© 2008 William Ahearn
Crime scene analysis is all the rage these days on TV with CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York and the soon to be introduced CSI Deep Space 9. While most real-life crime scene investigators would give up raises and vacation days for even some of the gear the TV crime scene units have, it really is a science.
Except when it comes to serial killers. Serial killings are a different pathology than your garden-variety homicide and one reason is that some – not all – but some serial killers do arrange the crime scene and that requires what has become know as profiling. Any profiler worth his sanity will tell you that profiling serial killers is more art mixed with luck than science.
For a real-life recent serial killing where the killer staged the bodies facing east and shoeless, go here.
In David Fincher’s 1995 film “Se7en,” the scriptwriter takes the concept of crime scene manipulation and explodes it into a full-blown pathology all its own. While its an interesting concept, I kept wondering if John Doe – the name given the killer in the film – didn’t grow up in a community theatre that put on “The Mikado” or “Our Town” every summer.
Having said all of that, this is some fine Hollywood moviemaking with Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey. It’s a good film even if its depiction of serial killers is a tad misguided. John Doe may have a bent moral compass yet he has one nonetheless. There is a religious aspect to his killing – the Se7en of the title refers to the seven deadly sins – and this arises in serial killers in the movies from time to time but I can’t find a major serial killer who ever claimed any connection to any god. John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Gary Leon Ridgeway all had their reasons. It seems that some moral imperative never even occurred to them.
Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) has an interesting take on the motives of serial killers. At one point he tells Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), “There’s so many freaks out there doing their little evil deeds. ‘The witches told me to do it, my dog made me do it, Jodie Foster told me to do it.’”
In a way, the unlearned and rough-hewed young detective is as correct as the erudite older professional. The sense that is made by these killers isn’t a sense in any sense at all.
For Hollywood, this is as good as it gets.