truepenny | UBC: Earley, The Serial Killer Whisperer

The Serial Killer Whisperer: How One Man's Tragedy Helped Unlock the Deadliest Secrets of the World's Most Terrifying Killers by Pete Earley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

[library]
[audiobook]

So apparently I am fussy as all get out about audiobook readers. This one drove me crazy by having a Serial Killer Voice, so that all the serial killers, and there are several in this book, sounded like Henchman #2 in a '50s gangster movie. Also, the way he said "traumatic brain injury"--every time but once--like it was the first time he'd ever said it and it needed extra emphasis because it was so exotic ...

Like I said. Fussy.

The book itself suffers from not quite knowing what it wants to be. Is it the inspirational story of a man who overcomes a terrible accident to find his purpose in life? Is it an exploration of the (empty) inner lives of people with Antisocial Personality Disorder? (Earley calls them, always and only, "serial killers," which I think is both a reification--all people who commit serial murder are the same thing--and a distancing strategy--so you can draw a line between US (human beings) and THEM (serial killers) and only Tony straddles the line between the two.) Is it a book about how a young man with a TBI started writing to incarcerated serial killers and ended up solving cold cases based on the information they gave him in their letters?

That's the book I wanted, and it is, sadly, the least present in the actual book I got. I'm not terribly interested in Tony Ciaglia's TBI or his heroic struggles to overcome the damage it did to his frontal lobes, although I fully acknowledge that the accident was horrific and his struggles quite genuinely heroic. That's just not the genre of nonfiction I was looking for. And the empty inner lives of serial killers are just exactly that. Empty. Yes, they're monstrous and abhorrent, but they're also all the same. Each of them has one story and he tells that story over and over again. Every murder he tells Tony about is the same murder.

This makes perfect sense, given how people who commit serial sexual murder do seem to get stuck in one story. That's what creates their signature, the things that they can't edit out of their own behavior. The repetition and the ritualization also make sense of why people who commit serial sexual murder frequently never bother to find out their victims' names, can't remember how many people they've killed, etc. Because the victim is really only a prop in the story this person is telling himself. (Or herself, to be fair, although most of the people who commit this kind of serial murder do seem to be men--which is not to say women don't commit serial murder. They just don't usually commit this kind.) These people need secrets (as Ian Brady says in The Gates of Janus, as Ted Bundy tried to tell Bob Keppel without telling him), and I caught that moment over and over, the thing that they cannot tell, cannot talk about. And they both create and keep their secrets with dead girls. (Not all serial killers are male heterosexuals. But Dahmer and Gacy, to name the two most infamous male homosexual serial killers, were both self-destructively obsessed with keeping their victims with them, in their homes. Not with this sort of dark, inverted Treasure Island story about burying your secrets in the wild, so that no one but you will ever know where they are. No matter how many victims a Ridgway or a Hansen may reveal to the police, there's always going to be another one, a secret one, that he keeps to himself, because it's the secret that provides the magnet he holds himself together around.

But my point is that the interminable quotations of letters from Arthur Shawcross, Joe Metheny, and David Gore--even while they induce pity for the victims, disgust at and contempt for the murderers, and mingled horror and revulsion at these women's fates, both before and after death--become intensely tedious. If nothing else The Serial Killer Whisperer is a powerful antidote to any tendency you might feel to romanticize serial killers (*cough*Hannibal*cough*) because there's nothing in these men to romanticize. They are hollow men. When Tony realizes, about 2/3 of the way through the book, that it's not the "serial killers" doing him a favor by writing to him, it's him doing them a favor--possibly the biggest favor anyone has ever done them in their entire, wretched, self-absorbed lives--he is absolutely right.

SPOILER: In this book, Tony Ciaglia does not actually solve any cold cases.

He provides information to investigators which may lead to the solution of cold cases, but Shawcross died before he confessed any unsolved murders (and the book completely ignores the one extremely specific description Shawcross gave of where he'd left one victim's skull), Metheny (who died this August) refused to give precise and accurate information without being paid, Gore pussyfooted coyly around the location of his stash of Polaroids and scalps and started another flirtation about discussing his cold cases in the last pages of the book (and if it's true that his letters to Tony sped up his execution, then the justice of poetry has been served) and the information Tony gets from Robert Hansen's cellmate about the location of two previously unknown victims gets swallowed up into the official investigation and we never learn what happened. (Those two victims are still unconfirmed according to wikipedia, so I'm guessing that ultimately nothing came of Tony's information.) So, for me, because the solving of cold cases is the part of true crime I most love, this book was a taunting bait-and-switch. I wanted cold cases. What I got was the inspiring story of a man who overcame a TBI to find his purpose in life and the exposure of the drearily empty inner lives of people who commit serial sexual murder. (If you're thinking these two things don't mesh very well together, you are 100% correct. Which makes the book even more frustrating.)

Finally, in his epilogue, Earley says that he himself was present when Tony and his father went to Maryland to visit Joe Metheny and to Florida to visit David Gore. These are important pieces of the book and I find it both unforgivably creepy and also dishonest of Earley to edit himself out. Because if he was there (and Earley himself appears nowhere in the narrative, so I have no idea how he fits into it), that means the plan to write a book about Tony came quite early in his process of trying to solve cold cases based on the perpetrators' own information. And that makes that whole "Tony Finds His Purpose" arc somewhat less than refreshingly candid. I don't know how much of the book is therefore being faked with one eye on the writer's scribbling pencil . . . I can't tell, because the story Earley told is not the true story. And in a book, and a genre, that is so obsessed with lying and truth-telling, that seems like a betrayal of his own enterprise.

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