Using archival footage, interviews with forensic psychologists and homicide investigators, and tracing life stories that are almost always ravaged with childhood sexual abuse and violence, these films attempt to piece together and contextualize what sort of damaged person would lash out against and terrorize both innocent victims and society at large. Serial killer documentaries attempt to make sense of a behavioral pattern that is beyond most normal people’s ability to rationalize and justify. Whereas the public can understand mass murder when it happens in war, or even contract murder when it involves money, they can’t quite comprehend the mind of someone so utterly alienated and remorseless that they kill one person after the next without feeling anything other than satisfaction-assuming they’re able to feel anything at all. But serial killers seem much more unsettling due to the fact that they do it again and again and again almost as if they are addicted to murder. It’s likely that most people have felt pushed toward that brink. As disturbing as the idea of mass murder is, people are more likely to comprehend that someone can finally snap in a single blaze of violence.

Louisiana serial killer 1920s