ABSTRACT
Nothing is more visible in the proliferating, “official literature on serial killing than its relentless banality. This may be attributable in part to what counts as “expert” knowledge in the field. The governing assumption, as the sociologist Philip Jenkins observes, is that “solutions advocated were to be found in state-of-the-art information technology and behavioral science: Was not the Behavioral Science Unit the most quoted source on every aspect of the putative crisis?” But one basic problem with this way of locating the causes and solutions in serial killing appears just here, in the authority of the BSU profilers: “The experts who gained the widest acceptance did so not because of their academic credentials [?], but because of their personal narratives of travelling to the heart of darkness that is the mind of the ‘monster among us,’ This is the language of shamanism rather than psychology.” 1
