Everyday Psychokillers (24 page)

Nilson, the articulate loner, the kind who killed for company.

Lake's partner, Ng, the snuff filmmaker, who recorded and catalogued everything.

Lawrence “Pliers” Bittaker with the fingernails.

Hannibal the Cannibal with the gourmet's tagline and his crossdressing sidekick, Buffalo Bill. Their masks of sanity. Their secret identities. Their riddles and codes. This and that roman á clef.

The Ax Man of New Orleans. The Mad Biter. The Measuring Man. The Green Man. The Son of Sam and Zodiac. The Monster of the Belfry, the Monster Butler, the Monster of the Wedge or of this or that city. Smelly Bob. Metal Fang. Two-Face and Prune-Face. Monk. Freight Train. Minus Man and Leatherman. The Texas Chainsaw what's-his-name.

Black Widows and Bluebeards and Baby Farmers. Mad Bombers, mad scientists, mad this or that. This or that monster. Freeway Murderers and Highway Killers. Nightstalkers. Voyeurs. Slayers. Devils and Demons. Jason, Chucky, Freddy, the supernatural ones without the superhero names. This odd form of understatement.

The guy who fed waitresses to alligators.

Remote killers, the poisoners and tamperers, the mailbombers and snipers. Intimate killers, who want to get as close as possible, who want to look up close, as close as any close-up photograph. They want to open her like the case of a machine, to pull her tendons and watch her legs work. They want to climb inside and inhabit her. These two forms of creating anonymity, of typifying the person you're faced with, far away and up close exactly equal, because either way she's an abstract concept, it's a matter of looking at her organs as shapes, as colors.

Cutting her. I think of a great blade slicing asphalt, and swamp water, thick with silt, rising through. Dissecting her, arranging her, preparing her. Codifying her. They're civilizing her.

I can remember Ted looming over his grid of bugs, and I can remember him on his balcony, like a bug on his back, one hand wriggling into his pocket and the other elevated, angular, pinching his cigarette which looked like an eye on a stem. I could think of him as Bugman Ted. I can remember him like that, but I know it's not right. I know, for one thing, how much thoughtfulness I felt from him. I'm pretty sure he loved me a lot.

When you look into it you'll find the names of their victims, their wives, their mothers, daughters, girlfriends, buddies, lovers, although the categories don't work well because so many belong in more than one. Julie Dart, Rhonda Knuckles, Angel Lenair, Novella Toole. Names out of a comic book. Somewhere there are humans behind them, but there's no way you could know. Exxie Wilson, Betty Goodyear, Veronica Compton, Florine Braggs, Ida Irga, Stephanie Vikko, Hectorina McLennan. They're like the strewn parts of one enormous wrecked body. They're their names alone.

Each belongs to a psychokiller or two, and the names are earnestly included in the various accounts, so that they will not be forgotten—as if reading a name alone conjures an actual person…but if a pen just slipped, imagine, a pen slips on the big white dry erase board in the police station, or downstairs in the station's fileroom some senile clerk, or recovering junkie, or sleepy bombshell, or dyslexic intern slips you into one file over from the one you're meant for and suddenly you're a whole other person's victim, you're the lovesick prison correspondent and not the girl he bleached. At some point someone decides whether or not the case of you and your killer is solved. Brings the mess back down to two lists. Solved, unsolved, saved, not saved, dead, not dead yet. Lubie Geter. Elton Crude. They're killers or they're victims. It depends on when you look, at what point you check in on the story, at what point in the history of how it's been told and recorded. It depends which version you read, who you hear about him from, which cop, which chronicler, which book, which flick, which sad high school kid who wrote to him and got some letters back.

Lubie Crude, Elton Geter. They've killed or been murdered. Elton Lubie, Geter Crude. They're ideas of people. All of them.

As you read the book, see the film, watch for updates in the news, you'll notice how each depiction of unfolding events makes you feel, for the moments you're watching, like there's only
this one
bad guy in the whole world. In each depiction that one guy strikes and strikes again, and then in the sequel, where the last girl left alive grows up, he strikes again. It's still as if there's this one single evil guy, and if we'd only get it together and
get
him, that poor girl could jog in the dark again.

But there are many, many killers, and many multiple killers.

In each depiction, victim after victim, there is that one special victim, the one they go all out for. There's a whole swat team, there's helicopters, there's armies of men with guns out to save her.
This
one we'll save. This little innocent, whoever she is, sweetheart or asshole, it doesn't matter, if you're captured you're innocent. You could be anybody.

There she is, alone in her cage, her cave, her dungeon, her rack, her white room, her glass cell, her steel drawer, her pit, and so much of her agony, at least half of what's tearing her up is that she could be one of many, or she could be the one, but there's no way she can have anything to do with the decision. If she's the lucky, special one, then the whole world, it seems, is out to save her. They're sparing no resources. They're out to save her as they've never been out to save her before.

There is nothing strange about wanting to be rescued.

Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he's done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn't exist.

How nuclear they felt, Ted and CiCi, what a wanting, warped family we played out. Family enough, in any case, that I know I inherit from them. Sometimes she felt like a happy mother, sometimes a first love, sometimes a torn sister, sometimes a live paper doll, an icon of doomed foolish girlness. When she left, I figure she left both Teds, she left all of them, I like to think, all the little Teds and forms of Ted who'd gathered in her life and in her mind.

You know I see her like a horse, running. How extremely liberating it must have felt. A horse is beautiful when it runs, there is no denying it. All those images you've seen of that beauty, the glossy power, the primitive grace of it, I know that, I know it as fully as I know anything. But horses run out of
fear
. Fight or flight, you know. It's easy to forget, when you see them playing at it in a field, like kids at hide and seek, hearts thumping, giddy, bubbling, gleeful with the raw truth of their imaginings, the powerful feeling of teasing your own emotions, playing it all out in your muscles, in the containment of a paddock, of a yard, of a place that feels safe, like home.

How is it possible to look at a creature and
know
it's acting out of fear, even if it's only
mimicking
fear, in preparation for real fear that is sure to come, beating it to the punch so to speak—how is it possible to see that and find that
beautiful?
Because I can, and I know I do.

After she said I love you, which broke my heart, the air shivered in her wake, and I looked around the damp apartment with its few strewn articles, the weak paint, the dense rank smell of wet ash and old water. She's exactly who I never want to be, and because of that she feels as bound to me as the air that surrounds my shape. One of us is a looming shadow, and one the frantic sparkling space around it.

How
visible
she was to me. How visible she was, half-submerged. How was she to know? How Bundy liked his girls with dark limp hair, parted cleanly in the center, a white road bisecting the head. And after she knew it was college girls he liked, girls with social promise—how could she have mistaken herself for one of those? Lousy tennis player. Great blowing chestnut-headed runaway, hitchhiker. She had it all wrong. She was some other psychokiller's chick. I think of CiCi and that guy, how when you are recorded, when you go down in history, it's just another kind of disappearing.

I can hear them asking her: His name was Mark, you say? Mark is what he said his name was? As in
Mark my words?
As in
on your Mark get set?

Let me try again. Let me try again to explain this psychokiller. This time I think of the busy psychokiller doing his thing. I picture a composite of him, a composite psychokiller.

I picture him in his apartment, which looks a lot like Ted's apartment, that same sad carpet. He's got everything in there—one of each malady, each psychology you've heard these psychos have. He's got the collage of cut-up photographs of his victims on the wall surrounding his bare mattress, one wall for those he's stalking, one wall to commemorate dismemberment. A little physical space, nicely delineated, for each atrocious habit. He has his room of complicated torture machines. Under the rug by the sofa there's a trapdoor in his floor. He keeps a bone or two in his closet with his shoes, only half getting his own joke. He hangs his collection of garrotes among his ties. He owns an assortment of woodworking tools, a chemistry set, and shiny medical instruments, and keeps them sparkling with disinfectant. He's got the vat of acid, and the hooks to hold up chains in the dining room. He's got his own darkroom setup in the bathroom, and a stash of special lightbulbs to set the mood. In his refrigerator leftover body parts pose frostily in ziplock bags. Fifteen deflated breasts like pancakes are stacked in a plastic tub that used to store whipped margarine.

He collects stuff: archeological finds, or religious images and icons. He keeps fastidious records. In his chosen form, he encodes everything he does. Sometimes he encodes where he left the body, but sometimes he encodes how many eggs he ate that week, how many people entered the coffeeshop across the street. He likes countdowns: his twenty favorite movies, his fifty favorite songs. He organizes and categorizes and counts. He's a failed scientist or historian, anthropologist or artist, or he's weak and dumb, unloved, ugly, poor. He's been abused, bonked on the head when he was young, really bonked or just felt like it, you know, emotionally bonked, or bonked by the world, plus he might be a bad seed, with that extra Y chromosome. He has a variety of warning signs, bulbous fingertips, frizzy hair, potentially wacky thyroids, and now he does it all. He pisses in bed and eats shit, but he's also a neat freak. He's a dissector and a cooker, driven to civilize what's raw as he simultaneously destroys it.

But for me, picturing him, watching him press a shape onto my life, he's a decapitator most of all, because the towhead Adam was the one that started me thinking about what people might do, the one who spawned. It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Gubie Lude. For me it was Adam. My first. The first one I saw when I glanced up from whatever I was doing before. What Adam's psychokiller did was decapitate him. Parted the head from the body. I imagine a composite psychokiller, a collage of one, one I can picture, that I can wrap my head around, so to speak, and that's what he does, too.

A long time ago, back when the composite psychokiller was a little kid, when he was merely pulling the legs from spiders and setting tiny measured piles of them on fire, watching them smolder and fume like hair, back when the welts on his head still felt new and unwarranted, when his humiliation was fresh and his mind clear, and clearly in pain, clearly confused, he went to school one clay and the teacher stood at the far end of one row after another and counted out, licking her finger, six times six sheets of plain white eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper and sent them down the row, minus four for the kids who were out, two in one row, one more in two other rows. The psychokiller sat in his desk near the back but not quite in the back, surreptitiously sucking on a lifesaver, because he was in the midst of a phase where he worried his breath smelled and maybe that was why kids didn't like him as much as he wanted them to.

Even though plenty of kids liked him fine. They even liked John and Mary Crumb, the retards, who were obviously annoying. I mean, who wasn't annoying? They were all annoying, all those kids, like for instance the very smart but annoying girl with long red hair and freckles and the temper she'd always been told goes with it. Bossy girl. I mean the psychokiller had as many friends as she did, probably, and she was home in the evening staring at the black ceiling, mentally dividing her toys into groups based on who should get them when she died.

The psychokiller sat in his particleboard desk with its blond plastic veneer and shallow pencil groove, and thought maybe if he fixed his breath, you know, he wouldn't feel like such a loser. Each morning he swiped coins from the top of his father's dresser and bought a roll of bright translucent candy from a vending machine at a gas station on the way to school, even though it meant riding his bike a longer route.

You might remember that right around that time when I went to that school in the suburb of a suburb, a lot of magazines and newspapers were writing about how serial killers were what they called a new breed of killer. Which I believed, but is ridiculous because, I mean, as long as there've been records of history there've been records of a lot of killing. So I suspect what was new, really, was the idea of a
breed
of killer, that there was some force at work, some seeming consciousness replicating some
type
of person. People in the field (you see how after a while everything sounds like a euphemism: this field of studying, how pacific, how pastoral. A new breed, etcetera…the way the word
type
suddenly feels evil, when the notion of a machine that replicates symbols is re-connected to the notion of erasing a human person's three-dimensionality…) people were in any case becoming really interested in dividing murder into increasingly specific categories. They argued over the connotations of the possible terms, and in fact they're up to it still: how many do you have to kill to make it mass; does mass mean all at once or within one day; what if partway through the day he takes a nap; is rampage a technical or descriptive term; how many do you have to kill before it's serial; how similar do the killings have to be for an MO and then what's part of and what's a deviation from an MO once one's established; what's a sociopath and what's a psychopath; can you be both methodical and insane; can you be organized sometimes and disorganized sometimes or does sometimes disorganized make the moments of organization not count because you just go back and mess up your good work, like clean everything up and then drive away and then freak out that maybe you forgot something and go back and let a receipt fly from your pocket while you're checking your work? So is that “organized” or “disorganized,” I ask you. What kind of killer are you? What kind of psycho?