Why do you want me to feel sorry for the murderers?

In Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi wrote:

In Freud’s time the environment was essentially repressive, and acting out took the form of repetitive and compulsory acts. The compulsory act was part of a neurotic framework of denial and repression. Today, the psychotic framework of hyper-stimulation and constant mobilization of nervous energy is pushing people, especially suggestible young people, socially marginalized and precarious, to a different kind of acting out: an explosive demonstration of energy, a violent mobilization of the body, which culminates in the aggressive, murderous explosion of the self. [56]

There is a very dangerously delicate line between analyzing perpetrators — their motives, their circumstances, even the late-capitalist conditions that shape them — and inadvertently aligning oneself with them. Critical inquiry demands that we interrogate structures, without confusing accountability with explanation.

I was motivated to write this after watching The Scream Murders: A True Teen Horror Story (2026). The ideological work of the series begins with its title. By choosing “murders” rather than “murderers,” the crime is foregrounded while the agents recede. The grammatical shift from subject to event subtly detaches violence from those who enacted it. Why not The Scream Murderers? That phrasing would center accountability. Instead, the current title reframes the narrative as spectacle — a horror story — and emphasizes “teen” as a qualifying condition. The repetition of adolescence throughout the three episodes suggests an interpretive lens: these are not simply perpetrators, but underdeveloped subjects. The title thus anticipates the series’ larger project — to mediate criminality through youthfulness.

The limited true crime series is about the murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart by her classmates and friends Brian and Torey in 2006. They were all 16. It was a brutal crime, a planned one. She was stabbed 29 times, apparently for no other reason than to feed Brian and Torey's morbid ideas and obsessions. They made a video tape of their planning stages and also recorded themselves right after the crime. In the video, Brian is seen saying, "I’m sorry Cassie’s family, but she had to be the one. We have to stick with the plan. And she’s perfect, so she’s gonna die." The language is chilling not only for its detachment but for its framing of murder as necessity within a self-authored script. They'd made a list of girls they wanted to murder. Brian made no secret of the fact that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, inspired him; in the video there was a mention of doing a mass school shooting.

Both were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, at the age of 16.

The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion (mostly unconscious) to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest nor the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self-assertion: to kill and be killed. [Bifo, 52]

There are a lot of similarities between Harris and Klebold, and Brian and Torey. Especially in the way in which they conceptualized the world. In the video tapes and the third episode of the series, Brian especially is rather open about this fact: they were in the sidelines and wanted to be in the spotlight, wanted to feel some kind of agency – which they did by taking away the agency of someone else in her most vulnerable time [they cut the electricity of the home and wore scary masks]. The murder has now become a performance of control. Violence becomes a compensatory act of self-assertion. The affinity with Harris and Klebold lies less in biographical similarity than in shared cosmology: a competitive worldview in which humiliation is intolerable and recognition must be violently seized.

Narrative framing, certainly, redistributes moral weight. The first episode made me a little uncomfortable, but it was setting the ground: only Brian and Torey's family members featured in the series, being interviewed and telling their side; none from Cassie's. The emotional architecture of the episode therefore orients the viewer toward the perpetrators’ domestic grief rather than the victim’s loss.

Torey's mother came off as insensitive because she was ardently speaking about her son mostly in a non-negative way [would it be too far to say that she was outright refusing to see her son's wrongdoing? I don't think so]. Whether or not this constitutes refusal, the effect is unmistakable: moral emphasis shifts toward parental suffering.

Brian's mother and father were more compassionate. While compassion for their son remained, their emphasis on Cassie's murder and their son's active involvement was not lost on them. While they are not showing any strong negative emotion towards their son [by foregrounding his youth and humanity], their narration shows how they are extremely sorry for Cassie and the murder their son committed – which means that their devastation came from the gravity of wrongdoing of their son. Thus, seeing them grappling with two opposite weights, that of their son murdering and that of sadness for the crime, made their interviews worth it for me because this dual burden renders their testimony complex rather than exculpatory.

The killers are repeatedly situated within networks of care — as sons before they are perpetrators. The victim, meanwhile, is narratively reduced to the site of violence. Sympathy circulates unevenly. The series tried to be faintly suggestive of their main intention [and failed at this too] for the first half, but once they started talking about how the United States has made it illegal to give life sentences to people under the age of 18, the series started heavily implying that they should be given a chance to be let back in the society. This implication is reinforced through emotionally charged footage: childhood photographs, home videos, and extended interviews with parents who advocate for their sons’ release. The affective trajectory becomes clear. The viewer is encouraged not merely to understand, but to reconsider punishment.

Yet the legal record complicates this framing. Tried as adults, both were sentenced to life without parole. At sentencing, the presiding judge acknowledged the severity of the punishment but stated plainly that releasing them would pose a danger; he could not be confident they would not kill again.

What unsettles me is not that the series examines motive. It is that it calibrates empathy. Through its title, its interviews, and its narrative sequencing, the series repeatedly invites viewers to inhabit the emotional worlds of the perpetrators and their families, while Cassie Jo Stoddart remains largely an absence: a body, a scene, a consequence. Sympathy, here, is not accidental; it is distributed.

True crime in its contemporary form [I am only focusing on true crime based on murderers who are alive] increasingly functions as an empathy machine. It promises psychological depth, contextual nuance, and structural analysis. Yet the cumulative effect often tilts toward mitigation. Explanation begins to feel like softening. Humanization shades into moral cushioning. There are a few things to note here.

Even in the early 2000s, power was conditional on public attention and visibility. Some killers went about video taping themselves, others wrote manifestos, some others did both. As internet has taken complete control over people, and attention is the biggest currency, it has become the source of feeling power. Bifo calls this the Neoliberal will to win. He writes, "No more capitalists and workers; no exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery" [51]. This creates a dangerous mix.

The fact that human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers is undeniably leading to the development of a new kind of sensibility. The new forms of mass psychopathology of our time cannot be investigated without due consideration of the effects of this new environment, in particular the new process of language learning. [Bifo, 48]

A lot of murderers whose specificities are random have an inspiration, whom they identify with, whose struggles are their own. Today, not only has true crime become a big genre that pulls great profits and the murderers' glam-and-glory-fication is a big part of it, but also their stories and motivations are shown in great detail: their motives are legible, and someone is legitimizing it. Their struggles now have a face, and the violence that came with it is in the spotlight. Violence remains horrific of course, but it is contextualized, interpreted, sometimes even aestheticized.

Baudrillard's language helps us here. He first theorized how media creates a "hyperreal" environment where the distinction between real life and its representation vanishes. If, as he suggests, events are experienced only through screen-mediated coverage, then the killer’s self-staging and the documentary’s re-staging begin to mirror one another. And if there's care and empathy embedded in showing their narratives, if there's any possibility of people's advocation, it amplifies the source of power and their justification of crimes based on emotional states. In other words, when empathy and advocacy attach themselves to these mediated narratives, they risk amplifying precisely the form of power the original act sought to seize.

The genre operates within the same attention economy that many perpetrators internalize. Empathy itself is commodified – as a product and as a tool.

Don't get me wrong. There are a few documentaries, docu-series, and limited fiction rendering of the crime stories that do the job exactly right. Whose spotlight is in the right, and their stance against the killers are very visible. [Some of them: The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, the Ruby Franke one, Wild Wild Country, Night Stalker, Don't F**k with Cats, and so many more on YouTube].

What I'm asking is: what if empathy, when unevenly distributed, becomes distortion? What if certain forms of narrative intimacy risk re-centering those who have already seized the spotlight through violence? What is the new common ground for identification?