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This chapter focuses on the difficulties the Mexican police, press, and public had in conceptualizing a serial killer, and how this affected the search for El/La Mataviejitas. It opens with a discussion of Mexico’s cultural beliefs concerning serial killing—that it is a product of anomie; it can happen only in a society deficient in moral values. The chapter then shows how from official discourses to popular culture, Mexicans conceive of their society as strongly grounded in traditional family values and how this belief influenced the search for a serial killer. The chapter closes with an analysis of the construction of "infamous" serial killers internationally and the impact of these constructions on the conceptualization of El/La Mataviejitas. The analysis focuses on the police assumption that the serial killer of elderly women must be a man, based on international patterns. This stereotype of the serial killer took on a distinctly local flavor once the police authorities modified their belief that El Mataviejitas was a “he” to include the possibility that he was a “travesti”—a local gendered identity linked to sex work, which police equated with sexual perversion and upon which it is culturally easy to build criminality.

This chapter explores the enduring myths about the phenomenon of serial murder generally and serial killers in particular, in Britain between 1960 to the present. The Chapter argues that many of these myths have been created and continue to be perpetuated by the print and broadcast media. It is suggested that this process was ignited by American popular culture about serial murder, to the extent that many British students engaged on university courses do so because they want to emulate the heroine of the popular novel The Silence of the Lambs and become the fictional character, Clarice Starling. This observation is used to explore other myths about offender profiling, the role of the profiler in police investigations and the idea that this involves entering the mind of the serial killer by the profiler. Based on his own applied work with serial murderers and on police investigations and after their conviction, the chapter reveals the realities of the phenomenon of serial murder, serial killers and the limits of offender profiling. The chapter uses a number of situations encountered during police investigations and with serial killers to illustrate its arguments. It concludes that we need to harness, rather than dismiss, student interests in this territory in more productive ways. It adopts a structural/victim perspective about serial murder, as opposed to a relentless focus on what might motivate the serial killer to kill. The chapter suggests how this might be done both within the academy and, more broadly in public policy.

This chapter focuses on Dennis Nilsen, a civil servant who strangled to death at least 15 young men between 1978 and 1983 in North London, and kept their bodies around his flat for long periods of time. Contemporary British culture has always been fascinated with the figure of the murderer, and Nilsen is one of the most prominent faces of serial killing in this culture. As well as spawning the usual tabloid-esque true-crime volumes, Nilsen's case and persona have been the basis for an avant-garde physical theatre piece, an award-winning feature-length “docudrama,” an oil painting, and a postmodern Gothic novel. He is therefore notable among twentieth-century murderers for being associated with alternative and high art. Added to this, Nilsen is unusual, though by no means unique, among convicted murderers in terms of the amount of self-representation and creative production, in the form of both confessional and fiction writing, classical music, and images, which he himself has produced.

The introduction provides an overview of the case and an outline of the methodological frameworks that will serve as the analytic anchor points of the text. After describing my visit to see Juana Barraza in prison, the introduction (1) contextualizes the story of the Mataviejitas by providing a brief history of criminality and serial killing in Mexico, (2) introduces the political concerns and long-standing rift between the government of Mexico City and the governing party of Mexico, and (3) lays out the main methodological tools I will use, mexicanidad and pigmentocracy.