Why America Loves Serial Killers

Long Island again. Serial killer(s) again. The media have—a little too overeagerly—been conjuring up the specter of "the Long Island serial killer," even though those five words compress at least two unproven assumptions: There's no proof that the remains of up to 10 victims (so far) found on the sandy barrier island that parallels Long Island's South Shore were killed by a Long Islander, or even by a single individual. Or that they were killed on Long Island. For all we know, they were killed by a Yale comp lit professor, who deconstructed them in Connecticut and carried them to Long Island where he "unpacked" them from the trunk of his Prius.

But even if the perp or perps came from elsewhere, at least one of the presumed murdered prostitutes, Amber Lynn Costello, operated out of a seedy home in Long Island's West Babylon. It was she who was the subject of murderous speculation in a chat room that made the front page of the New York Daily News: "HOOKER SLAY EXCLUSIVE, WEB OF L.I. SICKOS, Inside secret site where johns plotted revenge." It's indisputable that these "sickos" did come from Long Island and apparently patronized the murdered hooker from West Babylon. (There's a name to deconstruct!)

But it's evident that in tab world, Long Island and serial killer seem to go together. I feel a certain responsibility for that, having thrown a spotlight on the L.I./serial killer connection back in the '90s in a lengthy essay for the Times magazine, when my "Guyland" homeland—as I fondly called it in tribute to the way the L.I. accent rendered it: "Lawn Guyland"—had begun sprouting corpses (20 or so) from serial killers like Joel Rifkin. It was a time when Long Island also had to endure the embarrassingly seedy Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco scandal—and the three made-for-TV movies based on the case of Fisher, the "Long Island Lolita."

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