Explore the world of Serial Killers with Dr. Scott Bonn 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 28 at the Elsinore Theatre. Click here for tickets.
If you’ve been bitten by the true crime bug, you’re not alone. I had the opportunity to chat with Professor Scott Bonn this week ahead of his live event this Saturday at the Elsinore Theatre to learn more about his study of serial killers – and to get his take on why so many of us are obsessed with true crime.
Marie: This is a fascinating (albeit morbid) topic, and one that I think many of us consider a bit of a guilty pleasure. In fact, I read a recent statistic from YouGov that says that 57% of Americans are consuming true crime content on a regular basis. Why do you think this is such a popular genre?
Dr Scott Bonn
Dr. Bonn: True crime has always held a fascination for the public. And you can probably trace it back at least as far as Jack the Ripper in London and H.H. Holmes here in the United States, which were roughly at the same time in the late 19th century. But technology and improving production standards really brought it out of the darkness (literally and figuratively). There was a time back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, where true crime was sort of the bastion of pulp magazines; I remember my grandfather having copies of that kind of stuff in the basement. And he wasn't too proud of showing them to people. But now, true crime is primetime TV with the highest quality production standards. People are no longer embarrassed to say they like true crime.
Marie: Definitely. There’s no longer the same stigma. Following that same data, it seems like crime is especially popular among women. Do you see that reflected in your audiences?
Dr. Bonn: Absolutely. And in fact, many of the places where I speak collect the statistics along various demographic profiles, including gender. And the latest number that I've heard is that my audience is comprised of about 77% women, regardless of where I go.
Marie: I’m one of those 77%, right here. What do you think draws us to it?
Dr. Bonn: Well, most of us have the thing that serial killers don't, which is empathy; empathy for the victim, as well as a desire to understand the mind of the perpetrator. I think most of us are drawn to both the dark and the light, the good and the bad; we want to understand it. But I think that's particularly true of women.
Marie: That makes sense. And really, there’s so much about serial killers that defies common understanding. Which leads me to ask about psychopathy, which you’ve mentioned in your work that this is a trait that many serial killers share. I grew up in the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas during the BTK era, and I often wondered about someone like Dennis Rader - who lacks empathy and the ability to connect emotionally to other humans - how does someone like that have a family and participate in church and have a steady job? We know people like this are hiding among us, but how does someone like that manage to blend in when they're lacking some of those basic human skills?
Dr. Bonn: That’s a great question – and that intensifies the interest, right? Dennis Rader looks like he could just be anybody. He could be the guy who runs the plumbing supply store down the street. He could be the guy who comes to trim your trees. But it's also important to understand that while, yes, they could be hiding in plain sight, psychopaths are also extremely rare. Serial killers are responsible for no more than 1% of all the homicides that occur in the United States every year. And only a subset of those are stone-cold psychopaths; in fact, BTK would be known as a malignant narcissist because he’s not only a psychopath but also a narcissist. He has the trifecta of antisocial personality disorders, and he was successful because he was able to compartmentalize. He can effectively flip a switch and go from being a doting father, taking his daughter, Carrie, who I know, to Girl Scouts when she was 12 years old, and then getting in the car and driving over to someone's house and abducting them and killing them and doing it seamlessly - with absolutely no emotional duress or paradox or stress.
And what’s interesting is that Rader was a bit of a navel-gazer; he did try to understand himself to some extent, because, of course, he's the most interesting guy he knows. And he came up with a term for it: he called it cubing (which we would call compartmentalizing). Remember the old-fashioned photo cube, where you could have a different picture on each side? One picture is dad. And then you flip the cube, and it’s a picture of BTK. And he’d say, when you look at one, you can't see the other. In his mind, it's these are two absolutely separate and distinct things. So it’s partly being able to compartmentalize, and partly that they’ve learned to perform as if they have empathy so they can connect emotionally with other people; and they’re good at it.
Marie: So, they’re not feeling the emotion or the connection, but they’ve learned to mirror it.
Dr. Bonn: Yes, absolutely. People will often ask me things like, “I’m a schoolteacher, how can I identify students with antisocial personality disorders?” Well, it's easier to recognize a child who may have psychopathic tendencies, because they haven't learned yet how to mimic emotion and how to mimic affect appropriately. By the time you're in your 20s, 30s and beyond, you’ve become an actor. You may not feel what you should feel, or what a normal person would feel, but you know the appropriate time to feign sadness or to feign joy and happiness. And children can't do that. But adults who are sociopaths have learned do learn to effectively demonstrate that.
Marie: I would imagine that makes it easier for them to get away with these horrific crimes, right? Because they don’t have guilt getting in the way.
Dr. Bonn: Exactly. How did Ted Bundy kill 36 people? He was highly organized and meticulous. He had a routine. He had a ruse. And because he was a psychopath, he didn't feel any of the normal emotions, not even fear or shame or guilt – he felt none of the things that might trip the rest of us up. People often think these folks are evil geniuses, but they’re not. They're just psychopaths without emotions, combined with a very meticulous, obsessive, organized nature, where they rehearse, plan, and have contingencies. And you combine those two things - psychopathy and planning - and that's why they can get away with it.
Marie: We hear so much about North American serial killers. Is this a more common thing here? Is it happening with the same frequency elsewhere, and we're just not hearing about it?
Dr. Bonn: We are just much better at categorizing and tracking it here. In fact, serial killers have diminished in recent decades. The 1970s and 1980s are often referred to as the heyday for serial killers. Up until 1973, the FBI didn't even call them serial killers; they just lumped them together with mass murderers. They didn't really understand the difference between a BTK and a Columbine shooter. They didn’t realize or understand the psychological differences. But then we had expert profilers like John Douglas, Bob Ressler, my late friend, Roy Hazelwood, Ann Burgess, to name just a few. They developed profiling techniques. And guess what? When you develop new techniques that work, they found what they were looking for. Prior to the 1970s, they just didn’t connect the dots. But once they started using expert profiling techniques, they found at least 650 serial killers operating in the United States during the 1970s. By the 1980s, that number increased to more than 800. But then by the 1990s, the numbers started to dwindle. The latest decade right now, the 2020s, there are about two dozen serial killers that have been identified in the United States thanks to these new profiling tools. And the biggest game changer of all came in 1986, when DNA came along. You had BTK, the Golden State Killer, and the Long Island Serial Killer leaving DNA for years without ever realizing it could be used against them. They had no idea. And then it’s ultimately how they get identified and arrested.
Marie: You’ve written a book, Why We Love Serial Killers, that delves into this in so much more detail – it’s a fascinating read. And you also travel around the country speaking to audiences about your work. For those, like me, who’ve read your book and followed your work online, and are thinking about joining one of your live events – what can we expect? …I’d love to help our readers get a sense of what they can experience at your show.
Dr. Bonn: The show is comprised of two acts. Act one is where I take the audience inside the minds of several of the most diabolical killers of the 20th and into the 21st century. I’ll talk about the son of Sam (David Berkowitz), BTK (Dennis Rader), and more recently, Rex Heuermann, the Long Island serial killer. I’ll do a deep dive into their psyche and their evolution into killing. And in the case of both Berkowitz and Rader, I’ve spent extensive amounts of time with these individuals, either corresponding or in the case with Berkowitz, in person. I have unique perspectives and experiences that you won’t find anywhere else. I also put these individuals in perspective within the pantheon of serial killers, the type of serial killers they are, how they evolved, and I explain their unique drivers and motivations.
Act two is more of an opportunity — an interactive session where the audience gets to ask me anything they ever wanted to know about serial killers. It’s fun because you just never know from night to night, show to show, what people are going to ask. And oftentimes there's a local flavor. There might be questions about a particular case or perpetrator – we have a tremendous amount of fun with that.
Serial Killers with Dr. Scott Bonn
Learn more about the curious appeal of the world's most terrifying murders in Serial Killers with Dr. Scott Bonn 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 28 at the Elsinore Theatre. Click here for tickets.