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Hoover Crips: When Cripin' Becomes a Way of Life

A common approach is for Levin to indicate a trait that typifies most serial killings and then illustrate that trait with a number of brief case reports. Serials killers are said, for instance, to plan carefully rather than, like most murderers, to be moved by sudden killing rages. We learn in this regard of R. Gene Simmons of Dover, Arkansas, who waited until Christmas so that he could annihilate his wife, thirteen other members of his family, and two townspeople. Levin, as do all scholars on his subject, keeps careful count of the number of victims of the various perpetrators to let us know who holds or might have broken the record. He also occasionally allows his literary impulses to trump the available data. Thus, Simmons is said to have waited “patiently” (p. 110) for the proper opportunity to exterminate his family. Levin advocates that serial killers and mass murderers (although most of the latter commit suicide to end their rampage) not be executed so that behavioral scientists may be afforded the opportunity to study them and, hopefully, to derive understandings that might reduce the phenomenon. This strikes me as merely a romantic idea with a tinge of self-interest, but like the entire book, it is thoughtful and wellintentioned. As I see it, capital punishment is morally indefensible, and social scientists would be hard-pressed to carry the argument that their insights derived from lifers have made existence safer for us. Levin, as his stories attest, is something of a media celebrity. The dust jacket lists a dozen or so national television shows, “among many other programs,” on which he has appeared. He decently grants that at times he, and many others in the prognostication business, have been off target, such as when they informed the public what they presumed would characterize snipers at work in the D.C. area. He indicated they would be white and male, and a bit disingenuously observes that this was hardly a difficult call, since 75 percent of serial killers are white and 95 percent male. But the killers were black, and worked as a pair. For me, Levin’s sharing what he has learned and at times publicly being challenged beats the much more common sociological predilection to produce prose that is comprehensible and of interest only to those engaged in the same kind of endeavor. Serial Killers tells specialists and the general reader what a dedicated scholar has experienced in his ventures into a very ugly realm, what he has discovered, and what he has concluded.