The Scene of the Crime: Inventing the Serial Killer
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663906069547 |
| Author | Alexandra Warwick |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE SCENE OF THE CRIME:
INVENTING THE SERIAL KILLER
ALEXANDRA WARWICK
University of Westminster, UK
ABSTRACT
This article examines the meanings of the crime scene in serial killings, and the
tensions between the real and the imagined in the circulation of those meanings.
Starting with the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 it argues that they, as well as forming
an origin for the construction of the identity of ‘the serial killer’, initiate certain ideas
about the relationship of subjects to spaces and the existence of the self in the modern
urban landscape. It suggests that these ideas come to play an integral part in the
contemporary discourse of serial killing, both in the popular imagination and in
professional analysis. Examining the Whitechapel Murders, more recent cases and
modern profiling techniques, it argues that popular and professional representations
of crime scenes reveal more of social anxieties about the nature of the public and the
private than they do about serial killers. It suggests that ‘the serial killer’ is not a
coherent type, but an invention produced from the confusions of persons and places.
KEY WORDS
crime scenes; myth; profiling; representation; serial killers; Whitechapel murders
INTRODUCTION
AT7.30 EVERY evening, a guided tour sets off from Tower Hill tube
station to walk around the streets of Whitechapel, visiting the sites
where five women were murdered in the autumn of 1888. The
women’s names were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride,
Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly, but their killer has only the name signed
to a letter sent to the police and picked up by contemporary newspapers: Jack
the Ripper. The murders seemed to stop abruptly in November 1888 and the
murderer was neither caught nor identified, despite the efforts of police at
the time and those of so-called ‘Ripperologists’ since. It isn’t necessary to
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 15(4), 552–569
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906069547
wait until 7.30 in the evening to see the sights, as Madame Tussaud’s and the
London Dungeon are open every day and prominently feature Jack the
Ripper reconstructions. A century-old crime scene is reanimated every day,
and the immediate question is obvious: what is the continued attraction of
these sites and scenes?
I am not so much concerned here with the question of the nature of the
pleasure derived from seeing images of violent death, nor with issues relating
to the gender of victims and perpetrators, although debates in these areas are
important and far from concluded. I also do not wish to deny that the real
and terrible events of multiple murder have happened; instead I want to
examine something of what is occurring in the production of the figure of
the serial killer in contemporary culture, and the tensions between the factual
and the fictional in that production. I am suggesting that the Whitechapel
murders, as well as forming an origin for the construction of the identity of
the serial killer, initiate certain ideas about the relationship of subjects to
spaces and the existence of the self in the modern urban landscape that
continue to underpin contemporary discourses.
The argument is formed by an idea of space that encompasses both the
straightforward sense of physical place – geography, streets, houses – and the
more abstract sense of location in concepts of the relationship of mind and
body, the interior and exterior and the public and the private. This is a treat-
ment of space that is partly derived from literary critical treatments of the
Gothic, which emphasize the relations of physical and mental geography to
be found in such texts (see Sedgwick, 1986). Philip Simpson (2000) identifies
the Gothic tradition as the progenitor of fictional serial killer narratives, and
I would go further, to suggest that the influence of Gothic is not limited to
the fictional, but extends to much of the discourse. Richard Tithecott (1997)
asks, ‘although the blurring of fiction and reality is not restricted to the
discourse of serial murder, why should we especially want to represent serial
killers in a manner which obscures the distinction between fact and fiction?’
(p. 122, emphasis in original) The figure of the serial killer is being used in
ways that go beyond entertainment and police work, having more to do with
ways of understanding ourselves and modern society. Alison Young (1996)
describes the scene of the crime as the scene of meaninglessness that is made
intelligible, and I want to use the expanded notion of space to examine what
is at work in making the particular crime of serial killing intelligible.
The meaninglessness of the crime scene is that it represents a break in
perceived order, where otherwise contained or repressed elements surface,
casting doubt on the clear delineations of social and psychological structure,
and collapsing the boundaries between the self and others, the public and
private, and the interior and the exterior existence. The serial killer emerges
from the crime scene of most extreme unintelligibility: the murder of a
person for no apparent reason. What I want to suggest here is that despite its
production as a coherent type, the figure of the serial killer reflects exactly
the incoherences that it is constructed to overcome.
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