The Celebrity Killer

The killer, or at least the version of the killer who hogs most of the airtime, is set apart from the rest of humanity because of his bad deeds, but that apartness also marks him as special. Something of the animal is in him, and also something of the artist. He's a mastermind, someone who doesn't play by the same rules as the rest of us. (This celebrity killer is almost always a "he," both because the vast majority of all murderers are male, and because the stereotypical roles allotted to female killers--the bad mom, the jealous ex, the gender-nonconforming monster--are less easy to glamorize.)

Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, 2019