Do you think you’ve ever been stalked or nearly victimized by a serial killer? And if so, would you even know? Most likely not. That is, unless you are like 63-year-old Anna Williams, who in 1979 came home late one evening to the front door unlocked, one of the spare bedroom doors open, an open vanity drawer and clothes on the floor. Jewelry was also missing, and the phone lines to her house had been cut. It’s not unthinkable that at the time she considered herself merely the victim of a burglary. But fast-forward two months later, to when she received a letter in the mail, featuring a 19-line poem and a drawing.
The poem went like this—
“Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
T’ was perfect plan of deviant pleasure so bold on that Spring nite
My inner felling hot with propension of the new awakening season
Warn, wet with inner fear and rapture, my pleasure of entanglement, like new vines at night
Oh, Anna, Why Didn’t You Appear
Drop of fear fresh Spring rain would roll down from your nakedness to scent to lofty fever that burns within,
In that small world of longing, fear, rapture, and desparation,the game we play, fall on devil ears
Fantasy spring forth, mounts, to storm fury, then winter clam at the end.
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
Alone, now in another time span I lay with sweet enrapture garments across most private thought
Bed of Spring moist grass, clean before the sun, enslaved with control, warm wind scenting the air, sun light sparkle tears in eyes so deep and clear.
Alone again I trod in pass memory of mirrors, and ponder why for number eight was not.
Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear
BTK, 1979″
This drawing was included—
She would have been the BTK killer’s eighth victim. It was learned later that he had been stalking her for months, and had broken in hoping to surprise both she and her 24-year-old granddaughter when they returned home, but after waiting many hours for them to return, he finally grew impatient and left.
Nor was this an isolated incident. Over the course of his thirty-year-reign of terror the BTK killer stalked and broke into the houses of a multitude of women, whom he did not ever send letters to, and who went about their lives none the wiser.
I’ve been reading a lot about serial killers lately since the new novel I am working on is about one, but it seems a lot of the books out there exist as investigative diaries, told from the perspective of either those directly involved in the investigations, or writers with access to the investigators. I am more interested in the stories of these murderers from their own perspective. Which is why two books in particular have struck a cord.
The first, “Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer” by Katherine Ramsland, was compiled via a series of letters and jailhouse interviews which allowed Rader to tell his story firsthand, going into great detail about his life growing up, his first experiments with bondage, both on himself and others, and finally murder. BTK eluded authorities for decades. During that time he was an active member of his church, a married father of two children, and nothing could have prepared those who knew him from the discovery that he was in fact a serial killer.
Were there warning signs? Some, But none that were so obvious as to cause anyone to suspect the truth. When he first married his wife, he tried to convince her to let him handcuff her to the bed during sex, which she did, but she did not enjoy herself, it never happened again.
Once she walked in on him performing bondage on himself. He was tied up with a mask, strangling himself. Though this disturbed her surely, she tried to be an understanding wife by purchasing books of sexual deviancy wishing to better understand him.
Rader has thought long and hard about what made him the way he was. He does not fit the profile of the average serial killer. He was not, for example, ever physically or sexually abused. There was nothing in his background that could have caused anyone to foresee the kind of man he would become. A couple things that stuck with him—once a neighbor gave him a toy truck to play with and when he brought it home his mother scolded him to no end, viewing the gift as charity, and he was made to feel humiliated when forced to return the toy and apologize. One of his most vivid childhood memory was of his mother reaching for something inside the sofa, and upon trying to pull her arm back out her wedding ring became stuck on one of the springs and it took her a long while to free herself. Something about seeing her trapped like that really intrigued him.
As he got older he became fascinated by the cover of dime store novels and detective magazines with covers like these—
He also found an issue if Life Magazine from 1947 that excited him. It featured a woman the magazine had dubbed ‘the most beautiful suicide.’ Evelyn McHale, her name was. She had jumped from the Empire State Building and landed on a vehicle that was parked below. A photographer had captured her final pose, and it really was a pose. The whole thing looked staged. She lay there on her back atop a crumpled sedan with all its windows shattered, her eyelids gently closed, dressed elegantly, one white gloved hand up near her face as though about to gesture to something. Take a look—
When he was finally ready to graduate to murder, he broke into the house of woman and her two children while he thought the husband was away, but as it turned out the husband was home as the result of an injury, and Rader proceeded to tie them all up and strangle them one by one. The eleven-year-hold girl was hung from a pipe in the basement and sexually assaulted.
The other book that’s really haunted me is Final Truth: The Autobiography of Pee Wee Gaskins. I had never actually heard of Donald Gaskins before picking this up, and his story is really a doozy. Gaskins was a life-long criminal and was in and out of institutions his whole life. He was a man who had zero regard for other people. This was one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. Here was a man who would help himself to whatever deviancy he wanted without any qualms whatsoever. Though convicted of ten murders, he claims to have committed dozens more, mostly hitchhikers he picked up driving along the coast of South Carolina. He would drive them to secluded areas and then tie them up and torture them for hours. The descriptions of this are truly harrowing. One woman he tied up for days, coming up with innumerable ways of tormenting her.
The most disturbing scene for me was when he kidnapped a young woman and her two year-old daughter. He made the daughter watch as he assaulted and killed her mother. Afterwards, he offers a detailed description of how he then raped and strangled the two year-old girl. He claims he climaxed at the exact moment she expired, and calls it the best orgasm of his life, either before or since.
This is dark and twisted stuff.
The challenge, of course, in writing a protagonist based on these types of characters is to make them palatable enough to read a novel about. Of course, a protagonist never has to be likable, as long as they are interesting. But it’s taken me to some pretty dark places. What’s fascinating about BTK was his ability to compartmentalize the various aspects of his life. He may be a psychopathic killer, but he also harbors real affection for his wife and children, guilt for what he’s put them through, yet the only actual murder he claims to regret is that of the eleven-year-old girl, because the look in her eyes as she expired always haunted him.
The number of active serial killers has drastically decreased since the advent of DNA testing in the late 80s. Now it is much more difficult to get away with it, though they are still out there. Who knows? The guy standing in front of you in the Target check-out line with the overflowing cart of Christmas gifts? Maybe he’s one of them.
Sweet dreams.
Some killers are just born psychopaths, BTK seems like one of those. And Bundy, if you believe his story about having a perfectly normal childhood.
Learning how to spot narcissists and psychopaths/sociopaths are important life skills imo. They aren’t always violent, but they’ll still fuck up your life.
I’m curious about your protagonist, are going the Dexter route and making them more of a vigilante, or sticking with a more realistic type of character?