Seven
One of the reasons I am drawn to David Fincher’s films (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Zodiac, Gone Girl, Se7en, Fight Club, etc.) centers on how the process of research—and library research specifically—finds its way into his stories. This is especially true in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Zodiac, and Se7en. This feature of Fincher’s aesthetic is something that a blogger named Jennifer writes about over at her amazing Reel Librarians blog. If you are a book/film lover like me, you need to check out her blog asap.
Anyway, I am drawn to this aspect of his films for all of the obvious reasons. I am writer who has published books. I love libraries. I love research. And I love a good old fashioned mystery. But above all, I am endlessly curious and hungry to learn. If you listened to Episode 12: 38 Words Part I, you will understand why I love libraries and how the research process—while tedious at times—really does pay off, if you put in the work.
Recently, I found myself back in the WSU library plucking volumes from the shelves in the criminology stacks. All the books I checked out were about serial killers. When I dropped the tower of volumes on the circulation desk, the young woman behind the glass glanced at the titles, then glanced at me, then back at the books. “Whoa,” she said. “This is some dark reading.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll probably have nightmares.”
Later that same day I posted a picture of the books on social media. The comments were predictable: Uh-oh. Now you are on some kind of watch list. Best be looking over your shoulder!
My reasoning for checking out such dark matter was both simple and complex. Simple in that I wanted to learn more about what turns a human into a serial killer, but complex because I knew at some basic level that no matter how many books I read on the subject matter, I would surely never really know. That there are innumerable books devoted to the subject matter is evidence, I think, of its ultimate unknowableness.
Still, I push on because I don’t see unknowableness as a dead-end, but rather a challenge. It’s just the way I operate. The bigger the challenge, the more determined I become. In other words, I was eager to get home and begin tackling the stack of dark matter.
One of the first books I cracked open was Serial Killers: The Growing Menace by Joel Norris. Although published in 1988, the book remains valuable because it outlines what Norris has dubbed the seven phases of serial killing. I had heard of these seven phases, but only cursorily, and so I wanted to learn them to see if they might tell us anything about the perpetrator in any or all of the cases we are looking at in The Snake River Killer podcast. Because I will get into the seven phases more in an upcoming episode, I will just call them out here so you have an idea of what they are. You can also read more about them here if you can’t wait.
1) The Aura Phase
2) The Trolling Phase
3) The Wooing Phase
4) Capture
5) The Murder
6) The Totem Phase
7) The Depression Phase
The first thing I noticed upon reading through these phases and what they mean is that I wasn’t the first person to have spent significant time with this book. An obvious observation, sure. I mean it’s a library book afterall. But given the subject matter, I—like the young woman at the circulation desk—wondered about the person checking out such a book, and why? My hunch is that it was a criminal justice major who checked it out, that it was some studious soul who was the one who underlined certain passages with what appears to be a cheap ball-point pen whose ink was about to expire. Beyond the ballpoint markings that feature asterisks the size of pencil erasers next to each of the 7 Phases of Serial Killers, there are a number of yellow, highlighted passages. These, for some reason, seem newish. Like they could have been done within the past year.
In other words, as I read Norris’ 7 Phases of Serial Killers, I was on the one hand learning about this complicated and ritualistic behavior, and on the other hand wondering who had highlighted these passages and why these passages specifically? For instance, the highlights don’t appear in Phases 1-4, but instead begin with 5) The Murder. The first highlighted passage reads:
The fundamental similarities that unite all serial killers [is that] the murder phase is a ritual reenactment of the disastrous experiences of the killer’s childhood. Only, this time, the killer tries to reverse the roles occupied in his childhood.
The second passage reads, in part:
The moment of murder itself is the emotional high for most confessed serial killers. At this instant, when the victims were dying at their hands, many serial killers report an insight so intense that it is like an emotional quasar, blinding in its revelation of truth.
While both passages are disturbing in what they purport, I noticed a theme of intense emotion in each. Indeed, the subsequent highlighted passages are exclusively about the emotional charge of killing, which I find interesting, if not troubling. In reading the first passage, my mind wandered to Lance Voss’s childhood, his mother, and step-father because there are still so many unknowns about his upbringing that all I can do is wonder and to keep digging.
But in the subsequent highlighted passages, my mind didn’t swing to the direction of Lance Voss. Instead, it swung to more recent events. Maybe it’s because we just marked the one-year anniversary of the Idaho murders, and that Bryan Kohberger was a criminal justice student at WSU, that my mind swung in hisdirection.
In other words, was I tracing my finger across the very pages that a serial killer had highlighted? Probably not. But still I wonder.
I will always wonder. Because wondering is curiosity in action. And curiosity, when bolstered by hard work, can lead to the truth, and very often, that truth lives in libraries. And so I push on into the unknowableness.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for Episode 13, which will be dropping in the next two weeks, and if you have any tips, please reach out.