How to disarm a murderer

Osvaldo Aguirre

09/03/2021 16:00

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Updated 09/03/2021 16:00

The contrast between common appearance and the background of unhinged subjectivity is commonplace in television series about serial killers. Another is the search for explanations to create profiles, as if the commission of one or more crimes could be diagnosed in advance. Casuistry is abundant in the United States and provides the material for documentaries and fictions. In the midst of so much offer, a new look aims to question stereotypes and break the spell caused by the protagonists of those stories, through a feminist perspective.

The miniseries Ted Bundy: Falling for a killer (Amazon) displaces the usual point of view: the focus is on the victims and not on the man who murdered thirty women between 1974 and 1978. Nor does it propose to analyze Bundy's motivations but to expose the devastating effects of crimes and disappearances (several of the victims were never found) on family and friends and the prejudices that formed a context of gender violence, such as the socially accepted recommendation that women they should not resist rape to protect their lives. Among the interviewees stand out Elizabeth Kendall and Richard Bundy, girlfriend and brother of the murderer, and also victims of his machinations.

The serial killer is a prototype of American popular culture and as such is surrounded by crystallized representations. Bundy's capture sparked disbelief "because he was not like Charles Manson," according to journalist Barbara Grossman. He embodied the other side of the insane killer: a smiling college student who spoke softly and was inevitably sympathetic. The series directed by Trisha Wood records how, even in the face of evidence against her, she was unsuspected.

An Exemplary Citizen Citizen Bundy (1946-1989) volunteered in an election campaign for the Republican Party, a member of the Mormon Church, a member of a Seattle crime commission dedicated to preventing rape and, once in prison, FBI collaborator in profiling serial killers.

Conventional approaches understand such demonstrations of sociability as a simulation.

The repeated observation that the murderer looked like a common man does not lead to an inquiry into the so-called normality;

it would be another display of a monstrous and extraordinary personality.

The use of neurology reinforces the detachment of the character from the environment: in Criminal Minds (Netflix), the British psychologist Adrian Raine thus postulates that violence would be located in biological data because “the brains of criminals are different from those of people normal".

The alleged monstrous character of the murderer is also associated with the fascination that he provokes and with the pseudoscientific delight around his figure.

Journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth interviewed Bundy while on death row and provide the basis for another miniseries, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (directed by Joe Berliner, Netflix).

But what is significant is not the testimony but the way in which the character manipulates his interviewers: while refusing to talk about his crimes, he cynically ironic about the accusations (“There is nothing in my past to deduce that I could commit murders "," Guilt is a mechanism of social control "), aware that these statements feed back the myth and journalistic attention, and the confession is reserved until the last moment as a resource to postpone the execution of the death penalty.

Through the night Véronique Pirotton was found dead on October 31, 2013 in a hotel in Ostend, Belgium. He had bruises on various parts of his body and other guests had heard loud noises from the room ("the woman was howling," according to a witness). The police arrested her husband, Congressman Bernard Wesphael, who was accompanying her and alleged that Pirotton had committed suicide by suffocating himself on a plastic bag.

The Wesphael (Netflix) case reconstructs that story in a timeline that runs through October 6, 2016, when the defendant was acquitted for the benefit of the doubt. The series focuses on the investigation and the trial, based on interviews with Wesphael at the scene of the events and relatives and close friends of both parties, as well as images from different stages of the process. The narrative axes are the confrontation between Wesphael and the psychologist Oswald de Cock, Pirotton's lover, “a cockfight” according to the definition of a journalist, and the discussion between the experts of the prosecution and those of the defense.

In the essay Laëtitia or the end of men, the French historian Ivan Jablonka warns about the overvaluation of the figure of the expert in media stories and in court cases.

The conclusion of an expert, in itself, does not solve a cause: "It only makes sense within the reasoning that requires it, activates it and resituates it in a framework of intelligibility, where it becomes evidence."

In the trial held in Liege, on the contrary, he had a decisive role for the jury and prevailed in the face of Pirotton's background of affective relationships and his record as a victim of abuse.

The Wesphael case contrasts testimonies and interpretations in a format reminiscent of court dramas, without questioning about gender issues.

The title (also the original in French) already indicates the man as the protagonist of the story and that choice is also that of the trial, where Wesphael had among other witnesses in his defense the president of the Belgian Senate while Pirotton's life was examined at through "behavioral witnesses" who drew the profile of an alcoholic nymphomaniac, an exemplary bad woman.

Who owns the night Wesphael's histrionics and eloquence capture the attention of filmmakers.

The Yorkshire Ripper (Netflix), on the other hand, focuses on the victims and their relationship with the mobilizations of British feminism towards the end of the 70s.

Peter Sutcliffe's crimes were a trigger for the Reclaim the night movement, which emerged in Leeds against the British police's claim that women should stay in their homes and go out in the company of men to prevent attacks. "The night and the darkness belong to us as well as to men," said the organizers.

Between 1975 and 1981, Sutcliffe murdered thirteen women in different cities in England. The nickname that the press gave him was due to the place where most of the events occurred and in reference to the never identified Jack the Ripper. Reconstructing the history of women makes sense in the series because they took a backseat to the criminal and also because the investigators developed the theory of a prostitute killer, although several of the victims were not, and with that idea they discarded evidence and testimonies . The documentary also shows that a wide sector of society remained indifferent while it appeared to be prostitutes.

Sutcliffe and Bundy were detained in routine procedures, for minor offenses: the police control tasks were more effective than the complex investigations deployed. A wide repertoire of stereotypes is nevertheless available to idealize the work of detectives, as shown by La noche del cazador, the Netflix documentary that extols the work of a police couple in the pursuit of the serial killer Richard Ramírez.

In The Yorkshire Ripper, a journalist argues that instead of listening to Sutcliffe, she is now trying to return him to anonymity. In love with a murderer suggests that Bundy was a misogynist and disregards further speculation in this regard to notably observe the pain of relatives, the remorse of people who were close to the victims and the moving ways in which they coped with and they continued their lives, without celebrating the death penalty or dejected by the losses they suffered. The mysteries, in any case, are not in the minds of the murderers but in the society that harbors and excuses them.