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who sneak off at night to cruise the gay bars; successful corporate executives supporting costly heroin habits. But cases like these pale beside the lives of certain serial killers. Ted Bundy was so bright and personable that he could have run for elected office if he hadn’t also been a sadistic sex killer who murdered dozens of young women. John Wayne Gacy liked to dress up as a clown and entertain hospitalized children when he wasn’t torturing teenage boys in his suburban home. And the Swedish physician Dr. Teet Haerm, who mutilated and killed at least nine young women, was a respected forensic pathologist who actually ended up performing the autopsies on some of his victims.
    Killers like these possess such monstrously split personalities that they seem slightly unreal, as if they stepped from the pages of a horror story. More specifically, they seem like the flesh-and-blood incarnations of a figure first dreamed up by British writer Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1880s:Dr. Henry Jekyll, who spends half his life as an idealistic scientist and the other half as a hideous creature named Edward Hyde.
    “Dreamed up” is not just a figure of speech, since the idea for the story reportedly came to Stevenson in a nightmare. He dashed off a first draft in just three days, but his wife was so shocked by this version that Stevenson burned it, then rewrote it in a slightly less sensational form. Like Dracula and Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of those stories that everyone knows, even if they’ve never read the original. This is largely because it’s been made into so many movies, beginning with a 1920 silent version starring John Barrymore. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that Stevenson’s novelette is not so much a horror story as a mystery, revolving around the question of Edward Hyde’s identity—who is this evil being and what is his relationship to the distinguished Dr. Jekyll? The answer to these questions isn’t revealed until the very end, when readers discover that Hyde is really Jekyll’s alter ego, the living embodiment of the good doctor’s bestial, hidden self.
    For people who only know Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the movies there are other surprising aspects of the original story. On film, Hyde is typically portrayed as a fanged, hairy creature—a kind of werewolf in Victorian clothing. In the book, however, he is less overtly monstrous. There is something deeply repellent about him, but exactly where this quality comes from is hard to say. “He is not easy to describe,” one character remarks. “There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way.”
    Furthermore, though Stevenson tells us that Hyde has a history of vile and violent deeds, he doesn’t appear to be a homicidal maniac. Rather, he is the personification of the nasty, lawless impulses that lurk beneath our civilized veneers: what Sigmund Freud called the Id. Indeed, in Stevenson’s story, Edward Hyde commits only a single murder—the clubbing of a distinguished old gentleman named Sir Danvers Carew.
    In short, though serial killers like Bundy and Gacy are often described as Jekyll-and-Hydes, they are really far worse. Compared to them, Stevenson’s bestial creation was a pussycat.
    J OKES
    Serial murder is no laughing matter. But that hasn’t stopped people from making fun of it—any more than it’s kept them from swapping sick jokes about other lurid and sensational subjects, from O. J. Simpson to Lorena Bobbitt, the Virginia housewife who, in 1993, sliced off her husband’s penis while he slept because she was unhappy with their sex life. The latter, in fact, costarred in this widely circulated rib