Anyone who claims to possess total immunity from embarrassment suffers from a bad case of dishonesty or disorder. Still, I like to think I have a higher threshold than most, if only due to years of intensive professional training. The kind of reporting I do often requires an unavoidable degree of social mortification, of inserting myself into places where I’m not wanted or needed and have no real business being.

But even a high threshold has its upper limit. I discovered mine on arrival at the Vaults, Waterloo, on a gloomy Thursday afternoon in late October. The entrance to “Serial Killer: The Exhibition” is located a short distance from Leake Street’s underground board game cafes and American sports bars. I enjoyed the alley’s relative obscurity on approach, though not for its well-curated approximation of urban blandness, council-approved street art and dressed-up craft beer joints. The darkness would, we hoped, eliminate any slim chance of running into a friend or acquaintance. “What exactly? i am do you manage here alone in the middle of the work week or? I imagined them asking, eyes flickering between pity and alarm.

“Well,” I found myself snorting, “actually I’ve spent the better part of £30 hoping to spend the next few hours looking at Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge-freezer, old Volkswagen Ted Bundy’s battered Beetle and a selection of artifacts that once belonged. to several other of the most reviled mass murderers in recent history. To “unmask,” as the online promotional copy puts it, “the mysteries behind the most twisted minds of the century… from a scientific, historical and educational perspective.” I hope to gain a unique insight into their minds and heinous criminal acts, as well as the chance to empathize more fully with their victims. I’m looking forward to the Jack the Ripper VR experience.”

What can be said about the global boom in true crime that hasn’t already been turned into overfamiliarity? The last decade and more has seen the relentless growth and mainstreaming of a genre once considered the subcultural property of troubled suburban teenagers and bored housewives with over-developed macabre tensions. A revolution took place in the early 2010s, starting – the dominant narrative goes – with the arrival of the glossy American investigative podcast. Serial and his numerous successors of varying legitimacy and prestige.

The rise of the whodunnit, or did-they-do-it, industry has been accompanied by a parallel rise in serial killer content, from two-bit podcasts to documentaries and big-budget Netflix dramas. Dahmer, Bundy, Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, Joseph James DeAngelo, Golden State Killer. You name a killer and they probably had a limited run shine.

Our collective obsession with this “fraternity of sweaty, inverted blood-spattered dumbs,” as Martin Amis once put it, knows few apparent limits, despite recent delusional suggestions of an imminent slowdown in consumption caused by mass-killer fatigue. In 2022, his co-hosts My favorite crime signed a $100 million Amazon distribution deal. Ryan Murphy’s execrable TV show Dahmer was released the same year, reaching one billion hours of viewing within months of its release. His latest, hypersexualized, fact-phobic show Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez, went straight to the top of the global charts upon release in September.

Life inside the true crime industrial complex is lucrative work, at least for its ruling caste, whether on TikTok or in the major streamer machine. We know what any ostensibly fair person should do about this sort of thing. It is exploitative and voyeuristic, a form of shamelessness at the unlimited pain and suffering of others. “It stokes the paranoia,” as he puts it New York Timesand desensitizes us to real-world violence. Even the best and most sensitive practitioners of true crime are affected by the moral price paid “to enrich our understanding” of crime because New York recently worried.

It is no longer enough, at least for work that aspires beyond the lowest common denominator of the genre, to justify its existence in terms of pure entertainment or shock value. Now a further refinement is required, usually in an appeal to the tenderer nature of the audience. The ubiquitous invocation of “victims,” ​​whether they have killed themselves or the devastated friends and relatives left behind, is its logical development. This vaguely ethical window dressing makes business sense. According to a recent “True Crime Consumer Report” by Edison Research, more than three-quarters of regular consumers of true crime podcasts are interested or very interested in consuming “victim-centered” content. Like any other creative endeavour, it can be done well or badly, with great seriousness or desperate cynicism. There are many honest, truly groundbreaking offerings like Hallie Rubenhold’s 2019 book The Fivewhich highlighted the largely ignored lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims and the impressively memorable 2021 anti-procedural TV drama Investigatebased on the disappearance and murder of journalist Kim Wall, who strongly refused to show the victim or the perpetrator on screen.

We are also given more than our fair share of supposedly “victim-centered” cash receipts. Although maybe I’m not the right person to berate someone for being actively interested in this genre. Much of my year 2022 was spent reporting and writing a book on what became known as the ‘Bible John murders’, a series of three apparently interconnected – and still unsolved – murders that rocked Glasgow in the late 1960s .The murders were attributed to a red-haired, scripture-quoting devil created by the city’s tabloid press: his specter caused an explosion of paranoia throughout the city and spawned a small industry of speculation that endures to this day in the form of of narrative podcasts, TV documentaries and – yes – books.

When asked why I chose to dedicate myself to the subject, my answers were unvarying. It was an attempt to enlighten Why certain crimes or acts of violence are remembered, drawing on the work of the great Gordon Burn and others. An attempt to interrogate our obsession with uncaught killers and relative lack of interest in the lives of their victims. All of this was true. What I couldn’t say, or perhaps admit to myself at the time, was that the horror of the story was interesting in itself. That his darkness had its own magnetic pull.

Is a demand for victimhood really that much more edifying than a simple fascination with serial killers? In August 2022, I headed to CrimeCon Glasgow, which I had seen advertised online earlier that summer. An American invention, it was the first of its kind to be hosted in the city, after several years of thriving events in London. Its premise was simple enough, whether it was in Las Vegas or the Hilton meters from the M8 motorway, which cuts through Glasgow city centre.

“True Crime,” as the official website puts it in dizzying blurbs, “is much more than crime re-enactments and dramatic courtroom showdowns.” Here, the “victim” was sacrosanct. Perhaps more than anything, the convention would provide, he assured, a reflection on the way we live now. I assume that promise was kept. The £230 tickets came with access to an all-you-can-eat buffet and some Bible John talks. Hand-picked expert panels have ranked Scotland’s worst killers. A range of CrimeCon-branded merchandise was on sale (£14 would get you a bottle of water, although a marquee could be purchased for a third of the price) and seemed to sell out steadily throughout the day.

The strangeness of that day came back to me as I prepared to walk through the Waterloo exhibition space. What kind of tasteful offerings would the curators have? It was certainly hard to see what an extremely gratuitous, gore-covered reconstruction of a Jack the Ripper murder scene had to do with honoring the memory of murdered women. Or just what the poster offering a style ranking of Britain’s worst serial killers – Harold Shipman took pole position, with 1930s ‘Acid Bath Murderer’ John Haigh coming in a disappointing tenth – to improve understanding our collective criminology. Did the young couple in love who stopped to eat every glossy print and serial killer biography really harbor dark thoughts of victimization? The giggling teenage German tourists squealing with delight at the plaster cast of John Wayne Gacy in full clown costume?

At the makeshift store, I thought of a block of Dennis Nilsen fridge magnets and an Aileen Wuornos poster emblazoned with the caption “THE DEAD DO NOT RAPE.” Whether any of the proceeds were transferred to their victims remained unclear. Upon exiting the gallery, even the heavy late afternoon sky felt like a disinfectant.

Francisco Garcia’s book We All Go into the Dark: The Hunt for Bible John is published by Mudlark

(See also: When women fight back)