A morbid curiosity for killer TV
One of the most fascinating people I ever met was a private investigator called Peter Jay. We worked together in the United Kingdom in 2004, on an undercover investigation centred on a puppy farm in Wales for British animal welfare charity Dog’s Trust and the BBC’s 60 Minutes.
The investigation, which at one point involved me putting on a Welsh accent and pretending to be from Aberystwyth, was a success. Mostly because Jay was a consummate professional who knew exactly what needed to be done to bust the rotten business wide open.
The name might not be familiar to you, but he’s a true-crime legend.
As a detective with Scotland Yard in 1983, Jay arrested British serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Jay seemed happy to talk about his part in what must have been a heartbreaking and gruesome job.
Between 1978 and 1983, Nilsen was responsible for the murder of at least 15 young men, including 14-year-old Stephen Holmes and at least seven men who have never been identified. He lured them to his home where he strangled them then kept their bodies, sometimes for years.
Many of his victims were homeless men who were never reported missing. Nilsen was eventually caught after body parts blocked his drains.
When 37-year-old civil servant Nilsen answered the door to Jay, he calmly asked why police officers were interested in his drains.
‘‘I think you know why, Dennis. Where’s the body?’’ Jay replied.
At that point, Jay told me, Nilsen’s shoulders slumped and he directed the police to a bag containing the remains of victims who had been in his wardrobe for more than 18 months.
Later Jay told The Mirror he found Nilsen ‘‘odd and frightening’’, not only because of his horrific crimes but because of his matter-of-fact manner. ‘‘I looked at him and thought he was just so ordinary.’’
I thought about Jay often while I was watching Netflix’s true crime doco Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, about a murderer whose crimes so perplexed people in the United States because he looked ‘‘just like one of us’’.
Promoted as an opportunity to hear Bundy’s motivations for killing in his own words, the show is really a lesson in frustration and loathing.
Forcing you to face the very worst that humanity has to offer by detailing Bundy’s crimes in gruesome detail, the killer’s recordings fail to offer even a modicum of clarity about why he did the heinous things he did.
How can they when it becomes increasingly clear his crimes were so incomprehensible, he couldn’t even admit them to himself?
Instead, the four-part documentary series offers Bundy a posthumous platform to spout a load of partially fabricated nonsense about himself, until he’s finally backed into a corner and delivers a potted pyschological assessment of what might drive someone – not him, of course, because he was innocent – to murder more than 30 people.
While Nilsen initially admitted what he did, he was no more clear about why than Bundy. In fact, legend has it that when Nilsen was asked why he killed, he said, ‘‘I’m hoping you will tell me’’.
The worst kind of voyeurism, The Ted Bundy Tapes relegates Bundy’s victims to a string of names and silent faces sliding past on the screen, as dehumanised and voiceless as that bag of human remains at the back of Dennis Nilsen’s wardrobe.
Meanwhile, the series marvels over Bundy’s ‘‘daring’’ prison escapes, ‘‘daring’’ attack on four sorority girls while they slept in their dorm room and ‘‘daring’’ bid to mount his own defence.
Yes, the off button is right there, but this is why true crime is so addictive – there’s a sense that if you watch just one more episode, hear one more tape or one more murder story, you’ll gain some life-saving insight and finally fathom how a human being can go so monstrously wrong.
Beyond the prurient rubber-necking, that’s the subtext that true crime as entertainment sells us: first, that it’s everywhere (it’s not, New Zealand has never had a serial killer, that’s how rare they are), and secondly, that if you can just figure out what makes them tick, you’ll be able to spot them.
It’s a fantasy. And yet the true-crime juggernaut rolls on.
As I write this, Netflix has announced it has acquired Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a drama about Bundy made by the director of The Ted Bundy Tapes, starring Zac Efron.
While promoting the show, Efron has been talking up the film’s authenticity, about how he shed weight to get that wiry 1970s look, shot scenes in the places Bundy was held, copied his mannerisms, found just enough of a connection to the notorious killer to faithfully recreate him for our . . . what . . . our entertainment?
But it’s not a celebration of Bundy, Efron says. Rather, it’s a psychological study – yet another glimpse into something we’d otherwise never see: the abyss.
Private investigator Peter Jay said he found serial killer Dennis Nilsen ‘‘odd and frightening’’, not only because of his horrific crimes but because of his matterof-fact manner.