Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder

""Between 1968 and 1974, I had the dubious distinction of living in two communities that were threatened by serial killers."" So begins this rigorous report by Fisher, a criminologist with a flair for archival research, on the ways in which communities respond to the trauma of serial killings. The killers profiled range from well-known figures like Jack the Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer to more obscure ones like John Norman Collins, who murdered several young woman in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the late 1960s. The first killings Fisher covers were perpetrated by Richard Raymond Valenti, who slew three teenage girls in Folly Beach, S.C., between 1973 and 1974. This case becomes the book's prototype, illustrating the four stages that, according to Fisher, a community goes through when subjected to serial murder: anger at betrayal of the social contract; search for rational and scientific explanations; appeals to the supernatural; community-wide suspicion and self-hatred. Each case study further illuminates these stages, as Fisher effectively uses ""contemporary newspaper reports as a window... to observe and recapture the thoughts, feelings, and actions of each community studied."" Along the way, Fisher debunks some stereotypical notions about serial murder investigations, including the value of complicated personality profiles and of psychic investigators in apprehending the guilty. According to Fisher's research, serial killers are almost always caught by simple police work or by accident. Though Fisher's writing is dry at times, and his method overly schematic, he presents a wealth of information and, especially in his coverage of the Son of Sam investigation, offers a mildly satirical look at ""the bond of mutual exploitation"" created among the public, the authorities, the killer and the press--a bond, he suggests, that may excite the killer, desperate for media attention, to strike again. (May)