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This chapter introduces the topic of serial homicide, exploring the development of this academic field. Difficulties in defining ‘serial killing’ are considered in relation to the numerous definitions and different criteria upon which they draw. Thereafter the study of female serial killers is explored and the different types of approach to making sense of women who engage in such crimes are critically considered. Thereafter, the case of Mary Ann Cotton is introduced and contextualised within existing understandings of female serial killers – the chapter concludes that existing approaches are limited in the amount of light they are able to shed on this particular case.

This chapter tells the story of the 1920 Alexandria serial murders, the “Raya and Sakina” murders, and argues that they played an important role in constructing the notion of an Egyptian national culture in 1920s. The discovery of seventeen bodies buried under the floors of houses in Alexandria's al-Liban neighborhood engendered the first major media sensation in modern Egyptian history, and literally hundreds, if not thousands, of chapters related to the case appeared in the press in the months after the discovery of the first bodies. The Raya and Sakina serial murders attracted national attention, and the great number of Egyptians who followed press coverage of the murders underwent a re-examination of gender, class, and national identifications. Though usually discussed in the post-1952 context, as early as 1920 the beginnings of a “mass-mediated” popular culture began to percolate through Egypt based on notions of acceptable public behavior.

This chapter explores the numerous ways in which Fritz Lang's M prefigured and captured the growing understanding of serial murder in cinema. It recounts how Lang used a number of true crime sources and spent several days in a mental asylum to conduct his intensive research. It also mentions how Lang was inspired by several real-life German child killers like Fritz Haarmann, Peter Kürten, and Carl Großmann, whom he also allegedly interviewed. The chapter contrasts M and Lang's other work during the period with other German films that portray violent killers as their protagonists, such as those made by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst. It looks at how directors of horror-themed movies deal with the intersection of violence, death, and sexuality.

This paper discusses the role of 'terror' and 'terrorism' as an aspect of state policy in Iran during the twentieth century, looking at its historical context both within Qajar Iran and as an aspect of state policy during there French Revolution. The paper critically assesses Iranian state's relationship with the term, as both a perceived victim and perpetrator, and focusses on the application of political violence against both dissidents and political opponents where the term 'terror' is used in Persian as a synonym for assassination. The paper looks at the various justifications for the use of terror and political violence, the legacy of the Rushdie affair and the impact of the US led Global War on Terror on perceptions within Iran. 

This chapter examines the magazine's representations of a string of unsolved murders targeting same-sex-desiring and gender non-conforming black bodies in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It then explores these serial murders as an alternative historical site for examining the problem of value as a raced, class, gendered, sexualized, and spatialized term. Through close readings of a poem and performance that responded to these murders, it shows how black gay artists imagined alternative to normative conceptions of value.

This chapter discusses the case of eight black women who were the victims of a serial murderer between July 2003 and October 2004 in Peoria, Illinois. It begins with an analysis of the Don Imus incident of 2007, in which the “shock jock” referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” in order to foreground the unwitting alliance between discrimination and liberalism at the level of representational discourse, and to suggest how black women in the life expose the limitations of a social order conditioned by value.

In 1695, Charles Perrault wrote a French fairy tale, “La Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard”). Published in 1697 and translated into English in 1729, it featured a character that had dominated international folklore and myth for centuries before he was given a blue beard and a magnificent castle by Perrault. That castle had one forbidden room with which to tempt and test the man’s wives. Despite being one of the grisliest in the canon, “Bluebeard” captured the English imagination and gave rise to a nexus of variants related by themes of curiosity, forbidden chambers, punishment, and serial wife murder. This chapter looks at the principal variants of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” fairy tale, along with the English variant “Mr. Fox” and versions of Bluebeard with animal grooms. It also considers the influence of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights on the Turkish Bluebeard, Bluebeard in Greek mythology and the Bible, and the alleged use of Bluebeard as a name by King Henry VIII of England.

This chapter focuses on the death of James Baldwin, which made a big impact on Sonia Sanchez’s life. When Sanchez first read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, she knew she was home. Seeing Baldwin on TV, she immediately felt a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America’s contradictions transformed his face into a warrior’s face, whose tongue transformed massacres into triumphs. When Sanchez first met him in the late 1960s, she was stricken by his smile smiling out at the New York City audience he had just attacked. Sanchez, however, focuses on the next to the last time they spoke in Atlanta, when Atlanta was just coming out from under serial murders. At the time, Atlanta looked on Baldwin as an outsider attempting to stir up things better left unsaid.