UBC: Keppel, Signature Killers

[truepenny]

Signature Killers by Robert D. Keppel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Dr. Keppel is a visionary, ground-breaking criminologist and an excellent analyst. I admire him greatly. But he needs someone to edit the living shit out of his prose.

I will give only one example, because it's like shooting fish in a barrel:

The killer's MO was extensively refined and stylized as he continued killing. In practically every circumstance, the killer did something to clean up the crime scene after him. He took jewelry, purses, and clothing from his victims. In New York, the motel fires could even have been interpreted as an effort to cover up physical evidence of the crimes. The killer also may have tried to prevent identification in the New York murders by removing the heads and hands of his victims at one scene, but he really didn't need to worry. After his two New York City mutilations, Cottingham didn't have to fear that the identification would lead police to him. None of his other crimes had put authorities on his trail. Like serial killers near the end of their arc of violence, part of Cottingham believed he was completely invisible and could commit rapes and murders at will. Another part of him remained obsessively paranoid about leaving evidence at the crime scene. Therefore, in the arson murders, where the act of setting the fires was the last act of the killer at the crime scene, the setting of the fire may not have been some sexually perverted paraphilia with fire that some offenders possess. It might simply have been Cottingham's attempt to lead Manhattan detectives down a blind alley.
(73)

Let me clean this paragraph up:

Cottingham's MO became increasingly refined and stylized with each murder. Like other serial killers near the end of their arc of violence [the "end" of the arc being their arrest, not their choice to stop killing, because they will never make that choice -sm], part of Cottingham believed he was completely invisible and could commit rapes and murders at will. Another part of him remained obsessively paranoid about leaving evidence at the crime scene, even though none of his crimes thus far had put the authorities on his trail. In practically every circumstance, Cottingham did something to clean up the crime scene after him. He took jewelry, purses, and clothing from his victims. In the West 42nd Street murders, he went farther, both removing the heads and hands of his victims and setting the fire as his last act at the crime scene. Given that his other crimes did not include arson, but did include this obsession with removing evidence, it seems most probable that his actions in the West 42nd Street Travel Lodge, rather than demonstrating a paraphilia for fire, were a further, ritualistic (and partially successful) attempt to destroy evidence of the murders of Deedah Godzari and Jane Doe.

I've interpolated information (mostly antecedents) from earlier paragraphs, but otherwise all I've done is rearrange the information Keppel provides in order to give it a logical throughline. What it still lacks is the signposting that tells you how it relates to the thesis of this section of Keppel's argument (which is that a serial murderer's signature is not the same as his modus operandi), and I'm honestly not quite sure HOW it relates. Is he saying that Cottingham's experiments with evidence removal were part of his evolving MO, or that Cottingham's obsession with evidence removal was part of his signature?

This is why you need editors.

Birnes did a better job of taming Keppel's stream-of-consciousness prose in The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (at least, I assume--perhaps incorrectly--that that's Birnes' contribution); Signature Killers reads like it was written and published too fast. Other than that, I found this book interesting and compelling. Keppel has the range of knowledge to support his argument convincingly.

He discusses Morris Frampton, Harvey Glatman, William Heirens, Richard Cottingham, Timothy Spencer, Cleophus Prince, Nathanial Code, Steven Pennell, George Russell, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy (John Wayne Gacy shows up frequently in comparisons, and he couldn't include Gary Ridgway, because this book was published in 1997, before Ridgway was caught), talking in each case about how to discern the signature and how the signature helped detectives find and stop each man, and noting parallels between them, ways that they are all demonstrating the same wrong turn in their psyches.

It's important to note SOMEWHERE, and here is as good as anywhere, that women are very rarely sexual signature killers--Aileen Wuornos being the token exception. But that isn't the same as saying women aren't serial killers. They just tend to kill people they have relationships with (husbands, children, patients, etc.), rather than strangers, and they don't seem as often to fetishize the act of murder itself. Mary Ann Cotton is my favorite example, but there's also Amy Archer-Gilligan, and Mary Ann Geering. They aren't as SHOWY as the sexual signature killers, but they are there. And they were there long before Jack the Ripper. People (mostly men) who commit serial murder for sexual reasons may be a product of modernity, but serial murderers are not. Keppel has an elaborate argument about how sexual signature killers are created by the collapse of the extended kinship group as unit of family, leading to fewer people to do the parenting (plus, he doesn't quite say, women entering the work force), leading to babies being neglected at a critical stage of the development of their psyche, which results (sometimes--he does say) in psychopaths who kill for anger or for pleasure. And that may be why there are so many angry psychopathic men roaming the 20th century killing women for sport. But it's not why human beings sometimes commit serial murder.

If you are interested in signature killers--psychopaths who commit serial stranger murder for reasons that inevitably betray their presence in the way the crimes are committed--this is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.



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