With Netflix’s release of the Son of Sam documentary this week, it’s important to remind people that serial killers are not intriguing, intelligent nor attractive.
Being “obsessed” with true crime is not a personality trait.
Romanticizing serial killers is not only dangerous, it’s insensitive to the victims and their families.
You wouldn’t think that anyone would find people who brutally and senselessly murder multiple people appealing, but some serial killers actually have fan bases.
Richard Ramirez, a California serial killer, as sick and twisted as he was, was written to and visited in prison by multiple fans — one of whom he married.
Cult leader Charles Manson not only had followers that were somehow entranced by him, he was able to convince them to murder for him.
Manson’s cult was even dubbed a “family.”
Despite confessing to 30 murders, notorious serial killer Ted Bundy has been described as “attractive” and “intelligent” and was proposed to by multiple women while he was in prison.
Imagine your loved one being murdered and for the rest of your life you had to hear people describe their killer as “hot.”
Many books have been published and a number of movies and documentaries have been produced highlighting serial killers and their lives.
Stand up comedian Karen Kilgariff and Cooking Channel host Georgia Hardstark host a true crime comedy podcast called My Favorite Murder.
Just the name and description of the podcast themselves are extremely insensitive.
On January 24, 2019, Netflix released a series documenting Ted Bundy’s life called “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.”
While the documentary itself was strictly informational, people’s responses to it were inappropriate.
Netflix released a statement four days later on Twitter addressing people calling Ted Bundy “hot.”
“I’ve seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service — almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers,” Netflix wrote.
Giving these killers a platform to describe their childhood and motivations only creates an opportunity for the public to sympathize with them.
Convicted serial killers don’t deserve sympathy. They don’t deserve to be able to explain themselves or even try to give reason for what they did.
There is no reason to invade somebody’s safe space and take their life.
There is no reason to take somebody’s child away from their parents, or make a child live the rest of their life without a mother.
By romanticizing these murderers, people are taking away from the horror of their crimes and the impact the murders have had on the victims families.
It’s a problem that we know the names, acts and background stories of serial killers and very rarely know the names of their victims.
The victims should be memorialized, their killers should rot nameless in prison.