My Journey Inside the “Mind of a Serial Killer”
A couple of weeks ago, while taking the train back home to Brooklyn from therapy on (where else?) the Upper West Side, I noticed a subway ad I’d never seen before. “MIND OF A SERIAL KILLER: THE EXPERIENCE,” it blared ominously, in tabloid-style all caps, over what appeared to be a black-and-white mug shot of a lank-haired, stubble-jawed man. Offering, helpfully, that the exhibition was only a “5 min walk from union sq.,” the ad went on to promise (or, maybe, threaten?), “True crime isn’t a podcast anymore. It’s an experience.” What was this, now?
I was familiar, of course, with so-called experience museums. Starting about a decade ago, it suddenly seemed like you couldn’t leave the house without stumbling into some sort of immersive exhibition, where instead of observing precious objects from a careful distance, like you’d do at any old museum, you could engage with the displays in an interactive way, with the added benefit of plenty of Instagram-ready photo ops. I’ve had some brushes with this kind of thing myself. I once dove into an enormous ball pit at something called Color Factory (an “immersive art experience” in SoHo), and I often pass by the ever-bustling Museum of Ice Cream, also in SoHo, a tourist mainstay with an “iconic sprinkle pool” and a “banana jungle” (a “playful tribute to the classic banana split.”)
I’d also heard of Candytopia (“joy you can taste, touch, and share”) and the nature-focussed Arte Museum (“Feel waterfalls crash around you”). The beloved sitcom “Friends,” I knew, had its own dedicated experience in Gramercy, where you could lounge in a replica of Central Perk or kick back in La-Z-Boys just like Joey and Chandler’s; and, more recently, even the reality-competition game “Traitors” got in on the action, with the show’s Scotland castle setting recreated in a Williamsburg pop-up. I also remembered, with both fondness and queasiness, a much earlier precursor to all this: my tour, at eighteen, of the old Heineken brewery in Amsterdam (the name of the venue has since been changed to the Heineken Experience), where the interactive element—though it wasn’t referred to in those terms back then—consisted, at least for me, of getting blind drunk on the litres of freshly brewed Pilsner that my friends and I were served as part of our visit.
Still, as I gazed up at the serial-killer-experience ad on my subway ride, it struck me that an invitation to immerse myself in the mind of a knife-wielding maniac, even if that mind was conveniently only a hop, skip, and jump from Union Square, seemed a potential bridge too far. After all, this wasn’t beer or ice cream or even a La-Z-Boy. As my daughter pointed out when I showed her the picture I took of the ad when I got home, wouldn’t the “experience” of “true crime” simply be “crime”? Nonetheless, I had to admit that I was intrigued enough to go ahead and visit the exhibition. A couple of days later, I headed back to the city on the subway, where the menacing but clearly effective ads once again greeted me.
Although I enjoy true crime—Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” are among my favorites—I’ve never really listened, from start to finish, to a true-crime podcast, the medium that appears most responsible for the genre’s recent rise in popularity. In fact, I’d only fully realized how well loved true-crime pods had become a couple of years ago, when my Critics at Large co-hosts and I conducted man-on-the-street interviews for a true-crime-themed episode, and every single random person we approached turned out to be a rabid true-crime-podcast fan. And even though I couldn’t count myself among them, I could still imagine how the intimacy of the medium—receiving real-life violent, disturbing, and perhaps titillating stories directly to one’s ear—makes such podcasts enticing.
However, now that “true crime wasn’t a podcast anymore,” as the serial-killer ad had informed me, how would an exhibition space not just recapture the genre’s excitement but heighten it? The answer to this question is: it couldn’t. And the first sign of coming disappointment emerged as I approached the show venue on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue and realized that the pop-up I was about to enter had once been an Urban Outfitters store that I used to frequent in my twenties. Already, it seemed odd to immerse myself in a house-of-horrors-style experience at the very same location where I’d once tried on low-rise BDG jeans and tees reprinted with the Ramones logo.
This fly-by-night, barn-raising vibe continued as I entered the space. Unlike a “real” museum, which usually exhibits one-of-a-kind objects, experience museums—and “Mind of a Serial Killer” is no exception—lean heavily on reproduction and reconstruction. After passing through a hall displaying the setup of an old-school F.B.I. investigator’s office, featuring desks laid out with hulking monitors, typewriters, and examples of forensic tools (evidence bags, DNA swabs), as well as a metal file cabinet with an old coffee maker and two mugs that read, a bit heavy-handedly, “World’s Greatest FBI Agent,” I arrived at the meat (sorry) of the show: a series of rooms, each dedicated to the history and exploits of a notorious serial killer.
The gang was all here: Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Richard Ramirez. Alongside a wealth of informative, highly detailed wall texts, laying out each perpetrator’s kinks, quirks, crimes, and ultimate capture, the display included a lot of fairly cheap-looking props: a decapitated head, made out of what looked like plaster or maybe rubber, in Dahmer’s freezer; a replica of the VW Bug in which Bundy kidnapped his victims; skeleton parts found half buried in a crawl space under Gacy’s home. This was definitely creepy, in a Halloween kind of way, but more than once I found my thoughts turning to that great viral tweet from some years ago: “If I pay $40 for a haunted house, I better die.” Where was the kick? I probably felt the visceral effect that an experience museum aims to deliver most keenly when I visited the venue’s not-very-nice bathrooms: a sticker on the dirty black stall door, printed with the oddly capitalized directive, “Lock the top Bolt,” sent a genuine chill down my spine. I complied, fastening the rusty latch with shaking hands.
Part of the issue, of course, is that “Mind of a Serial Killer” is focussed on monstrous violence perpetrated against defenseless victims, and the exhibition must try to balance its attempt to chill and thrill with the icky fact that we’re talking about actual tragedy here. It does this by offering occasional nods to these victims (a mound of dirt planted with flags displaying the names of the women Bundy had killed; a mirrored room decorated with candles “in memory of the lost”). The exhibition also flip-flops, throughout, between the perspective of a bad-guy perpetrator and that of a good-guy F.B.I. investigator. Visitors are welcome to type on an “agent’s” typewriter (though on the day that I went, there seemed to be no ribbon) and scribble on his pad, and, for an additional ten-dollar fee, they can take a fairly janky V.R. tour alongside an oddly squat and mustached avatar of an agent, whom one can “help” to “save” two child kidnapping victims. At the same time, the gift shop offers sweatshirts that bear the word “killer,” and patrons are encouraged to take their mug shot under the words “wanted for murder” or “wanted for kidnapping,” and to “share it on socials.”
As I walked through the exhibition, I reflected on the fact that all the environments and circumstances that it depicts are resolutely of the twentieth century. Between the agents’ Olivetti and Hewlett-Packard monitors, the cigarette-butt-filled ashtrays on their desks, and the bouclé seventies-style couches in some of the killers’ replica living rooms, the exhibit treats the terrible things that it presents as a thing of the past. In the mug shot photo-op area, on the dry-erase board meant for patrons to hold while taking their novelty pictures, I noticed that one visitor used the name “Effrey Jepstein” instead of their own, which naturally turned my thoughts to the Epstein case. That case—with its tantalizing suggestion of large-scale conspiracy, its many anonymous victims, its sense of justice not having been fully served—seems like a very twenty-first-century kind of text. For all their horror, the crimes that “Mind of a Serial Killer” exhibits are over and done with, which makes them, in a way, easier to approach and metabolize. If nothing else, this provides the kind of closure that, in an era like our own, is increasingly difficult to find elsewhere. ♦