'What is interesting about serial killers and the cultural enthrallment with them is not how aberrant their psychology is, but how banal and pedestrian their hatred of women is. ' This is disturbingly true, and you should read this essay.

It also reminds me of something I've noticed reading my share of serial killer case studies (consumed along with Norwegian death metal and horror movies, natch). Serial killers imagine they are enacting a role of immense power, but the reality of what they do is sordid and stupid: it's rotting flesh in the sewage, it's ID cards and bloodstained clothes hidden under the mattress, it's a head rotting in the garage, it's the vicious extinction of another life in an ultimately doomed attempt to lend meaning and grandeur to your own. It's trying to be a god by behaving like the devil, to use a religious metaphor. I realise this is a little tangential to the post I've linked to above, but I just wanted to articulate this thought for what it was worth.