Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer. Rev. ed.

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Social anthropologist Elliott Leyton argues that modern multiple
murderers “are not mere freaks; rather, they can only fully be
understood as representing the logical extension of many of the central
themes of our culture—of worldly ambition, of success and failure, of
manly avenging violence.” He depicts their crimes as the product not
of insanity or a history of child abuse, but of status frustration and a
precarious (if not nonexistent) sense of personal identity. The six
serial killers under examination—Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, Albert
DeSalvo (the “Boston Strangler”), David Berkowitz, Marx Essex, and
Charles Starkweather—are portrayed as class-conscious, ideologically
conservative, and fiercely ambitious men who killed because of their
perceived rejection at the hands of the (generally) middle class into
which they craved admission. Hence their tendency to prey upon
“unambiguously middle-class figures such as university women.”

Holding fast to his anthropological thesis. Leyton fails to adequately
explain why women, middle-class or otherwise, figure so prominently
among the victims of serial killers. It is not enough to explain their
victimization in terms of the social class their murderers perceive them
to represent. Under the logic of Leyton’s thesis, shouldn’t men, as
the more socially empowered sex, experience to a greater degree than
women the deadly effects of the serial killer’s status anxiety? A
satisfactory explanation of female victimization would require a more
interdisciplinary approach than Leyton is prepared to offer.

Despite its billing as a revised edition, this book is in fact a
reissue of Leyton’s 1986 study of the modern serial killer. The only
new material is the author’s preface, in which he discusses the
critical response to Hunting Humans and provides a brief but useful
overview of the studies on serial murder that followed its publication.
It’s a pity the update ends there. Why not a chapter on, say, Jeffrey
Dahmer or Aileen Wuornos?

Caveats aside, Hunting Humans is admirably written, solidly researched,
and blissfully free of pedantry. It is also uncompromising in the
gruesome details it serves up; the faint of heart are advised to steer
clear.