Volume 41, Number 6 · March 24, 1994
'I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness'
By Joyce Carol Oates
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Serial Killers
by Joel Norris
Anchor, 257 pp., $9.00 (paper)
Probing the Mind of a Serial Killer
by Jack A. Apsche
International Information Associates, 231 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Death Benefit: A Lawyer Uncovers a Twenty-year Pattern of Seduction, Arson, and Murder
by David Heilbroner
Harmony, 353 pp., $20.00
The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy
by Ann Rule
Signet, 498 pp., $5.99 (paper)
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer
directed by Nick Broomfield
Strand Releasing
Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder
by Brian Masters
Random House, 324 pp., $24.00
The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee's Jeffrey Dahmer
by Anne E. Schwartz
Birch Lane, 225 pp., $17.95
A Father's Story
by Lionel Dahmer
William Morrow, 240 pp., $20.00
Hunting Humans: The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
by Michael Newton
Avon, Vol. 2, 338 pp., $5.99 each (paper)
True Crime, Vol. 2: Serial Killers & Mass Murderers
by Valarie Jones, by Peggy Collier
Eclipse, 61 pp., $4.95 (paper)
It was shortly after the New Year of 1976, in the affluent Detroit suburbs of Oakland County—Birmingham, Royal Oak, Franklin Village, Berkley—that the nude, violated corpses of abducted boys and girls began to be found, like nightmare artworks, by roadsides or in parking lots or snowy fields. The children, objects of intensive local searches, had been taken in daylight close by their homes or schools; they ranged in ages from ten to sixteen. By March 23, despite highly publicized police vigilance, there were to be at least seven victims. Most of the children had been sexually assaulted and then killed, by diverse means—shooting (handgun, shotgun), strangulation, suffocation, carbon monoxide poisoning, bludgeoning. What linked the murders and gave to them their particular signature was their mock-ritualistic nature; the killer had taken time to meticulously wash and scrub several of the children, either before or after their deaths; their bodies had been laid out for public discovery in funeral positions; in several cases, their freshly laundered clothes had been neatly folded and placed nearby. Because the murderer's scrupulosity suggested a cruel parody of solicitude, local media baptized him 'The Babysitter.'
Review, 8111 words
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