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| Image credit: Photo by pareeerica on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
Yesterday I wrote about the possibility that Karen Maezen Miller could be a serial killer. (In case you're wondering, the chances are small.) To be honest, I was much more concerned with the more real and terrifying possibility that she or Shawn somehow knew my mother and would, upon learning my name, call her and say, "Hey, do you know that your daughter is writing a secret blog about being married to a sex addict?" But I left that part out because it's not as entertaining as the thought of a Zen priest Unibomber. However, while that was a bit tongue in cheek, the thought really did occur to me.
It occurred to me because I think about serial murder, hm, rather more than I should. My husband and I recently rented DVDs of Dexter (a TV series about a serial killer). Halfway through the second episode, I began blathering excitedly about the serial killer subgenre of crime dramas, when my husband paused the show and said, half teasing and half genuinely exasperated, "What is your deal with serial killers?"
What is my deal with serial killers?
Well, it's true. I do have a deal with serial killers; in fact I have a longstanding morbid fascination with murder in general and both mass murder and serial murder in particular. When my son was born, I would record true crime shows and watch them, holding him through the long, lonely hours of his infanthood. He was breastfed to documentaries about the Night Stalker and Ted Bundy the Son of Sam and John Wayne Gacy. And well before he was born I'd voraciously devour books and newspaper articles, studying each case. Always I wanted to know the same things: Why do they do it? How do I tell the difference between serial killers and the billions of other non-serial killers on Earth? How do I know who to trust? What makes their mind different from my mind? How does their mind work? How does my mind work?
At the time I found out about my husband's sex addiction, when my son was a few years old, the story of Laci Peterson's murder was all over the news. She had been pregnant, her husband had an affair and he'd killed her along with their unborn son. I was pregnant at the time too and my husband had also been unfaithful. When I thought about how much I had trusted Mark and how much he had hidden from me, I didn't know what was real anymore. I felt an aching connection to Laci and the parallels were strong enough that I wondered, in all earnestness: What made me different from her or my husband different from Scott? Why was I alive while she wasn't? Who was to say my husband wouldn't murder me? After all, I wouldn't have thought he could cause such unimaginable hurt he did. I remember how Laci's family supported Scott, until they learned of the affair. They changed their minds in an instant, thinking (as I did), "Well, if he could do this first horrible wrong I thought him incapable of, what is to keep him from doing another?"
Murder is the most extreme form of violation and betrayal. The ultimate trust we place in one another as humans is the trust that we will not kill each other. Murderers break that trust, and serial killers break that trust again and again. When my husband betrayed me, I asked why. When someone is murdered (or murders themselves) I ask why. There is no rational reason for either, yet my mind pursues it, trying to make sense and form understandable patterns from the irrational ones.
When Mark asked me what my deal is with serial killers, I paused before saying, "Well, I suspect it's the same reason I'm drawn to addicts. I think there's something there that resonates with my own life, there's something in the stories I relate to, there's something about me that I need to figure out. And I think you," I said, tickling him under the chin, "are sort of like my own serial killer." He frowned, rolled his eyes and went back to watching the show, not at all pleased with the analogy.
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