Where Monsters Meet the Truly Disadvantaged-Race, Gender, and the Serially Killed

Stories about serial murder saturate the entertainment market. But given that the True Crime Boom was relatively recent, studies on how these stories are told are relatively scarce. Because of this, misconceptions about the subject are easier to spread, even if they have been addressed at length in a variety of ways by sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, and other scholars. Though perhaps not as prevalent as it was a decade or two ago, the idea that serial killers are exclusively white men abound. While the existence of black serial murderers is discussed in academic literature, these studies usually stop short of actual analysis of race in these cases. This is peculiar, given how frequently race and crime are tethered to one another, and how blackness and criminality are often viewed synonymously. But for better or worse, cases of serial murder by and/or of black people is rarely given a central focus. My work will fill in this gap by placing race, gender, and place at the center of my analysis. More specifically, I will examine and compare four cases of serial murder using newspaper coverage, books, and legal documents on the subject. I will argue that race, gender, and location (neighborhood, mainly) play a central role not only in what stories of serial murder get told, but how they are told.