Serial Killer Culture

"Dr. Phil" McGraw rose to fame when Oprah Winfrey spotlighted him as an advice guru.� Eventually, he got a daytime spin-off show of his own.� Yet he didn't limit it to mere advice for common problems in families and relationships; he decided to take on more serious issues, such as the causal factors in criminality specifically serial killers.� Not being versed in criminology himself, he made statements that provoked genuine experts to react and media sources to report a rather startling story about his techniques.� Before we look at the incident, let's get some background.

On the Web site for Dr. Phil's program, he lists the so-called "Fourteen Characteristics of a Serial Killer."� He derived the list, he indicates, from the work of former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, but does not provide sufficient reference information to look it up.� Yet it's clear that the list refers to work done during the 1980s, based on a prison study of 36 murderers (not all of them serial killers) that Ressler did with John Douglas.� That work has been updated, with many items changed and much data added, but Dr. Phil seems unaware of this fact.� While it was a seminal study when it was presented in 1984, criminalists today are aware of its severe limitations: all of the subjects in the study were self-selected killers willing to speak to the FBI, they were primarily American, and they were mostly articulate.� All of them were white and male, and most were sadistic lust killers.� Thus, a list of their collective traits would hardly be representative of serial killers as a whole.� (In fact, the list only contained ten items, not fourteen.)� Schechter offers the ten-item list in The Serial Killer Files, points out the limitations, and states, "There are many other serial killers who possess different characteristics."�

Book cover: Family First

When McGraw hosted his "Family First" prime time special on September 22, 2004, on CBS, he examined social problems based in family issues.� In particular, he looked at how someone might unknowingly raise a criminal.� He informed the parents, who had come to him with a nine-year-old son whom they could not control, that the boy exhibited "nine of the fourteen traits common to serial killers."� To add emphasis, he said that Jeffrey Dahmer only had seven.� (Note: when one looks at the list that Dr. Phil published, Dahmer in fact, shows nine, possibly ten).

The list includes such outdated ideas that serial killers

• tend to be intelligent
• were raised by domineering mothers
• are overwhelmingly male (about 15% to 18% are female)
• come from criminal families
• wet their beds beyond age 12
• love starting fires

McGraw reassured the horrified parents that this did not mean their child would actually become a killer, but there had to be some intervention.� They would have to make sacrifices to spend more time with the child and achieve a healthier balance.�

This show was controversial for many reasons.� First, to tell parents on national television that they're possibly raising a killer is startling and disturbing in its potential for humiliation.� (Ann Hulbert, in a review of McGraw's book, calls him "abusive.")� Then, to ignore all the work done on psychopathy and serial killers in order to offer simplistic solutions appeared to criminologists to be strikingly ignorant.� While Dr. Phil may have derived his "list" from a renowned former FBI profiler, this was clearly a superficial approach to a desperately complex problem.� But television is about entertainment, not therapy, and it's not the only medium to latch onto the public's fascination with multiple murders as a way to gain an audience.

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