Serial Killer

What makes human people do inhuman things? That question hangs heavy over America in this anxious year of school and workplace shootings. The debates are full of easy, policy-oriented answers like loose guns, bad parenting and violence in TV and the movies -- but literature has already been addressing this question for centuries. The results could strike the chattiest talking head dumb.Imaginative writing, especially fiction, has infinite potential to delve into the human heart and suggest how particular worlds work on particular minds to inspire acts of evil.

In several articles last week, the age of homicide victim Kimberly Spicer was incorrectly reported. She was 23.The Sun regrets the error.Joe Ray Metheny wants to stop killing people.That's why, his lawyer said yesterday, the 41-year-old suspect in multiple killings has sat down with a homicide detective and confessed to strangling, stabbing and mutilating three women and drowning a man."He's depressed, confused and under a lot of medication," said attorney Margaret A. Mead, who met with her client for 90 minutes Thursday in the psychiatric ward of the Baltimore City Detention Center.

The state's highest court denied serial killer Steven Howard Oken's request for a new trial, ruling yesterday that the Baltimore County jury that sentenced him to death in 1991 was properly selected and sufficiently informed.The Court of Appeals rejected claims by Oken -- convicted of killing three women in 1987 -- that Circuit Judge James T. Smith Jr. failed to sufficiently question the jury members about their sentiments regarding the death penalty.Oken also argued that Smith should have told jurors that he already was serving life without parole for a slaying in Kittery, Maine, before they sentenced him to die Jan. 25, 1991.

WASHINGTON -- Seven weeks after a manuscript by the serial bomber known as the Unabomber was published, investigators say they have been deluged with thousands of leads from the public, but are no closer to solving the baffling 17-year-long string of bombings.But the authorities are revising important assumptions about the background and motives of the criminal whose 16 bombs have killed three people and injured 22 others.Interviews with investigators and academics who are closely following the case suggest that the 35,000-word manuscript is the work of a man whose profile more closely fits that of a serial killer than a domestic terrorist with a political agenda.

A police task force investigating whether a serial killer was responsible for strangling four women in a Southeast Baltimore neighborhood has arrested a man and charged him in one of the slayings.Meanwhile, police are investigating whether a link exists between the 36-year-old suspect and the deaths of the three other women, all of whom shared distinctive lifestyles and died in similar ways within one city block of one another."Drugs and sex are a common denominator in all the homicides," said Lt. Wendell M. France, of the homicide unit.

"Zombie," by Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton Press. 181 pages. $24The morning after reading the latest product from the JoycCarol Oates fiction factory, I awoke to the radio news of the French teen-ager who had bludgeoned his family to death, then proceeded to slaughter eight other people. Granted, this youth was a mass murderer as opposed to the sort of serial killer Ms. Oates dissects in "Zombie." But the esthetics are the same."Zombie" takes the reader into the mind of a 31-year-old man possessed by the demons of ultimate control and domination.

It came over the radio one day in 1986, a news flash about a serial killer spotted driving through Maryland on his way to Florida:"Andrew Manning is wanted for kidnapping and killing young women across the United States," the news flash said. "The FBI says that if you should spot Andrew Manning, take no action but call the FBI."Andrew Manning got a chuckle out of that. As FBI spokesman, he had given the radio station the information, and it had gotten muddled in the broadcast, with his name being switched with that of the real killer.

Since he was born there, it might be easy to confuse the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar with the Man of La Mancha. But his windmill is sexual repression and he tilts against it in all forms, sometimes with success and sometimes without.Latest score: Windmill 1, Almodovar 0.It's not that "Kika," which opens today at the Rotunda, is awful, although it is pretty pathetic. What's dispiriting about it is the sense of lack of control. Almodovar, who had so much better luck with "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down" and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and even (a personal, though not critical, favorite)

It says something profoundly depressing about society that the classiest person in Nick Broomfield's documentary "Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer" is Aileen Wuornos. She's even better behaved than Broomfield! And she probably could have made a better movie!The film, screening at 7 and 9 tonight and tomorrow at the Baltimore Museum of Art under the auspices of the Baltimore Film Forum's First Look series, is a jaundiced, amusing look at a horrifying subject relevant today: a feeding frenzy of cash-mad parasites swirling around a notorious act of murder.

"Serial Mom," John Waters' new film, will have its world premiere at the Senator Theatre at 8 p.m. April 5 as a benefit for AIDS Action Baltimore.Besides Waters, Kathleen Turner, Ricki Lake, Patricia Hearst, Mink Stole and Traci Lords will attend the premiere and a gala party to be held afterward at the Baltimore Museum of Art.The movie, which was shot entirely in Northeast Baltimore and Towson, features Turner as a suburban mom with a secret identity as a serial killer. It is rated R.Tickets are $75 and will become available on a waiting-list basis after March 25. Call (410)

Inside Prince George's County police headquarters yesterday, a squad of homicide detectives and nearly a dozen other senior investigators moved into a separate office and began poring over two recent cases that were suddenly the department's top priority. Not far away, in a quiet neighborhood near FedEx Field, all anyone talked about was the possibility that the cases - two double homicides - were connected, that someone is killing mothers and their daughters. The Loftons, Karen and Karissa, were the first, shot in late January in their Largo home.

Series Gossip Girl: : At the reading of Bart's will, Lily, Chuck and Bart's brother, Jack (Kelly Rutherford, Ed Westwick, Desmond Harrington), learn the fate of the Bass empire. (8 p.m., WNUV-Channel 54) 24:: Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) and Renee track Dubaku, with Chloe's help. (9 p.m., WBFF-Channel 45) Hard Time: : This new six-part series takes an inside look at Georgia's prison system, where military-style discipline is the order of business. (9 p.m., NGC) Medium: : Allison (Patricia Arquette)

A 27-year-old Baltimore man pleaded guilty yesterday to choking a 32-year-old woman to death with a wire coat hanger. Joshua Rice of the 500 block of Yale Ave. was sentenced by a city Circuit Court judge to the maximum 30 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Jennifer Fishbach. Prosecutors said that a search of Maryland's DNA database linked Rice to the May 2004 killing of Fishbach, who was found in a second-floor bedroom of an abandoned rowhouse in the 1200 block of Bayard Ave. Fischbach was one of three prostitutes found dead on the city's west side from late 2003 through mid-2004.

Serial killer in Russia gets life term for 48 killings MOSCOW -- The Moscow City Court gave a life sentence yesterday to a serial killer who had said he wanted to be the most prolific murderer in post-Soviet Russian history. Alexander Y. Pichushkin, 33, was convicted last week of murdering 48 people and trying to kill three others. The total was considerably smaller than the number of killings he claimed. In a television interview, Pichushkin said he had killed at least 60 people, part of a bid to kill a person for each of the 64 squares on a chessboard.

Maybe it's time for filmmakers to try telling one story at a time. Already this spring, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End have committed the sin of cinematic overkill by trying to cram too many stories into a single film. And now Mr. Brooks, with Kevin Costner as a model citizen by day, serial killer by night, joins the list of the jam-packed. In addition to the story line centering on Mr. Brooks, there's one involving Demi Moore as an heiress-turned-detective with some serious parental issues to work out and another with Dane Cook as a serial killer wannabe.

Like Cho Seung-Hui, other mass killers have also reached out to the media. Among them: Dennis Rader: In June 2005, the 60-year-old self-named BTK (Bind, Torture and Kill) serial killer who terrorized the Wichita, Kan., area from the 1970s to the 1990s, pleaded guilty to killing 10 people to satisfy what he said were his sexual fantasies. Rader, who had been president of his Lutheran church council, taunted authorities and the news media with letters and packages. Zodiac Killer: The so-called Zodiac killer murdered five people in San Francisco in 1968 and 1969.

LONDON -- Police in southeastern England issued an urgent warning to prostitutes to stay off the streets after the bodies of two more women were discovered yesterday, bringing to five the number found since Dec. 2. All of the women, ranging in age from 19 to 29, are believed to have been working as prostitutes in the Suffolk city of Ipswich, about 70 miles northeast of London. Police are convinced they are dealing with a serial killer. Britain's tabloids have dubbed him the Suffolk Strangler.

Hannibal Rising Thomas Harris Delacorte Press / 496 pages / $31.95 In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll argues that monsters violate our core conceptual frameworks. By merging otherwise exclusive states of being - zombies, for example, are both alive and dead - they undermine our faith in a safe and orderly universe. Their threat is as much existential as physical. Which brings us to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a.k.a. Hannibal the Cannibal, the serial killer who parlayed his cameo in Thomas Harris' fine 1981 thriller, Red Dragon, into a franchise that reaches its fourth installment in Harris' new novel, Hannibal Rising.

HOLLYWOOD-- --Sometimes having a dirty mouth is all a lady needs. Jennifer Carpenter, the young actress who contorted herself acrobatically in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, had never worked in television, but she really wanted to play the gung-ho cop sister of a serial killer who kills serial killers on Showtime's most-watched series, Dexter. Dexter airs at 10 p.m. Sundays on Showtime.

Hugh Jackman is neither a magician nor a pampered house rat. But he's playing one in the movies this year. He's also playing an emperor penguin, a mutant with razor-sharp claws and a really bad temper, a suspected upper-class British serial killer and a man obsessed with discovering the fabled fountain of youth. That's a pretty busy schedule for one actor, but Jackman chuckles when asked if he's vying to win the title of Busiest Man in Hollywood. He finished filming Darren Aronof- sky's The Fountain 18 months ago, and has been working on a pair of animated movies - Flushed Away (opening Nov. 3)