Bundy left them on a hillside. Gacy buried them in the crawlspace. Dahmer kept them, and then ate them. Gein wore them. The many breathing bodies which became victim to these murderers were subjected to the most heinous acts, and their last purpose told the story of what happened to them and why. In the contemporary cycle of true crime media, these torn bodies are re-created and re-presented in a never-ending parade of the spectacle of murder. This lecture will explore murder scenes across documentary, comics, dramatizations, and podcasts, as media sites of bodily destruction that appeal to our need to explore and understand humanity’s dark side. These bodies and crime scenes are used to tell us a story that we often already know all too well.

This lecture will unpack Joe Berlinger’s Conversations With A Killer series, connecting the Gacy basement footage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the uncanniness of the boxes, the sealed drum and the kettles, that were brought, one by one, out of Dahmer’s apartment. Later in the Monster: Dahmer series, the contents of those boxes and that apartment were re-created in horrific detail, folding Dahmer into Murphy’s screen horror universe. Our morbid fascination with death is explored in comics, examined here in Bendis and Andreyko’s Torso, a detective story on the hunt for the Headhunter killer, which re-presents crime photographs in a palimpsest with the frames and gutters of the graphic novel. And lastly, the lecture will turn to the true crime podcast, and the crime scene as it forms in the mind of the listener, with an exploration of ‘Gold Star’ material in The Last Podcast on the Left.

Murder might be most foul, but we can’t help but look.