ABSTRACT
Western societies have long retained a horror and fascination with the lethal. For, no matter how repetitively narrated, murders continue to traumatize the national psyche, never assimilated, never entirely understood.1 The terror they give rise to in the first instance can later give way to an obsessive preoccupation, where tales of these events are moulded through the twin forces of denial and repression. Only through such reworkings is trauma adequately repressed and fear reduced. Yet the very ineffectiveness of denial ironically guarantees the return of the traumatic repressed and ensures that murder remains always beyond incorporation and understanding, continually in need of fresh denials, new repressions.
