John Wayne Gacy Jr and the media

The Gacy relationship with the media and the society was strong. His story was really striking because nobody expected all those horrible murders from such a friendly and well known person. The story even inspired to an American singer-songwriter and musician named Sufjan Stevens, born in Detroit, Michigan, to write a song about him and his modus operandi. The story also inspired a movie (picture of the 2003 movie).
Song´s link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otx49Ko3fxw

Edmund Kemper: The Coed Butcher

Edmund kemper had little visibility in the media compared with other murderers, however, gave several interviews in which he pointed out all his crimes in detail, also inspired a movie, "Kemper" released in 2008 and directed by Rick Bitzelberger.

Then you will see one of his interviews:

In the video, edmund said one sentence:
"I'm an american, and I killed americans, I'm a human being and I killed human beings, I did it in my society"

Green River Serial Killer Media Blitz

There is a complete treatment about the Green River serial killer in the book:

Reichert, Sheriff D., Chasing The Devil, My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer, (Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2004). Reichert was one of the more notable members of the Green River killer task force. In chapter 13, he told us about the relation between the media and the killer. He starts the chapter talking about the victims of the killer and their relation with him. 

The next paragragraps have information extracted from the book.

The author says: "National magazines and television programs practically ignored the case (refering to the Green River serial killer case). As a result, even though the Green River serial killer had become the worst in American history —he was responsible for at least forty-eight murders — our investigation was almost unknown outside the Northwest. I doubt this was because writers and producers were consciously influenced by the status of the victims, but I do think that subconsciously they placed less value on the lives of women who worked the street. The case was also easier to ignore because Seattle was not a media center like New York or Los Angeles. Though it’s a big and prosperous place, the city is still stuck on the upper-left-hand corner of the map, about as far from the centers of power as you can get while still being in the lower forty-eight.

Because we wanted to shake up the public, we began making ourselves more available to the media. One of the first interview requests we received came from an unlikely place, the Sally Jesse Raphael show. This was in the era before television talk shows had become out-and-out freak shows with daily brawls and half-naked guests. The talk show experience soured me and other task forcemembers on daytime TV, but we didn’t abandon the pressidea entirely. Sometime after the Sally Jesse Raphael programaired, we got a call from a TV producer who was interested in doing a special on the Green River murders. We didn’t make a commitment, but we kept listening as he called every few weeks to ask what we thought about one option or another. Finally he came back with a proposal to do a documentary for a series called Manhunt Live, which would reenact some elements of the Green River case and invite viewers to call a toll-free number to volunteer information. As an added inducement, the program would offer a $100,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. The best thing about the Manhunt Live proposal was that it granted us control over what would be presented. There would be no surprise experts popping up to berate us, and we could tailor the material according to our own theories and advice from profilers. The producers decided to use me as a central figure, and the show would end with me issuing a challenge to the killer to call the hotline and speak with me directly.

The Manhunt Live program offered viewers a remarkable education. In two hours they learned about the killer’s methods, his likely profile, his area of operation, and his place in history as the worst of the worst. But nothing in the program was more powerful and affecting than the voices of the mothers and the pictures of the killer’s victims as little girls and teenagers. The innocence, vulnerability, and youth of the women who had been killed were just as plain as the pain in their mothers’ voices".

There is a documentary made by A&E TV channel. The link to its firts part is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e65t3YAMJo 

GREEN RIVER KILLER

A TRUE DETECTIVE STORY

KILLERS AND THE MEDIA

 Unfortunately the media has created the myth of a serial killer as a somehow heroic person that is determined enough to take whatever measures are necessary to fulfill their goals. The idea is to show how the media somehow changed the image we had of a serial killer and helped to construct of view of this coldblood killers as even nice people or people admired for their intelligence in fooling the police or their neighbours and relatives. The post above is the entry clip of the popular SHOWTIME series Dexter, about a "good serial killer" who only eliminate murderers and dangerous criminal that might jeopardize the way society works.

Serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson were used as icons by the media and still remain part of the popular culture in America.

"Natural born killers" shows us this problematic issue of the negative impact media have on society creting false values that people might feel like imitating.

 ...So, what do you say to your fans...?

John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 -- May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and rapist who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978. Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawlspace of his home, buried three others elsewhere on his property, and discarded the remains of his last four known victims in a nearby river. He was convicted of 33 murders and sentenced to death for 12 of these killings in March 1980. He was executed in May 1994.

Gacy later became known as the "Killer Clown" due to his charitable services at fundraising events, parades and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown", a character he devised himself. 

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. was the second of three children. His older sister Joanne was born two years before him and two years later came his youngest sister Karen. All of the Gacy children were raised Catholic and all three attended Catholic schools where they lived on the northern side of Chicago.

During Gacy’s late teens, he suffered some turmoil with his father, although relations with his mother and sisters were very strong. John Wayne Gacy, Sr. was an abusive alcoholic who physically abused his wife and verbally assaulted his children. Although John Sr. was an unpleasant individual, young Gacy deeply loved his father and wanted desperately to gain his devotion and attention. Unfortunately, he was never able to get very close to his father before he died, something which he regretted his entire life.

His first marriage ended when rumors about his sexual preferences became truths, when Gacy was indicted by a grand jury in Black Hawk County for allegedly committing the act of sodomy with a teenage boy named Mark Miller.Gacy received ten years at the Iowa State Reformatory for men, the maximum time for such an offence. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. was twenty-six years old when he entered prison for the first time. Shortly after Gacy entered prison, his wife divorced him on the grounds that Gacy violated their marriage vows.

He was a model prisoner, realizing that there was a high possibility of an early parole if he remained non-violent and well behaved. Eighteen months later, Gacy’s hopes came true: his parole was approved. On June 18, 1970, Gacy left the confines of the prison gates and made his way back to his place of birth in Chicago.

On June 1, 1972 Gacy married Carole Hoff, a newly divorced mother of two daughters. She was aware of Gacy’s prison experience, yet she trusted that he had changed his life around for the better.

In 1974, Gacy decided he wanted to go into business for himself. He began a contracting business named Painting, Decorating, and Maintenance or PDM Contractors, Incorporated. He hired young teenage boys to work for him.

As a free service to the community, Gacy and his employees volunteered to clean-up Democratic Party headquarters. Gacy further impressed Matwick when the contractor dressed up as "Pogo the Clown" and entertained children at parties and hospitals. Unaware of Gacy’s past and impressed by his sense of duty and dedication towards the community, Robert F. Matwick, the Democratic township committeeman for Norwood Park, nominated Gacy to the street lighting commission. In 1975, Gacy became the secretary treasurer. It seemed as if Gacy’s dreams of success were beginning to come true; however his career in politics would be short-lived. Troubles started to brew when rumors began to circulate about Gacy having homosexual interest in teenage boys.

In 1977, David Daniel, who was then age 28, testified that John offered him a rideto the bus station, but Daniel refused. He also said that Gacy was very insistent, while reaching to ask seven times and even offering marijuana. 

On December 22, 1978, Gacy went to his lawyers and confessed their crimes. He said he had killed for the first time in January 1972 when the stab in the body of a young and watch the blood flowed from the body, he felt a sense of excitement, and this started to like it. He also confessed to killing 33 individuals and indicated the location of 28 bodies to the police. They were buried on their property. 

In a time of trial, the defensetried to claim that Gacy's 33 murders were accidental deaths as part of eroticasphyxia, but the Cook County medical examiner demonstrated with evidence that these claims were impossible.

Gacywas executed on May 10, 1994 at Stateville Penitentiary in Chester, Illinois, bylethal injection.

American Serial Killers.

Jeffrey Dahmer

He was born in May, 21 of 1960 in a home where the relationship between his parents was not the best. It was composed by a chemical researcher and an emotionally neurotic, self-pitying woman. He was a shy and lonely child, who feared abandonment and gave the impression of being helpless.

Soon, he got interest in animal anatomy. In the basement of his house, he saved a lot of rabbits, chicken and other animals bones, feeling a lot of curiosity to see the inside of the alive animals he kept in captivity.

His mom had to be in bed for the rest of her days for having ingested a great amount of tranquilizers and other drugs, situation that take Dahmer in a total isolation.

He started to drink and masturbate himself compulsively using homosexual’s magazines or watching the killed animal’s insides. When he was 16, he used to go drunk to class, where he had only one friend that was a marijuana dealer and whom he saw daily. The young referred to alcohol like his “medicine”, which he auto-prescribed to calm his times of distress.

When his dad left the house, the boy avenged collecting lonely men in the street to who he gave his shelter and killed, and then he put the body in a garbage bag and threw it to an abyss.

Later, he went into a depressive crisis and his dad sent him to the University. There, he was also rejected by his continual state of drunkenness, and in December 1978, his dad forced him to go military service, but his continuous problems didn´t let him to finish it. When he went out, he decided to live with his grand mom, when he showed a possible reinsertion, as he began to go to church, and to read the Bible and even reduce his consumption of alcohol and find a job in a manufacturing factory.

In a short time later, he started again with his bad actions, and went frequently to the Milwaukee Sauna, where many homosexual met themselves to have anonymous and impersonal dates, but was hard for him ejaculate while his couple was awake. This led him to give them drugs before having intercourse with them. Later, he thought more appropriate to looking for corpses to satisfy his sexual instincts.

In September 1986, he was arrested by indecent exhibitionism and this situation compelled the authorities give to make him his first psychological analysis, that give as result that he was a dangerous person.

A year later, Dahmer woke up on a bloody body, but he told that didn’t remember anything about what happened that night. The part that he revived is when he saved the body in the closet and went out to buy a big suitcase to move the body to his grandma’ house. There, he saved it in the basement dismembered it, wrapped the victim´s head in a blanket and saved it in a shelf, then he boiled the head. 

After that, Dahmer begins to kill whenever he had occasion. Following the same modus operandi: first flirtation offering movey for sex, the offered them drink with sleeping pills and finally strangled. After killing the victim stopped hugging the body, thinking how to keep their heads to form an altar in a room decorated with bones.

Sometimes he took a bath in the company of corpses. In te fridge kept the heart in the freezer deads, skulls in the file and in bed a decomposed body. So they told the plice who searched his home once horrified achieved arrest on July 23 due to the caim of another victim who managed to escape from home.

Doxtator was Dahmer's third victim. Doxtator was lured into Dahmer's house with the promise of $50.00 if we would pose nude. Dahmer drugged and strangled him, disposing of his fles

JEFFREY DAHMER AND THE MEDIA

Due to outrageous of his murders the case of “the butcher of Milwaukee” had a lot of cover by the media, in special in The United States.

The Jeffrey´s image came out twice on People.

                                                           

His last victim was black man. And the majority of his victims had this skin color.

Images of the police taking out the refrigerator and de acid vat, where the killer kept parts of human bodies, of the Dahmer’s house where recorder by different media and they are relative easy to get them on internet. His judgment was recorded on video too.

The pain of relative´s victims during the judgment was the principal interest of the news.

Two movies came out about the case of the Milwaukee´s killer. One of them in USA in 2002 directed by David Jacobson and played the role of Jeffrey Dahmer by Jeremy Renner.

 

The Jeffrey Dahmer´s became so popular that even t-shirt came out.

A bunch of books came out too.