of violence and s/m identities.
Criminal Minds
In the Criminal Minds episode titled ‘Penelope’, the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ (FBI) Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) investigates the shooting of Penelope Garcia, a computer expert with their unit. In this episode the BAU is hyper-vigilant, as they are investigating a crime committed against a fellow employee who is also their friend. At the conclusion of the previous episode, a man Garcia met at a café shot her. Their initial meeting appears to be by chance, when Garcia fixes the man’s laptop computer. He is in his 30s, well dressed and handsome. During their initial dinner date, he tells Garcia his name is James ‘Colby’ Baylor, and that he is an Ivy League educated lawyer, all of which turns out to be lies.
hero and saver of lives. The episode concludes with a standoff between Battle and FBI officers at the BAU headquarters, during which a female agent fatally shoots Battle.
Dexter
Dexter is a serial drama about a blood spatter analyst who works for the Miami Metro Police Department (PD). Through flashbacks to his adolescence, the audience learns Harry Morgan, a Miami Metro PD officer, is Dexter’s foster father. Dexter and Harry share a deep bond. In the initial seasons, Harry is the only person who knows about Dexter’s secret homicidal desires. The flashbacks portray an emotionally detached adolescent with an intense desire to kill. Harry detects this, encouraging Dexter to enact his desires on criminals who escape punishment. Through further episodes, the audience learns that Dexter has killed many people, but only in accordance with the ‘Code of Harry’, which stipulates that the killing must serve a purpose and that Dexter must be sure that his victim deserves to die because of their violent actions. Usually, Dexter’s targets prey on ‘innocent’ people.
Jaworski confesses to Dexter that he is the man in the video and that it is a snuff movie, after which Dexter kills him.
Law & Order (SVU)
The Law & Order: SVU (SVU) episode titled ‘Uncle’ (‘Sadist’ in Germany) opens with the brutal rape and murder of a mother and her young daughter. Their naked bodies are wrapped in clear plastic, both have been strangled, their breasts and genitals bear incision marks and the young girl is positioned holding a crucifix. Detectives Elliot Stabler and Dani Beck from the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Special Victims Unit investigate the crime. Each episode opens with a voice-over stating this NYPD unit investigates ‘sexually based offences’ which are considered to be ‘especially heinous’. The NYPD: SVU includes various specially-trained professionals, including detectives and other forensic specialists. In most episodes, the unit works closely with a medical examiner, an assistant district attorney and a forensic psychiatrist.
conviction and by producing photographs of bite marks on the complainant’s body. Banks responds that the sex was consensual and denies he engages in s/m. He also claims he was wrongly convicted.
During the interview, the detectives psychologically bait Banks into taking a piece of chewing gum left in front of him in the interviewing room. This is a ploy to obtain evidence connecting him with the murders. Once he chews the gum and discards it, they will have the imprint of his bite pattern as evidence, and the idea that he will take the gum is based on his psychological profile as charted out by Dr Huang. This is somehow supposed to reinforce the idea that he is a sadist, that he is a taker who presumes his own superiority. Without Banks’ confession, the prosecution relies on two pieces of forensic evidence (ie the fingerprints and the gum). The gum is used during the trial as the primary evidence, presented by the prosecution as matching Banks’ teeth, and directly linking him to the injuries on the victims’ bodies. Not surprisingly, given such scant evidence, the case is dismissed and Banks escapes conviction. However, at the end of the episode a civilian kills him by pushing him in front of a moving subway train.
Dangerous Liaisons: Sadistic Serial Killer Themes
Several parts of the story indicate that he will go on to kill other women, if he has not already done so.
All three offenders are young (ie in their 30s), Caucasian, single, childless males. They have no familial or intimate relationship with their victims. Though their desires are heterosexual, their sexuality is relocated through the strangeness of sadism. However, sadism is very narrowly defined through these depictions as extremely violent, non-consensual and undesired. The violence is unforeseen by the victim, who is chosen somewhat randomly to satisfy the sadistic and insatiable desires of the offenders. This is an expression of one of the baseline dichotomies that the sadist as serial killer format relies upon. Violence is seen as being foreign from our commonly held idea of sociality, and it is dislocated from the realm of families and intimacy. Moreover, the offenders seem to inflict violence on their victims instead of engaging in intimate relationships. This implies two things; that sadism is a form of violence unrelated to human sexuality and that violence occurs outside of relationships. This reinforces the myth that sadists are grotesquely cruel predators and that violent offenders are strangers who bear no resemblance to men we know (eg husbands, partners, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, etc). Yet it is known to those even only somewhat familiar with studies of violence committed against women that most female victims of sexual violence are accosted by male members of their own families or men they may otherwise already know prior to the time of the attack.
all portrayed as egotistical and see themselves as being ‘above the law’, which in some way explains why they engaged in violence. All three plots imply that the offenders see themselves enacting a masculine right to inflict any degree of violence they so choose upon the female body.4 Violence is constructed as an extension of gender and sexual desire, albeit pathological desires in their case. Although the violence is criminal and pathological, this is very much a uni-directionally gendered violence. In these episodes, sadistic violence is almost exclusively centered in the masculine domain, and is perpetrated against women and children. While these stories acknowledge women’s subjective experiences of violence, they redirect it through the largely hyperbolic mythical figure of the stranger who poses a threat.
The victims are young (i.e. three of the women are in their 20s or 30s, and the other victim is the young daughter of one of these women). They are unmarried women who have little or no relationship with their attackers. Although the victims are unmarried, they are layered with symbols of heteronormativity. Two of the victims are mothers (the victims in SVU and Dexter). The other, Penelope Garcia, is looking for a boyfriend (the audience can imagine that she may become a mother later in her life). All of the female victims are Caucasian. Even Penelope Garcia is a Caucasian American who merely acquired a Spanish surname from her step-father. The victims are law-abiding citizens who contribute to society through employment and/or motherhood. They are portrayed as virtuous females who are harmed by ‘bad’ men, reflective of Christie’s notion of ideal victims.
The female victims are defined around culturally common notions of femininity (i.e. heteronormative gender tropes like wearing dresses and make-up, having long styled hair and through occupying gendered roles like mother, potential girlfriend/date and sexual object). They display a particular heterosexual and gendered vulnerability by which their attacks are somehow linked to their hetero-sexuality. That is, all of the plots imply that these bodies were
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victimised/vulnerable because of their gender and that these crimes would not be perpetrated on heterosexual male bodies, nor male or female same-sex desiring bodies. Further to this, these narratives imply that women are vulnerable in a particular way, which is directly linked to notions of the dangerous stranger. Female vulnerability is embodied through depictions of violence visited upon the female characters by male strangers (seeking out single, heterosexual women). This reinforces yet another myth, that violence occurs in public, and by doing so they help in the myth’s silencing the violence committed in private spaces.5
Sadism is measured through its proximity to death in all three cases. The victims in Dexter and SVU died as the result of violent acts committed by willful perpetrators. In Criminal Minds, the victim was shot intentionally, but pretended to be dead. The plot clearly outlines that the offender intended to kill her. This suggests that death is either the intended result or the ultimately aimed at form and outcome of sadism. Sadistic desire is shown as either an uncontrollable desire to kill or an uncontrollable desire for extreme forms of sexual gratification, the pursuit of which results in death. McCosker (2008) makes some interesting assertions about s/m in his analysis of the film Crash, which includes s/m themes within its plot. He tacitly argues that s/m participants may actually be exploring the limits of living, rather than toying with death. That is, s/m may be about a consensual, mutual exploration of the body’s experiences of painful pleasure. At any rate, his thesis highlights the multiple meanings s/m participants may express these inclinations in relationship to, meanings that are in conflict with notions of criminal violence and the violations of the ‘other’ endemic of these types of crime dramas.
In these television plots, s/m is also often portrayed as a series of acts through which men seek to kill females with whom they have little or no relationship. This aspect of
anonymity open up the group of potential victims to encompass literally almost anybody, and thus creates a limitless supply of victims and opportunities for violence, and this simultaneously reinforces the idea that sadism is the expression of an uncontrollably violent desire. Thus, sadists appear as horrifyingly, violent killers who have little self-control. This is in stark contrast to the literature on s/m that emphasises its consensual elements (Houlihan 2011, Moser and Kleinplatz, 2008). There is considerable academic literature that describes s/m, gender and sexuality from a more fluid position. These theories are based upon Pat Califia’s (1982) work that highlighted how the s/m scene and her intimate, sensual experiences were not defined by sex/gender.6 Further as mentioned above, s/m is often misunderstood as violence and conflated with criminality, and notions of consensuality and mutual pleasure are denied and silenced.
In crime dramas, the sadistic killers engage in acts of violence with ‘innocent’ bodies in place of the (female) self, who is most often heterosexual and Caucasian. Masochistic partners are displaced in favor of the unsuspecting, unknown victim. This is because masochists may also be construed as strangers. Mainstream audiences may have trouble with masochistic bodies, potentially seeing them as deviant and culpable for their own victimisation because they engaged in deviant desires. These narratives of violence, whether purposely or instinctively, utilise the familiar/strange dichotomy, whereby the heterosexual male body functions as the protector, the heterosexual female body is cast as the victim, and the stranger is the one who performs violent acts. However, the gender roles are exaggerated within these plots, representing extreme notions of femininity and masculinity—feminine bodies are vulnerable and in need of protection, while male bodies are either cruelly violent or protectors. Even given that it could be argued that the character of the sadistic serial killer functions to signal the extreme limits of men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, these fictions
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of violence incorrectly locate gendered, heterosexual violence (against women) within the boundaries of extreme and unusual assaults. Popular culture imagines violence through the dead bodies of victims and the unknown body of the random, sadistic, homicidal stranger. This situates violence as something that happens elsewhere, while also subsuming these violent expressions in the realm of fantasy. It reconfigures violence as an illusion and improbability.
These exaggerated gender roles clash with the more fluid and playful roles frequently found within actual queer and s/m spaces. For example, BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, SadoMasochism) practices can provide spaces in which to disrupt more traditional gender categories by creating playgrounds that challenge gender norms and recognise gender diversities (Bauer, 2007, 175-94). These more elaborate gender identities may provide alternate narratives to negotiate intimate relationships. Further, heterosexual, gendered and violent imagery within these television crime dramas are disempowering for men and women alike because they replicate and reinforce notions about abusive gender relationships. The domains of s/m play encompass gender polemics, but also create new ways for individuals to explore their gender and sensuality. For example, Bauer’s work puts forth the idea that those who engage in s/m tend to experience increases in “consciousness around gender identity and social and power relations (especially in regard to gender)” (Bauer, 2007, 198). Normative social and power relations enable violence against women, while s/m creates spaces within which individuals can challenge society’s gender norms. Given all this, it becomes clear that television crime dramas largely falsify their narratives of gendered violence and s/m as torture.
sex and violence, and those who practise it may argue (and often do) they are exploring psycho-social and cultural discomforts with sensual violence. Upon this point actual s/m practice is made distinct from the s/m killer represented in these crime dramas. S/m is a type of consensual sensuality embodying the expression of complex and intricate, yet highly controlled, desires. This is why s/m should not be classified as criminally violent, for violent crime, by contrast, is non-consensual and uncontrolled.
Closing Credits: Sadistic Serial Killers
and The Familiar Criminal Stranger
Sadistic serial killers have recurring roles within crime dramas, especially given that sadism is therein loosely defined around notions of cruelty and torture. This typology of criminality is evidenced repeatedly in television shows like Criminal Minds and the CSI franchises, which often utilise gruesome victim-imagery. The characters referenced in this chapter are highly representative of how villains are contemporarily portrayed in film and television in several ways. Yet, aside from these portrayals of sadistic serial killers embodying the fear of that which is unknown, among other things, these characters function to blur the boundaries between evilness and desire by making the strange more familiar.
psychological and/or sexual pathology. This is achieved by various techniques, including intertwining the usual with the extraordinary. For example, a suspect may be depicted at work, at home, on a date or doing some other ordinary task which fills the average person’s everyday life, but this may be spliced with imagery of the suspect viewing pornography, experiencing social isolation or engaging in criminal activity. But perhaps more importantly, the sadistic serial killer often fulfills the narrative of his culpability by evidencing his absolute and compound evilness through a relationship which signifies an s/m lifestyle. Thus, this labeling of offenders as sadists reinforces their extreme culpability. The innocent victim of the sadist serial killer is a polarised contrast of the offender in many ways—they are a locus for pathos in the narrative, a de-contextualised presentation of hyperbolically pure suffering asserted through the lack of connection between themselves and the perpetrator.
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