Expert comment Last updated 28 September 2018
Birmingham City University criminologists Dr Adam Lynes, Craig Kelly and Emma Kelly discuss the public’s fascination with following the footsteps of the victims of serial murderers.
This week in a perhaps misguided attempt to raise money to combat modern slavery, a local charity advertised a chance to sleep in a Victorian prison cell on the eve of Halloween. Tickets cost £75 and the evening consists of “ghost-hunting” within the confines of the former Birmingham police station on Steelhouse Lane. However, the reason for the event was quickly overshadowed by moral outrage within the British press due to the way in which the organisers chose to promote the evening.
The use of notorious serial killer Fred West and the chance to sleep in a cell he once resided within was greeted with widespread repugnancy, with media outlets scornfully questioning the ethical dilemma of using a notorious child killer as an advertising tool. Whilst the authors of this blog agree such usage does not sit comfortably as a promotional means no matter what the cause the charity is attempting to raise funds for, this has allowed us the platform to put forth the important conversation around leisure activities and the commercialisation of serial murder within wider society. Fred West and the Steelhouse Lane will therefore be used as a case study for this piece, however the content presented is representative of wider trends we see globally.
In 1994 Fred West and his wife Rose were arrested for twelve murders committed over a period of twenty years in Gloucester. Their ‘usual’ victims were what Professor David Wilson refers to as “runaways and throwaways”, a term coined for a large proportion of serial murder victims (Please see Wilson, 2007 and 2009 for further information regarding the victims of serial murder within the UK). This category refers to vulnerable young adults whom have either runaway from their usually chaotic home lives or were forced to leave. Most of their victims would fall within the aforementioned categorisation however some did not, including their final victim who was their daughter. The pair’s depraved activities often comprised of violent sexual assaults before dismembering their corpses and hiding them either within their cellar or burying them in the back garden (something that was witnessed by neighbours but never raised suspicion due to Fred’s occupation as an odd-job labourer). Upon finally being apprehended the pair were remanded to custody. Fred West was held in the cells of Steelhouse Lane before being moved to Winson Green Prison. On 1 January 1995 whilst still on remand, Fred West penned a suicide note to his wife and co-defendant before taking his own life.
Gloucester City Council, fully aware of the public’s morbid fascination into the world of serial murder moved to demolish 25 Cromwell Street. The ‘house of horrors’ was replaced with a quiet walk-through thus denying any tourists to the quaint town an opportunity to visit the place the infamous crimes were committed. Such a decision could perhaps be perceived as a little over zealous and unnecessary, however a short scan of TripAdvisor will soon demonstrate the magnetic pull of serial murder as a commodified form of leisure worldwide.
The general public’s fascination with serial murder is stark. Films portraying such horrific acts routinely top the box office. Books detailing the investigations are abundant and lecture halls in universities across the world fill if such content is promised. It seems the public’s appetite for such content is ferocious and thus a burgeoning trade has grown within the tourist industry to whet such appetites. In previous decades, serial murder within the context of the leisure industry would mainly comprise of grizzly artefacts linked to such offenders being displayed within museums (one such example can be found in Thailand, where the body of cannibal See Uey is on display), however in recent years a transition has been visible.
In London, tourists stalk the pavements of Whitehall each evening as local guides recount the grizzly details of Jack the Ripper’s murderous spree. There are numerous other examples of such tours including: The Helter Skelter tour in Los Angeles; True Crime tour in New Orleans; Cream City Cannibal tour in Milwaukee; and the Murder, Scandal and Vice tour in New York (to name but a few).
So too has recent times seen the development of ‘prison tourism’ globally. Various disused prisons have opened as museums. Such places have often been utilised as forms of historical significance within the country they exist such as the Robben Island in South Africa or Presidio Modelo (famous for the implementation of the panopticon) designed by Castro in Cuba. The transition from penal artefacts to a consumable commodity as a lived experience has begun to emerge in-line with the transition seen within the serial murder context. Young (2003) details tourists paying to stay within the confines of San Pedro prison in Bolivia, an active and extremely violent establishment run not by the officers but by the inmates.
This risky form of tourism however is not confined to the developing world in the global south. Karosta Prison in Latvia offer tourists the opportunity to stay in the old penal institution which has been converted into a hotel. However, far from offering soft bedding and a day spa. The ex-soviet military prison, in which hundreds were executed, needs visitors to sign a consent form. The form discloses that you will, as a paying customer, be subjected to the same treatment as the former inmates (minus the executions) and will be subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse and demands of physical exercise as a form of punishment. Within the United Kingdom the Malmaison in Oxfordshire offers an ‘upmarket’ alternative with converted prison cells complete with plasma televisions, a minibar and room service.
In a speech to the House of Common in 1910, Winston Churchill stated that “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminal is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. Within this discussion is seems that the public routinely perceive the treatment of offenders and their actions with a perplexed yet intrigued fascination.
The treatment of prisoners has been transformed into a commodity, with little attention paid to the complexities of the lives of those subjected to it nor crisis our penal system currently faces. This is only further exacerbated when we consider that, along with the commodification of prisoners as a source of entertainment, the very individuals and organisations governing and over-seeing their road to recidivism and rehabilitation are motivated and governed by an increasingly privatised market and neo-liberal ideology. In essence, while crime does not pay for the individual, it certainly pays these organisations to have full prisons when justice is administered through the prism of profit.
From this perspective therefore, we now turn our gaze to the wider leisure industry in which our society participates within utilising the emerging deviant leisure perspective (Smith and Raymen, 2016). As the work of Ellis et al (2018) details, in the era of mass consumption, individuals utilise leisure activities, such as the hedonistic alcohol base tourism of Magaluf, in a bid to stem the sense of lack they hold. As the paper denotes, those participants display a clear sense of ‘imprecise un-fulfilment’ within what they term as the boundless freedom supposedly offered by such destinations. However, rather than realising such activities fail to offer what the tourists are searching for, they return to such destinations annually in a bid to find the fulfilment they crave yet can never obtain. This Ellis et al (2018) propose confirms the magnitude of consumer sovereignty.
As Smith and Raymen (2016) observe, deviant forms of leisure are implicitly driven by the values of consumer culture which, as they allude, can be socially corrosive. Perhaps the public’s fascination and continual consumption of tourist attractions based upon various forms of human suffering, ranging from incarceration to brutal murders epitomises such harms of consumer capitalism.
At the time of writing we are unable to retrieve demographical data of those who choose to spend the weekend away sleeping in disused prisons and tracing the footsteps of society’s most deprived offenders. However, we surmise such data would allude to the fact the majority of those participating have grown too old to comfortably participate in the hedonism of 18-30 destinations. If so, such findings would display a damning indictment of the damage of consumer culture in the modern day in which individuals, in a bid to escape the daily monotony of their lives and guided subconsciously via violence as a commodity offered on their television screen each evening, search for the extremes of depravity to fill the void they failed to fill as young adults.
This brings us to the final question raised, why did the usage of Fred West for promotional purposes cause such a stir when Jack the Ripper tours do not? We would propose that the fetishistic disavowal (Zizek, 2010 and Hall, 2012) consumers utilise so easily within the historical context of Jack the Rippers crimes is a little harder to muster, mere decades after the events at 25 Cromwell Street. Nonetheless, whether the victims of brutal murders walked the streets a century ago or a week ago, they are still victims.
However, confronting the uncomfortable truths that society facilitated such crimes in the context of the runaways and throwaways must feel a little too real to confront. Such contradictions are rife within our everyday lives, most are quick to deplore dangerous, deadly and abhorrent working conditions those abroad suffer routinely, yet still queue through the night for the latest iPhone.