I mean, they glamourize pretty much everything. It is an essential part when you wish to make the audience get engrossed into your work. Especially when covering subjects such as this. That being said, whether they stray from the realism of a situation or not is up to each individual !!!!

The movie Natural Born Killers actually explores this quite well.

I think serial killers are over-glorified. The media loves to make them out to be some super-hero, psychotically grinning about killing people, when in fact they're just some loner types that are angry about something in real life and look to inflict pain by killing in as brutal of a way as possible.

They're not heroes. They're fucked up.

^I agree.