Supercops Part I: A History // R. Travis Morton
R. Travis Morton looks at some historical cases and our engagement with true crime as part of our guest edited month “My Dark Places.”
Much has been made about true crime in recent years, in no small part due to the particularly explosive popularity of podcasts and high-production value mini-series' such as Netflix’s Making of a Murderer. This rising interest is often called a morbid curiosity. It is often gestured to as a deficit of character in those interested, as if interest in the criminal, or indeed more specifically in the criminally insane, such as serial killers like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, is indicative of something awry personally. In episode 59 of CollegeHumour’s Adam Ruins Everything, he hints at this morbid fascination when he states, “Welcome back to part 64 of our investigation into a crime that’s none of our business […]. I needed to buy a new mattress but I was too busy playing amateur detective with real people’s lives.”
The clip has 3.8 million views and 66,000 likes at the time of writing, which tells us that while the context of mattress promotions may be unrelated, the perspective on true crime podcasting is widespread enough to have made this an unqualified joke. Interest in true crime is also frequently lumped in with violent video games, movies, and Dungeons and Dragons as a potential cause in the rising tide of mass shootings in the United States. It is an easy association made frequently by major news media that the things which interest us about the criminal and the deviant must also interest the criminal and the deviant themselves. What is perhaps more likely the case is that we are seeing the endpoint of a long progression going all the way back to the 16th century enlightenment and its lasting effect on popular imagination in light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous statement that “God is dead.”
I became interested in true crime only in recent years (from my ripe old age of 31) in discovering a love of The Last Podcast on the Left, hosted by Marcus Parks, Ben Kissel, and Henry Zebrowski. While I was at once both terrified by and interested in the story they had to tell about serial killer Dean Corrl and his two young protégés, what fascinated me as much as anything was a brief glimpse into an event we had collectively chosen somehow to ignore as a society. How could a person of this kind of depraved, almost cartoonish super-villainy like Dean Corrl manage to escape our collective consciousness in favour of more flamboyant examples like Gacy, the infamous “killer clown”? Even I had heard of the likes of him. What Corrl opened my eyes to was something that I had long suspected, but I was not quite prepared for the depths to which it plumbed—which is to say, there is a certain degree of institutional spackling that plays a role in covering up the presence of such figures, such that we don’t easily recognize them as part of our cultural zeitgeist.
There’s a reason we might be more comfortable thinking of the likes of Gacy rather than Corrl. I think it is because Corrl presents us with a difficult thing to imagine: that if we, likeElmer Wayne Henley Jr., get too close tothe monstrous villain we might become corrupted in the process of familiarizing ourselves. To “know the man, we must become the man” is the common refrain, though it is not often stated in our popular imagination by the morbidly curious—it is stated by those devoted to hunting them.
After several years of learning more alongside my wife (whose avid interest in true crime sparked my own) I found myself watching season one ofNetflix’s excellent show, David Fincher’s Mindhunter, which is adapted from the memoir Mindhunter by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. What attracted me to the show was not a fascination with the killers, but rather my enduring fascination with John Douglas, the historical basis for series protagonist Holden Ford; father of criminal profiling based on psychopathology and all-around supercop.
In learning about this strange, sometimes detached figure I realized just how many of my favourite characters in the popular fiction had drawn upon this man as inspiration. Will Graham and Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris’ books featuring Hannibal Lecter, Elizabeth Keane from NBC’s The Blacklist; Lincoln Rhyme, chosen protagonist of mystery author Jeffrey Deaver, and played by Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector (1999), and many more, going all the way back to the sheer ludicrousness of Sherlock Holmes, who is a personal favourite. Strangely enough, I can hardly consider Sherlock Holmes as a model for human behaviour any longer, as I have now discovered that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the character in sheer disbelief that such a figure could possibly exist as in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or Edgar Allen Poe’s Auguste Dupin. Doyle saw such characters as the mark of bad writing, to the extent that these figures possessed what could only be a superhuman knowledge of events as they had transpired.
But there is indeed a real-life basis for such figures. Before there was John E. Douglas, there was the positively ludicrous life of Eugene Francois Vidocq.
For the uninitiated, Vidocq was a larger-than-life figure who lived from 1775 to 1857. While there is hardly space, time, or attention we might devote to his life, try to imagine the ridiculousness of this story: the son of a baker in Arras, France, he was a layabout and a street thief, stealing as much as he could from his own family, and in the process becoming an expert duelist with a sword. Eventually betrayed and robbed blind, he ran off to join the circus. He worked hard playing (among other things) a Caribbean cannibal who ate raw meat, but was eventually forced out due to charming his employer’s young wife. After reconciling with his family, he enlisted in the military, where he challenged fifteen people to duels, killing two of them. He was arrested for these deaths, and while he was in jail for no more than two weeks, he orchestrated successful escapes for some of his fellow inmates.Rather than remain in the military, he relocated to the criminal underworld in Brussels, supporting himself as a successful grifter, and eventually faking his identity under the threat of arrest in order to make his escape. Under the same alias, he joined a team of men impersonating military officers and “confiscating” civilian goods. He defrauded a rich widow, fled back to Paris, joined a troupe of gypsies, before finally being arrested in 1795.
At this point, Vidocq was only 20.
From here he repeats a seemingly endless story of escapes and recaptures; through a combination of forgery, impersonation (at one point even asa nun) and a short career as a privateer (pirate), he was finally arrested again and identified properly.
A change in this story happened in 1809 when he desired to live legitimately after witnessing the execution of his first criminal accomplice. He now offered his services as a police informant in order to escape imprisonment.He was subsequently jailed, establishing his cover as a police spy—seen frequently in popular depictions of undercover work. He was wildly successful, garnering a great deal of information about forged identities and unsolved crimes and passing it on to the Paris police chief. The police arranged a successful“escape,” but he was not pardoned of his past offenses, and he continued to work as a secret agent, building an extensive reputation in the criminal underworld. He gathered together a small team and organized a plainclothes unit called the Security Brigade, or La Sûreté. They were among the first historical police detectives, and in 1813 Napoleon Bonaparte himself signed a decree making them state security—among the first federal police. La Sûreté was small, informally paid, and made up primarily of handpicked ex-cons Vidocq hired. For twenty years he led them with distinction, frequently going undercover as beggars, women, and even faked his own death. He resigned a rich man, and following the political turmoil rocking France, moved on to found the first private detective agency.
Vidocq is considered by historians to be the father of modern criminology.He introduced undercover work, ballistics, chronology, and record keeping for things like fingerprints—the forerunner to programs such as ViCAP, the ViolentCriminalApprehension Program. He was the first to make plaster cast impressions of shoe prints. He was also said to have had a photographic memory and could easily recognize convicted criminals even in disguise, and remember many pertinent details from his extensive records.
It is perhaps to this strange fusion of criminal and detective in Vidocq that we owe much of our understanding of crime solving and forensic science. This is, I suspect, part of where we start to see our historical narrative impressions of criminologists as having one foot in both worlds. We see the mirror image of the detective “becoming” the criminal as well, in the portrayal of characters such Hannibal Lecter or Raymond Reddington, where the charming and preternaturally brilliant criminal mastermind dons a white hat and provides the same kind of brilliant insight as a Sherlock Holmes might. At the same time we are often given the stoic face of a criminal investigator like Leverage’s Nate Ford, whose talent is “getting into the heads” of criminals. In this position, they are required to draw upon those criminals’ insight so as to alter the rigidity of their socialized upbringing. So often, such as in NBC’s Hannibal, the narrative drama is in Will Graham’s becoming warped by his pursuit of Lecter, such that he is himself incarcerated.
The same trope replayed itself at Mindhunter’s season one finale, in which Holden is overcome with panic as he is embraced by one such insightful psychopath, Edmund Kemper, the co-ed killer. Once again, we’re drawn into the world of Mary Shelley, who cautioned us against overreaching with science in the absence of God’s influence such that we might find ourselves in a kind of Faustian bargain with the devil himself. We can see the ways in which characters like Graham or Ford become morally ambiguous in the eyes of broader society. We dread the possibility that gazing into the abyss might have us discover the abyss staring back at us.
ButI’d like to posit that this is not the case at all. It is not the monster staring back scaring you: it’s your discovery that there really is a monster that is frightening. We want to see these killers as having human emotions like we do, and do things for reasons (bad reasons, they might be), but some murderers, like Corrl or Kemper just aren’t thinking like us at all.
Or, as Dr. Wendy Carr states in one of the first episodes of season two:“When we empathize with a psychopath, we negate the self.”
And that is what is truly dangerous—and terrifying—about these criminals. We lose ourselves in them.
R.Travis Morton is a PhD candidate in English Literature at theUniversity of Waterloo. His research areas include game studies, linguistics, political theory, American literature, horror fiction, and folklore studies. His dissertation involves independent survival horror games, with a focus on Slender:The Awakening.