Welcome to Sohu Strangler Week by Murdwell. To accompany the series, here's a few

extra details from the police files and the court records, to age your enjoyment and

maybe even help you crack the case.

This episode is about how the victims are demonised in the eyes of the people. So why do

we do it? Why do we demonise the victims?

Well the thing is serial killers are fascinating. Go into any bookshop. There are more books

on serial killers than the victims. And in most books on serial killers, the victims

live a barely amount to like a small percentage of the book. And often, the only reason they're

really there is so we can find out how they actually met their killer and what went

wrong, which in a way is victim blaming.

In order to have a fascination with serial killers, or even here a worshipping a killer,

as some people do, but you know, many won't admit to that. You can't openly praise their

cunning, their intelligence, their skill, or even their mission, as you can see with

Jack the Ripper there, mission as a moral guardian. Or even more sickeningly as some people

do, praising serial killers for their looks as if there's something to be fancied.

So first, in order to find a way to demonise the victims first, you have to make the victims

less worthy of living than the killer themselves, which unfortunately is what a lot of people

do when they praise serial killers. Sometimes in the press you can do this by just ignoring

the victims, reducing them down to just the bare essentials of them just being a name,

an age, a collection of injuries. Often you can kind of focus on the serial killer and

treat the victims more like they're just a prop or a piece of meat to guide you into how

you would find the information about this serial killer, why he chose them, why he killed

...