My Journey Inside the “Mind of a Serial Killer”

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.”