Why Do We Think Serial Killers All Wear the Same Glasses? (2024)

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A teenager with red hair swooping over one eye takes a selfie at an eyeglass store and posts it on Tumblr. “I saw these Jeffrey Dahmer like glasses,” he writes in the caption. “I feel like [they] look cute on me. Is that bad?” He tags the photo #serialkiller.

The list of serial killers who wore glasses is long and bloody, from Dahmer to BTK to Harold Shipman and his professorial frames; even the Zodiac Killer, never caught, wears a thick-rimmed pair in a police sketch. The aesthetic of “serial killer glasses” is so pervasive that it pops up everywhere from Urban Dictionary (“Eyeglasses with heavy or severe frames that live somewhere between fashionable and creepy”) to TV Tropes (where “a guy who is cold, emotionless… or even a soulless monster” is given glasses “to quickly tip off the audience to his personality”), and countless Tumblr posts in between.

Search for “serial killer glasses” on Amazon and you’ll be directed to the “So In Luxe Aviator Retro Fashion Glasses” — perfect for the manic pixie dream serial killer. Naturally, Spirit Halloween sells a pair, too. It’s a look that signifies “creep” and “outsider” so well that it’s become the punchline to a joke: Amy Schumer and Conan O’Brien have both done skits about how men who favor a certain style of glasses tend to be serial killers, molesters, cult leaders, or all of the above.

Of course, the fact that many serial killers wear glasses is simple math: Over 60 percent of Americans use some sort of vision correction, and serial killers are just like the rest of us, at least when it comes to their eyesight. But because these killers are often exhaustively scrutinized and even fetishized in the media, their glasses have become part of the serial killer iconography. A pair of shiny lenses, perched on the bridge of a serial killer’s nose, becomes a subtle metaphor for his walled-off nature, for her sociopath’s aloofness. Glasses become a mask that’s acceptable for the killer to wear in public. They become a threat, too: After all, the serial killer who wears glasses is apparently someone who can see us better than we can see them. Someone who’s always watching.

While serial killers can be found leering behind everything from cat-eye glasses to horn-rimmed spectacles, the glasses of Jeffrey Dahmer have certainly come to define the look. After the whole world saw a pair of bug-eyed, wire-rimmed, double-bridged, clear-lensed aviators adorning the face of Dahmer — cannibal, necrophiliac, killer of 17 men and boys — the style became notorious. These days, Dahmer’s accessory has been embraced by the mainstream; it’s an ironic statement now, a “lewk” that you can find not just on Tumblr but also on Pinterest (“Jeffrey Dahmer made me love these glasses”), Reddit (“How would I seek out the “Dahmer” style glasses?”), and even on the faces of Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Beyoncé, though they admittedly might be going for more of a “sexy nerd” look.

Photo: Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department.

As an object, the glasses themselves have become unnerving, even without the real Dahmer behind them. When John “Derf” Backderf, one of Dahmer’s high school classmates, stopped by the set of My Friend Dahmer to see how filming was going (Backderf wrote the graphic novel that the film was based on), he found it impossible to talk to Ross Lynch, the actor playing Dahmer, because of his glasses. “He was in his full Dahmer get-up, and it freaked me out,” Backderf remembered. “I said, ‘Dude, you HAVE to take off those glasses or I can’t talk to you.’”

Dahmer wasn’t the only killer lurking behind clear-lensed aviators, though. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, wore an almost identical pair as Dahmer, and a woman who fitted him for glasses at the Spectacle Shoppe in Wichita, Kansas, vividly remembers his cold eyes as he stared at her, “sizing her up.” Ed Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer, wore a pair, as did Dennis Nilsen, the Kindly Killer; Wayne Williams, the suspected Atlanta Child Murderer; and even the lesser-known Canadian Robert Hansen, the Butcher Baker, whose glasses were for sale on eBay in 2008. All these murderers operated during the ’70s and ’80s, decades when serial killers were sprouting like weeds across the globe, and the same decades that clear aviator glasses happened to be extremely popular. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of the decades’ worst offenders ended up in mug shots, glaring out at a horrified public through spookily similar frames.

Still, it’s not just ubiquity that doomed the clear aviator. 2020 Magazine, the “optical industry’s leading publication,” argues that there is something inherently creepy about the glasses’ physical design. It’s all in the curving, lachrymose angles: the bar across the top of the glasses turns suddenly downward at the corners of the eyes, and that, along with the tear-shaped curve of the inward frame edge, “pull[s] the face and the eyes down with them, giving the illusion that most aviator wearers are sad, frowny-faced, or otherwise dealing with some sort of internal personal problem just beginning to bubble to the surface.”

Photo: Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images

Though those eerie, teardrop-shaped lenses seem to symbolize someone who is forever surveilling us — the BTK killer, say, who would study his victims’ houses and routines before coming in for the slaughter — the truth is that sometimes these serial killers couldn’t bear their own sight. In the courtroom, Dahmer almost never wore glasses. He took them off because he couldn’t stand to see the faces of the jury — or of his victim’s parents.

Granted, not all serial killers wear glasses that scream, “I am interested in hanging your skeleton in my shower.” Now and then, these murderers blink out at the world from behind lenses that are so totally unthreatening, so endearing, even, that society finds it hard to believe they’re criminals at all.

Take Dorothea Puente. In the 1980s, Puente cooked incredible tamales, fussed over her rose garden, and killed seven of her elderly Sacramento boarders — many of whom were mentally ill, alcoholics, or drug addicts — before burying them in her own backyard. Her round cheeks, cloud of white hair, and huge, clear-framed glasses made it exceptionally difficult for people to accept the breadth of her crimes. Clues — like the stench of death rising from her lawn — were written off for months as “harmless eccentricities,” and even after she was caught, journalists wrote incredulously about the bespectacled figure “with the demeanor of a grandmother and the rap sheet of a felon,” emphasizing that Puente’s appearance “[did] not fit the stereotype of a serial killer.” Twenty years after her victims’ bodies were dug up, reporter Martin Kuz visited her in jail and described how the “round-framed glasses too large for her face magnify a pair of pale blue eyes. She resembles a wizened owl.” Hers was not a look that terrified; rather, it was a look that gave people cognitive dissonance. “Her passivity subdues suspicion,” Kuz noted. “She seems entirely harmless.”

Photo: Owen Brewer/Sacramento Bee/MCT via Getty Images

An even less threatening pair of glasses bedecked the kindly face of Harold Shipman, or “Doctor Death,” one of the most prolific serial killers of all time (the government report into his crimes estimated that he may have killed over 250 people between 1975 and 1998 by giving them lethal doses of medical heroin). One of the most unnerving things about Shipman was his “friendly doctor” demeanor, which caused one writer for The Guardian to marvel about how the defendant was “the gentlest, sweetest-looking man in the building: a middle-aged, middle-class physician, a father-of-four with a donnish beard, pebble-thick glasses and, judging from his quiet calm, an understated bedside manner.” Shipman’s glasses distinguished him as an educated professional, someone you could really trust, someone who was only giving you an excessive dose of diamorphine to help you sleep a little better. How could you fear a man with glasses like that?

What happens when the serial killer doesn’t need glasses at all — but wears them anyway? The Zodiac was (or is?) a serial killer who struck fear in the hearts of Northern Californians during the ’60s and ’70s by killing at least five people, mostly young couples, and sending a series of deranged letters and cryptograms to the press. He’s probably the most famous unidentified serial killer of all time, after Jack the Ripper, and a large part of his mystery involves a rather prosaic question: Did or did he not wear glasses?

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty

On October 11th, 1969, Zodiac shot a 29-year-old cab driver named Paul Stine at point-blank range. Three teenagers saw him searching through Stine’s pockets and gave a description to the police. The ensuing police sketch, released from the San Francisco Police Department several days later, shows a man with thick-framed glasses — and since then, a glasses-wearing Zodiac has become the most recognizable Zodiac around.

But some people think that — plot twist! — the glasses may have actually belonged to Paul Stine, the victim, and that Zodiac hurriedly put them on because he knew the teenagers were watching and would describe him to the police. In that case, the glasses become a genius last-minute disguise that has thrown us all off the scent for decades. People who think they saw Zodiac on other days don’t remember a man with glasses; a victim who survived him remembers a man in a hooded costume with sunglasses clipped over the eyeholes. “I look like the description passed out only when I do my thing,” Zodiac wrote in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle about a month after Stine’s murder. “The rest of the time I look entirle different. I shall not tell you what my descise consists of when I kill.”

Robert Rule’s daughter was killed by Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, a meticulous murderer who told investigators that he was missing the part of humanity that makes people care about other people. The Seattle Times described Ridgway as “so quiet that no one who knew him… glimpsed a hint of the killer who lurked behind the nerdy glasses and mousy smile.” He strangled at least 49 women, including 16-year-old Linda Rule, and while he could direct the police to their bodies, he couldn’t remember their faces. The lead investigator called his eyes “two dark holes that go into a deep, dark pit.”

In the courtroom, Ridgway was infuriatingly impassive. The judge lambasted him for his “Teflon-coated emotions and complete absence of compassion.” But one day during his long trial, Robert Rule stood up in court to address him. Rule worked as a Santa at a mall; he was plump, with a big white beard, and for his day in court he had put on a pair of rainbow suspenders. While the family members of other victims had sobbed or screamed or wished cancer and death and hell on Ridgway, Rule was preternaturally composed as he faced his daughter’s killer.

Photo: Josh Trujillo-Pool/Getty Images

“Mr. Ridgway, um, there are people here who hate you,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I’m not one of them. I forgive you for what you’ve done. You’ve made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and that is what God says to do, and that’s to forgive. And He doesn’t say to forgive just certain people, He says to forgive all. So you are forgiven, sir.”

As the father spoke, Ridgway’s chin began to quiver. He blinked rapidly. He started to weep. And then he took off his glasses.