*Foreword: Faces in the Abyss
“Mass men must be served by mass means,” the satirist and cultural historian Roger Price wrote a generation ago in a prophetic indictment of herd mentality called The Great Roob Revolution. The axiom has come to apply as well to an epidemic of slaughter, in which the FBI estimates that twenty-five percent of a given year’s 20,000 U.S. homicides will go unsolved. And of these 5,000 victims whose slayers will defy capture, the agency calculates that 3,500 will die at the hands of serial killers - practitioners of a social phenomenon that, although ancient, has only intensified with age.
The true horror of this increasingly dominant breed of public enemy is too readily obscured by our society’s obsessive fascination with big numbers and flamboyance: The daunting body count of John Wayne Gacy or a Charles Whitman, or the predatory grandstanding of a Gary Mark Gilmore, will frustrate a comprehension that a more subdued, less prolific slayer is no less a monster.
This selective gallery of case-history portraits makes no distinction as to the calibre of crime between the showier instances and the quieter episodes of lurking menace. Nor does the collection differentiate - and never mind the title of our package - between the concentrated rampage of “mass Murder” and the deliberate methodology of “chain” or serial killing.
Whatever gee-whiz or so-what? responses these cards may provoke are strictly in the eye of the beholder; the greatest urgency is to deliver a historical perspective on the beasts among us whose activities have shaped present conditions. An epidemic must be understood, and understood by its prospective sufferers, before it can be dealt with.
Michael H. Price
*Source: Back of card.