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SERIAL KILLERS:  THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS
A DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF SERIAL MURDER

PETER VRONSKY

 REVIEWS,  PRESS RELEASES AND MEDIA



AUDIO INTERVIEW WITH PETER VRONSKY: WORLD TALK RADIO hosted by Antoinette Kuritz
December 8, 2004

Segment 2
Peter Vronsky talks about getting started, the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and doing research.
Segment 3
From getting an agent to selling the book, more with Peter Vronsky.
Segment 4
A bit more with Peter, and then Diane Mott Davidson joins the Roundtable.

Original Website:  Writer's Roundtable at World Talk Radio

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
A Definitive History of Serial Murder

Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


Getting Serious About Serial Killers

 by June Pulliam

December 22, 2004.

This morning on CNN, it was reported that evidence from the 25 year old unsolved BTK[1] case in Wichita, Kansas had surfaced.  I was particularly struck by a comment made to the press by local police about how the BTK killer was doubly unsettling to the good people of Wichita because the city is located in the Midwest, where things such as serial killings just don’t happen.  It is this myth of serial killers that Vronsky punctures in his book, which purports to be “the definitive history of the phenomena of serial murder.”

In fact, the people in Wichita are no more immune from serial killers than are denizens of New York City or Oakland or Atlanta. Serial killers walk among us undetected, since on the outside, they are seemingly normal individuals. Worse still, serial killers are more than likely far more numerous than we know, their crimes often going unsolved since they so frequently victimize prostitutes, transients and runaways whose permanent absence isn’t always noticed. Also, lacking modern DNA evidence, law enforcement isn’t always able to definitively link crimes that might not be similar in other regards and thus can’t detect the work of a serial killer.

So the obvious question is who is the serial killer, and what motivates him?[2] 

Vronksy’s theory about the serial killer phenomena holds that it is a product of the industrial revolution, as this type of homicide necessitates a certain degree of leisure time to both contemplate the deviant pleasures of murder (and sometimes torture and mutilation) to carry out the crime. Earlier examples of serial killers cited by Vronsky include the seventeenth century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her beauty, and the eighteenth century aristocratic killer of children Giles de Rais. But as the industrial revolution wore on, it was no longer only aristocrats that had the leisure time necessary to become a serial killer. Everyday people such as John Wayne Gacy and Baton Rouge’s own Derrick Todd Lee could also rack up a high body count and terrorize populations.

Vronsky is particularly interested in what he describes as the postmodern age of serial murder, a period of time he claims was ushered in by Ted Bundy. He contrasts Bundy to someone like Jack the Ripper

who was always imagined as an aristocrat with a top hat—the best of our society gone worst. The serial killers who followed were portrayed as depraved monsters—freaks of nature—outcasts and drifters whose demented criminal features should have given them away. But not Bundy. He was like so many of us: an attractive college student with typical ambitions who drove a cute Volkswagen bug. He was an updated and egalitarianized version of Jack the Ripper—a killer of superior social qualities attributed to all the young middle-class upwardly mobile professionals taking over America. In other words, unlike serial killers of the past, he was not one of “them” but one of “us.”

It is this postmodern killer who is also so fascinating to me, as I am an avid reader of serial killer fiction. Serial killer fiction differs from true crime writing in that the story of a killer is crafted into a narrative that focuses on both the savagery of his/her crimes and sometimes also represents him/her as fiendishly clever, leading either an equally clever or clueless police force on a wild chase. This formula, ultimately, is not that much different from the one employed on the campy Batman television series from the 1960s. However, real life serial killers and their apprehension are very different from what is depicted in fiction. While the killers’ crimes are grisly, they do not seem to have an unconscious desire to be caught, and thus, don’t leave cryptic clues for a well-equipped police force to decipher. Instead, it is more often than not merely very good luck and just dull, plodding police work that gets them caught. Someone happens to notice the killers’ usually unremarkable features and places them near the crime scene, or they are caught during a routine traffic stop.

Vronsky’s analysis of the serial killer also deflates a good many myths. For instance, it is commonly believed that serial killing is a predominately male phenomena, and that women very rarely become serial killers. While men do make up the majority of serial killers, a startling one in five serial killers is female. Killers such as Aileen Wuronos particularly attract media attention because her crimes so much resemble those of her male counterparts. In some ways, Wuronos resembled Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer, in that she too was a missionary murderer, and her crimes were related to prostitution. The missionary killer believes that he or she is doing the world a favor by ridding the world of a particular type of victim. Ridgeway thought that the world was better off without prostitutes, whereas Wuronos believed that she was ridding the universe of the sort of scum who patronized prostitutes[3]. However, most female serial killers don’t get the same media attention as their homicides are in part an extension of their female gender roles. Women are more likely to kill in their care giving roles, such as nurses who operate as angels of mercy or mothers who suffer from Munchasen by Proxy syndrome and kill their children to get sympathy.

Another myth deflated by Vronsky concerns Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber.  Represented by the media as a crazed kook who lived in a shack in the woods, Kaczynski actually lived in more of a suburb hardly located outside of civilization. Also, as a young college student, Kaczynski was “a survivor of a series of brutal personality-breaking psychological experiments in 1959, conducted at Harvard by Henry A. Murray, a towering figure in the world of intelligence agency personality analysis, brainwashing, and interrogation techniques.”  Kaczynski became such a kooky caricature during his trial because the media coverage “was highly controlled by the very corporate powers he so hated.” Only a handful of people were issued press passes to the trial, with most of them going to major media outlets, the remaining two available on “a daily lottery basis to independent or small media organizations.”

His final chapter is unique in that it offers advice on how to survive an encounter with a serial killer. Admittedly, this advice is culled from a somewhat flawed sampling, as the serial killer’s ability to continue to murder depends on his ability to remain invisible, and thus, it is likely that a good many people have unknowingly come into contact with this person and are not aware as to why they have escaped from the encounter unharmed. Instead, this chapter is based on interviews with serial killers in captivity and their would-be victims who survived. The advice, basically aimed at women (who are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of serial homicide than are men) is to both trust their own fear instincts and to fight against their gender programming, which tells them to be polite and helpful and to appease attackers.  I particularly appreciated these last two bits of advice, as I am always impatient with those who tell women to do things when being attacked such as give in so as to not further piss off their attacker or to urinate on themselves so they will be unappealing. In essence, that sort of advice encourages women to further embrace a dangerously dependent feminine identity as they’re being victimized, rather than go down swinging. Becoming more passive in the face of adversity always seemed to me to be both dangerous and patronizing to women, and I was pleased to see someone encouraging women to actually fight back.

Vronsky’s book isn’t the usual litany of horrors perpetrated by serial killers. Instead, he actually puts this phenomena in historical perspective and examines the shortcomings of modern police work.  For this reason, as well as all the others cited throughout this review, I recommend Serial Killers as required reading for anyone who is particularly interested in the truth in this particular type of fictionalized reality.

 

[1] BTK, the acronym for “bind, torture, kill” is the name given to this unknown killer by Wichita authorities.

[2] I will use the masculine pronoun when talking about generic serial killers in this reviews since statistically, three in four of them are male.

[3] Wuronos herself was a streetwalker, and met her victims while practicing this occupation.

ORIGINAL REVIEW SITE

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS
A Definitive History of Serial Murder
 

Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


ROUNDTABLEREVIEWS.COM

Reviewed By Jeannie Langston
December 15, 2004

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS  is one of the most complete books I have read on serial killers.  Peter Vronsky starts by making it personal with two instances of fate intervening.  On two separate occasions he ran into serial killers, not actually knowing until much later that they were the Times Square Torso Ripper and the Red Ripper -- Richard Cottingham and Andrei Chikatilo respectively.

If I weren't prone to paranoia, I would have been shortly after the introduction.  In Vronsky's introduction he brings up the suggestion that serial killers lead perfectly normal lives.  How many times have we run into someone who is a serial killer or has the potential to become a serial killer? 

Vronsky gives a history of killers, everyone from Ted Bundy to Ed Kemper.  He describes cannibals and necrophiliacs to rampage killers; his descriptions are very detailed.  He brings to life many serial killers that I had never heard of as well as those who have touched everyone's lips at one time or another. 

In SERIAL KILLERS, the text goes into everything from classifying a serial killer to their childhoods and then onto their first kill.  The final chapter gives some options on dealing with serial killers.  It is not a how-to guide according to the book, just some tips based on FBI interviews with those who have survived an encounter with a serial killer. 

SERIAL KILLERS is a great book.  It is very detailed, and even includes photos.  I'm not sure this is a good choice for those who are weak-stomached or those who are prone to paranoia.  It is very in-depth.  However, if you are fascinated by the human mind and by those who are abnormal, this is the book for you.

Original Review at: www.roundtablereviews.com/roundtable/Archives/vronskypeter121504.htm 

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004

Serial Killers Not New To History

(New York/Toronto) January 17, 2005 -- "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" a book by Peter Vronsky recently published by Penguin Berkley Books, traces the history of serial homicide throughout history. Vronsky looks at the myth that serial killers are a modern phenomenon linked to urbanization. While we often think of Jack the Ripper in London in the 1880s as the “first” serial killer, Vronsky cites numerous cases in Germany, France, Spain and Italy of similar serial predators in the 1600s and 1700s. ( See: www.petervronsky.com )

One of the early cases Vronsky looks at is the trial of Jean Grenier in France in 1603, a fourteen-year old boy accused of murdering and cannibalizing several children. Grenier claimed that he was a werewolf, but the court rejected his defense stating that “It has been observed that real wolves tear with their claws, and werewolves tear with their teeth, whereas men know how to despoil girls they wish to eat of their dresses without tearing them.” The court ruled that Grenier was not a werewolf but “possessed by demons”—an insanity plea of the time. Instead of being put to death, Grenier was confined for life in a monastery.

Vronsky suggests that tales of werewolves and vampires might really be about serial killers. Even the eighth century English epic “Beowulf” features a description of a character named Grendel hauntingly similar to that of a modern serial killer. Grendel had been killing people by night over a period of twelve years and “grieves not at all for his wicked deeds.”

Vronsky reminds us that the term ‘serial killer’ is only twenty-years old. He points out that the words serial killer do not even appear in Ann Rule’s 1980 ground breaking true crime book about Ted Bundy, “The Stranger Beside Me.” In 1980, serial killers were still described as “mass murderers”, a term reserved today for murderers who commit multiple killings in one frenzied episode.

It has been commonly thought that serial murders were rare until the 1970s and 1980s when an “epidemic” rise of serial killing swept through the USA. Vronsky cites studies, however, showing that serial killer epidemics have hit the USA previously between 1911-1915 and 1935-1941. The difference was that in the 1980s, the Justice Department was lobbying Congress for funding to expand the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit at the same time that missing children’s program advocates were also lobbying for funding. It was in the interest of the Justice Department to highlight and even exaggerate the extent of the serial murder “epidemic” and to link it to missing children to secure the funding it was seeking at the time.

As for the actual term ‘serial killer’, Vronsky definitively explores its use in the past and the claims of former FBI agent and profiler Robert Ressler to having coined it while guest lecturing police officers at Bramshill in England.

One thing Vronsky does point out is that serial killing and sexual homicide in early history were frequently crimes of leisure and excessive wealth and power. He looks at the Roman Coliseum as a form of serial killing for the entertainment of the mobs. He explores the career of aristocrat serial child murderer, Gilles de Rais (who was also Jeanne D’Arc’s former bodyguard) and the killings by Countess Elizabeth Bathory in Hungary who was reputed to have bathed in her victims’ blood. Vronsky points out that today, some serial killers precisely seek the kind of unlimited power of life and death over their victims that ancient Roman despots had.

As the world became modernized and average people had time to think about things other than how to survive starvation, plague or barbarian invasions, some also had increasing leisure time to start dwelling on sexual and murderous fantasies.

The rise of large cities also made the offender more anonymous, Vronsky explains. He points out that the early migrating serial killers were often captured because small villages quickly identified and focused on a stranger in their community, while those who killed victims in their own tiny communities were quickly linked to them. It was in big cities that serial murders like Jack the Ripper's began to remain unsolved.    

The press also had much to do with the perception of serial killers. Jack the Ripper, whose crimes in 1888 still grip our imagination, committed his murders in the media center of its time: London. Newspaper headlines breathlessly covered his killings. But the twenty similar unsolved mutilation murders of women in Atlanta between May 1911 and May 1912, the first seven killings committed like clockwork every Saturday night, remain forgotten because they did not happen in a press center like New York or London. The fact that the victims were light-skinned Afro-American women also played a role in the newspapers’ relative lack of interest in the crime, a situation Vronsky suggest persists even today.

It really was not until the term 'serial killer' was picked-up by the media in the early 1980s that the notion of serial homicide as something new and unique was identified in the public's perception. What really was new was the term, not the thing itself.

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" is a definitive 430-page book covering the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide around the globe from the Roman Empire to the Washington Beltway and the Green River murders.

Peter Vronsky is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto and is a former international investigative documentary producer.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004

Serial Killer Profiler Accuracy Tested

(New York/Toronto) December 10, 2004 -- "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" a new history of serial murder by Peter Vronsky, describes research conducted by a university in Australia to empirically test the best qualifications for profilers of serial killers. 

Groups of police officers, professional profilers (forensic psychologists with a history of being retained by police departments), ordinary psychologists, claimed psychics, and untrained economics and science college students, were all asked to profile an unidentified offender based on crime scene information from a previously solved case. The details of the offender’s identity and characteristics were obviously not disclosed to the test subjects.

As expected, professional profilers and psychologists scored best in accurately describing the characteristics of the unknown offender. But surprisingly, the next highest scores were achieved by the untrained college students, followed by police officers and psychics last. Because the FBI asserts that investigative experience is the highest qualification that successful profilers can bring to the job, a second experiment was run to test the value of policing experience on the skills and abilities of profilers.

The test subjects this time consisted of 31 senior detectives with a minimum of ten years experience; 12 seasoned homicide investigators; 19 trainee detectives with a minimum of ten years of general police duties; 50 police academy recruits with less than six weeks of training; 50 recruits with less than three weeks training; and 31 untrained sophomore chemistry students. The results were astonishing, reports Vronsky.

Untrained sophomore chemistry students outperformed all the police groups across the board in producing the most accurate profiles. Among the police officers, police recruits scored higher than experienced homicide detectives and outperformed the other police groups.

These results seem to contradict the FBI’s assertion that investigative experience is the highest qualification for effective profilers.

Vronsky reports that researchers suggest that paradoxically, the more experience an investigator has, the more that experience gets in the way of interpreting data for the purpose of profiling. Investigators develop over the years a set of commonsense “heuristics”-impressions about criminals and crime that are based not necessarily on fact but on their own subjective experience and perceptions. College students and police recruits with no such prejudicial experience and a more open mind, can produce more accurate profiles than experienced police officers.

These tests are not conclusive, Vronsky warns. Formal education might also be a factor behind the effectiveness of a profiler, and the low scores from senior police officers might reflect the lower educational qualifications of police recruits in the past when those officers joined the force. Vronsky reminds us that many FBI profilers hold M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in behavioral sciences, which may account for the FBI’s reputation for effective profiling.    

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" is a 430-page book covering the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide and includes a chapter on the history of profiling and recent developments and advances in the technique.

Peter Vronsky is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto and is a former international investigative documentary producer.
SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


JOHN WALSH WRONG ABOUT SERIAL KILLERS AND MISSING CHILDREN

Publish Date : 12/10/2004 5:46:00 PM   Source : Legal News Onlypunjab.com

In "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" a new history of serial murder by Peter Vronsky, the story behind the “serial killer epidemic” of the 1980s is explored. According to the book, John Walsh, the current host of the TV program America’s Most Wanted, used inaccurate statistics when testifying before Congress in the 1980s. Relying on information, perhaps traced to the then Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell's claims, Walsh stated that 205 children go missing every hour: a total of 1.8 million children a year.

While most of the reported missing children are later found, Walsh said, “The unbelievable and unaccounted for figure of fifty thousand children disappear annually and are abducted for reasons of foul play… this country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, and strangled children.” Walsh suggested that serial killers are responsible for these abduction-murders. Walsh’s own son, Adam had just been abducted and murdered in Florida by a stranger, who might have been notorious serial killer Ottis Toole, Henry Lee Lucas’s partner.

But where were the actual reports of 50,000 unsolved disappearances: nearly a thousand children a week? According to Vronsky’s book, several studies were initiated in the wake of Walsh’s claims. A study of 1,498 child murders in California between 1981 and 1990 determined that the predominant killers of children were not strangers and serial killers, but the children’s own parents! Strangers murdered only 14.6 percent of children between the ages of five and nine, while relatives and parents murdered 44.8 percent of those child victims. Another 30.2 percent were murdered by acquaintances. Women comprised 36.4 percent of all killers of children between the ages of five and nine.

A later study by the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Throwaway Children (NISMART) determined that between 1976 and 1988, an average of 43 to 147 children a year were actually abducted by strangers—and not all murdered. A far cry from the claimed 50,000 figure.

Despite this rare occurrence of stranger abduction, the national fear triggered by the exaggerated reports of the 1980s persists today. While stranger abductions like the tragic case of Polly Klaas and the resolved case of Elizabeth Smart are extremely rare, Vronsky writes, “Of course, this fact is of no consolation to the parents of the 43 to 147 children who on average every year are abducted by strangers.”

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" is a 430-page book covering the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide from ancient times of the Roman Empire to the most recent cases today and includes many never before seen illustrations.

Peter Vronsky is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto and is a former international investigative documentary producer.
SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS COMMON 

(New York / Toronto) November 26, 2004   Nearly one in five serial murderers in the USA are women, reports a new history book: SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS by Peter Vronsky.

According to a newly written history of serial homicide by Peter Vronsky, a study of 399 known serial killers in the USA between 1800 and 1995, showed that 16 percent were females and 75 percent of them made their appearance after 1950. 

Peter Vronsky writes in SERIAL KILLERS:  THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS, that women “are often more deadly and more prolific than typical male serial killers.  Female serial killers are described as the ‘quiet killers’ because they rarely leave bodies dumped by the roadside, which alarm a community.  Their killing careers last twice as long as men’s:  eight years for women to the male serial killer’s average of just over four years.” 

Women serial killers are also better educated and qualified, claims Vronsky citing further studies that show females incarcerated for a single murder are, when they commit their crime, 77 percent unemployed, 65 percent Afro-American, 76 percent mothers and with a median age of twenty-seven years.  Female serial killers, on the other hand, are only 10 percent are unemployed and 95 percent white with a median age of thirty.  A remarkable 31 percent of female serial killers were professionals, skilled workers, or business proprietors, and a further 15 percent were semi-skilled workers. 

In his history of serial murder from the ancient days of the Roman Empire to the most recent cases this year, Vronsky includes a look at female serial killers and their motives, which differ to some extent from those of male serial killers.  “On average, 74 percent of female serial killers were at least in part motivated by personal financial gain, a sad reflection on their middle-class aspirations,” writes Vronsky. 

Vronsky reminds us, however, that a third of female serial killers committed their crimes with an accomplice, frequently a male, and his book includes several case accounts exploring the dynamics of the killer couple marriages and love relationships. 

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS is an exploration of the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide in a 430-page illustrated volume.

Peter Vronsky is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto and is a former international investigative documentary producer.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky

432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


HOW TO SURVIVE A SERIAL KILLER

(New York / Toronto) November 8, 2004 -- According to a new history book on serial murder, SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS, the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) interviewed serial killers, sexual murderers and rapists and their surviving victims to ascertain if anything in their behavior saved them from being murdered. Murderers convicted of multiple homicides were themselves asked, why they spared some of their intended victims. 

The FBI eventually identified a number of behavioral options a victim might take, organized in a decision flow-chart system ranging from acquiesce to resistance. Vronsky describes how the FBI weighed the various risks and dangers of each option against the possible profile type of serial killer or rapist.

Part of surviving a serial killer is avoiding one in the first place, Vronsky writes in his book, inspired by his own two brief encounters with serial killers prior to their capture. Vronsky reviews the accounts of several women who managed to avoid capture entirely because of a sudden intuitive flash. Vronsky warns both men and women not to underrate their “intuition” or “gut feeling.” He describes intuition as a psychological process where a person has observed something but the mind has not yet logically analyzed the meaning of what they saw.

In one case, Vronsky documents how a serial killer who was feigning a ski injury approached a young woman on campus and asked her to help him carry some library books to his car. She readily agreed to help the handsome studious young man, his arm in a cast, by carrying his books to a vehicle parked nearby. But as she approached the car she noticed that the front seat was missing and she was suddenly overcome by a wave of unexplained fear. She quickly put the books down and ran off, deeply embarrassed by her sudden seemingly illogical and unfriendly behavior. That handsome young man was Ted Bundy and he would sometimes use his fake cast to batter women into unconsciousness. Bundy had removed the front seat from his car to conveniently transport in various states of life and death some of his twenty-one raped and mutilated female victims. "Indecipherable warning signs of danger can be perceived subconsciously without being immediately understood by the rational mind," Vronsky argues. "No woman," he says, "should be embarrassed or ashamed to respond to her intuition and flee without explanation any situation she finds uncomfortable or threatening."    

Once confronted, captured, or under control of a serial killer, a whole new dynamic comes into play, according to Vronsky’s book. In his closing chapter he explores the range of options that a victim might be able take and the projected effectiveness of each for escape and survival: verbal confrontational resistance, physical dissuasion, physical confrontational resistance, verbal non-confrontational dissuasion and acquiesce. Vronsky reviews each option and discusses the type of serial killer who might respond to it—and which types might react with increased violence instead, according to the FBI studies, and what to do then.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS is an exploration of the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide in a 430-page illustrated volume.

Peter Vronsky is a former investigative documentary producer and is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky

432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


Serial Killer Media Coverage Biased to Victims According To Author of New History of Serial Murder
Publish Date : Oct/29/2004 2:53:00 PM   Source : Culture and Community News

Peter Vronsky, the author of "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters", a new study of the history of serial murder, claims there is a creeping nonchalance and callousness in the reporting by media of serial homicides of so-called 'society's throw-aways'--the homeless, prostitutes, runaway children, gays, inner-city poor, migrant workers, senior citizens.

Vronsky writes: “For the press covering serial murder these days it is not the sheer number of snuffed-out lives that count, but their status or visible credit rating--the trade-off comes in at around one SUV in the garage for every five dead hookers in the Dumpster.”

Vronsky’s book, "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" looks at the myths and realities of serial homicide from ancient Rome to current times and includes numerous case histories of serial killers of prostitutes, such as William Suff in California who killed thirteen women in a case largely ignored during the O.J. Simpson trial; Joel Rifkin who killed seventeen women in the New York City area but somehow is relatively forgotten; and Kendall Francois who killed eight prostitutes in upstate New York but whose horrific crimes were hardly reported.

Vronsky explains:
“Francois was doing his killing in Poughkeepsie, a town on the Hudson River halfway between Albany and New York City—too far south to enter the Albany television market and too far north to be covered by the New York City TV footprint. That’s like saying it never happened. And of course, by the end of the 1990s, eight victims was a relatively mediocre performance if numbers count for anything…

“Suff killed drug-addicted street prostitutes and left their bodies behind strip mall garbage Dumpsters, posed so as to call attention to their drug habits. But Suff went on trial in the middle of the O. J. Simpson case; what are thirteen dead crack whores compared to two shiny-white Starbucks victims in Brentwood at the hands of an enraged celebrity? And how about Joel Rifkin, who murdered seventeen street hookers in the New York-Long Island area? The media abandoned his story in the rush to cover the deaths of six "respectably employed" train commuters at the hands of Colin Ferguson. The trial of Joel Rifkin was wrapped up in relative obscurity despite the seventeen murder victims. We might not even know his name if an episode of Seinfeld had not made it a butt of jokes.”

In his chapter entitled 'The Silence of the “Less-Dead”' Vronsky describes a 'serial killer culture' that encourages and rewards disturbed individuals to pursue homicidal fantasies focused on marginalized members of the community whose lives are less valued by the rest of society.

Vronsky refers to a term coined by criminologist Stephen Egger for a type of victim : the "less-dead." These are victims whose lives are devalued in society's perception and whose murders are often seen by the media to be less important to report. Vronsky compares the lack of media coverage of the murder of eleven crack-addicted prostitutes in Detroit to the rush of live TV coverage of the serial murders of five white college students in Gainesville, Florida.

Vronsky reports that Egger is concerned that a 'killing culture' is being defined by true-crime literature, fiction, television, film, entertainment and media coverage which, "all focus on the serial killer's skills in eluding the police and the nature of his acts, while the victims are mere props in the story or worse, justify their own deaths."

The raising to near-hero status of the fictional character Hannibal Lecter portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in two Hollywood films, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and HANNIBAL, is an example of how the public is being encouraged to identify with or even laud the figure of the serial killer in our society. The serial killer is portrayed as a figure in rebellion, lashing out at society's ills and a symbol of swift justice cleansing society's ills. The killer's talents for avoiding arrest overshadow the death and grief he leaves in his wake, according to Vronsky.

Vronsky quotes the Green River serial killer Gary Ridgway who killed forty-eight prostitutes and commented to police after his arrest, "I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing, killing the prostitutes. Here you guys can't control them, but I can."

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky

432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004


PRESS RELEASE

(New York / Toronto) October 4, 2004 - SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS by PETER VRONSKY is a definitive history of serial homicide from the Roman Empire to the Washington Beltway.    

SERIAL KILLERS looks at past and current issues, controversies and techniques in criminal profiling, recent advances in categorizing serial killers, new approaches to psychological research in the mystery of what motivates serial offenders and features a unique chapter based on FBI research on how to enhance your chances of surviving if confronted or captured by a serial killer.

Peter Vronsky explores the history, culture, politics and psychology of serial murder in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, in 19th Century USA and England, and traces its extraordinary rise in the USA and the rest of the world during the 20th Century.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS is a shocking but sober exploration of serial homicide and features many new photographs never seen before. The book digs deeply into the true nature of serial homicide and reveals the politics and reality of the so-called "serial murder and missing children epidemic" which terrorized the American public in the early 1980s and continues to inspire fear today.

SERIAL KILLERS provides detailed cases studies of both infamous and lesser known serial killers. Exhaustively researched with transcripts of interviews with killers, and featuring up-to-date information on the apprehension and conviction of the Green River Killer and the Beltway Snipers, Vronsky's one-of-a-kind book covers every conceivable aspect of an endlessly riveting true-crime phenomenon.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS was inspired by the author's two brief accidental encounters with serial killers before they were captured: Richard Cottingham, "The Times Square Ripper" in New York in 1979, who tortured and dismembered five women and Andrei Chikatilo, "Citizen-X -- The Red Ripper", in Moscow in 1991, who killed an record 53 victims during his monstrous career.

Peter Vronsky is a former international television news and documentary film producer and is currently working on his Ph.D. in history at the University of Toronto.

SERIAL KILLERS: THE METHOD AND MADNESS OF MONSTERS 
by Peter Vronsky
432 Pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 0425196402
Publisher: Penguin Berkley Publishing Group
Available: October 5, 2004

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A DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF SERIAL MURDER

432 Pages, Illustrated, $15.00 /$22 (Canadian)

New York:  Berkley Publishing Group, 2004.

ISBN: 0425196402