#Fictional serial killer images series#
#Fictional serial killer images tv#

Best-known, however, is James EllroyвЂ™s dark, shimmering 1987 thriller, The Black Dahlia. This notorious cold case has had enduring cultural influence, inspiring numerous books and films including John Gregory DunneвЂ™s 1977 novel True Confessions, which takes a similar crime as its starting point and evolves into a redemptive portrait of two brothers in 1940s LA. The police investigation circled 150 suspects but no arrests were ever made and of the 500-plus confessions that have since been made, none has held up. Lurid newspaper coverage soon dubbed the victim the Black Dahlia. It had been severed at the waist and drained of blood, leading the young mother who made the gruesome discovery to at first assume she was looking at a mannequin. She was just 22 when her mutilated corpse was found in an empty lot in Los Angeles in January 1947. These five crimes and the literature theyвЂ™ve inspired create a literary hybrid that is not for the skittish. From Truman CapoteвЂ™s seminal вЂnon-fiction novelвЂ™ In Cold Blood to international hits like Emma DonoghueвЂ™s The Room and Emma ClineвЂ™s The Girls, chilling wrongs have a way of becoming only more so once theyвЂ™ve been fictionalised, enabling them to take up residence in the darkest recesses of the mind. Real-life crimes have found other routes into fiction, too, haunting novelists whose vivid imaginations are able to pick up where experience falls mercifully short. In 1991, Dutch writer Richard Klinkhamer murdered his wife and then delivered a macabre manuscript to his agent whose title translated as вЂWednesday, Mince DayвЂ™, and which might have been subtitled Seven Ways to Kill Your Spouse. Liu is not the first author to have committed a grisly crime and fed it into his fiction.

#Fictional serial killer images tv#

Following his arrest, he reportedly told Chinese TV station CCTV that some of his works were indeed inspired by his thoughts about the murders, whose victims included the guesthouse ownersвЂ™ 13-year-old grandson.

In the end he never wrote it, though he already had a title in mind: The Beautiful Writer Who Killed.

#Fictional serial killer images series#

In a preface to his 2010 novel, itself titled The Guilty Secret, Liu said he was already at work on a follow-up about a female author whoвЂ™s committed a series of gruesome murders and evaded capture. When Chinese author Liu Yongbiao was convicted earlier this week of bludgeoning four people to death in a guesthouse in 1995, it might not have come as such a surprise to his readers.