I'm reposting a three-part series on evil that I did a couple of years ago. The third part was published at the Christian Century website. I'm reworking parts 2 and 3 extensively for other purposes. Since they are taking up my writing time (That and an essay I'm working on for Christian Century) I'm going to post them here again. Most of you probably never read them the first time. Or if so, perhaps the reworked part 2 and 3 (most extensive reworking) will be interesting to you.

***

In interviews given while on death row, Ted Bundy seemed confused over the great concern about his crimes. He just didn’t get it. He couldn’t understand why so many people cared about a few missing girls. “After all,” he mused, “There are so many people.” *

This point of view, or perhaps I should say this lack of a point of view, is fascinating to me. I want to understand it. It seems important that I understand it.

I date my interest in serial killers to the summer of 1973 when my family moved from the desert climate of El Paso to the oppressive humidity of Houston. The weather change was like a slap in the face. I remember sitting on the curb with my brother and wondering how air could possibly feel like this. Wet was the word. Everything was wet, sticky, and green. The ground was squishy beneath the grass. The air was hot and heavy with moisture. It pressed itself upon you, squeezing your head until perspiration oozed from your scalp and collected on the ends of your hairs, binding them together in little clumps. Even the water in the pools was warm. It felt like diving into a bath.

I was eleven that summer and about to start junior high. Only two months earlier I had been kneeling on the ground of my school playground, one eye closed, shooting marbles into a big circle. I didn’t know it then, but that world was gone. Adolescence was about to roll over me with its smells, hair, and powerful feelings. Who can stand before the awesome power of puberty?

Your time in the garden is over, buddy. But while I have your attention, take a look at the incredible fruit hanging from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Looks good doesn’t it? Trust me on this; it IS good. Like girls and peaches.

That summer they began digging up bodies on the other side of town. Elmer Wayne Henley and Dean Corll had been killing teen-age boys for quite some time. They strapped them to homemade torture tables made of plywood and handcuffs. They did unspeakable things to them, unmoved by their pitiful cries for mercy, until finally the boys would die and then be buried under a boat shed. Every news channel in town was camped out at the burial site. Information and video came pouring out of our television sets and into our homes. Even the children could not be protected from it. What they didn’t see on TV, they heard from their friends.

These things happen in our world. They are horrible to consider, but particularly shattering when you are young and have no idea that anything like this is possible. I listened to the part about the plywood and the handcuffs. After that I couldn’t keep the images out of my mind. Laughing men sticking knives into naked boys and slowly peeling off their skin. It was unthinkable. A nightmare and a horror movie, but for real and right in my own hometown.

And then there were the television images of clay-colored bodies pulled one-by-one from the ground. Twenty-seven of them in all. Stiffened, body-shaped clumps of soil that came out of the earth with a sucking sound and were put into the backs of ambulances that came and went, shrieking, from the crime scene.

That wetness again. The wetness of the crime produced its own kind of horror. Tears and blood and sex and trembling flesh and Houston earth. The wet, sliding sound of a shovel plunged into clay. In all of its stages, life is wet work. The beginning of life and the ending of life and even the retrieving of bodies.

This horrible thing laid hold of my mind like my grandfather’s strong hands twisting the legs off cooked chickens. He would twist the leg until the flesh popped and the tendons broke free. Then he would hand you the greasy drumstick with little tubes and shreds of fat hanging from it and a white, knuckled bone sticking out the bottom. Tuck in.

I used to look away when my grandfather would seize a chicken leg and start twisting. But once you’ve seen a man twist the leg off a bird, you know what food is and what life and flesh are. You understand that it comes down to this. You’ve taken up this knowledge or had it thrust upon you, but there is no laying it down again. No going back to the garden.

And once you’ve seen wet bodies spaded from the earth and laid before weeping mothers, you know what life is and that sometimes it comes to this.

Here is the knowledge of good and evil, little boy. Tuck in.

What I’m trying to tell you is that there were some weeks in late July of 1973 when this knowledge came to me and would not leave. I swam in the wetness of Houston and death. I lived in a humid world of ugly knowledge, chunky, raw, and uncut.

I remember staring at the newspaper pictures of Elmer Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. I was both fascinated and repelled. Why would grown-ups do this to boys? And perhaps more disturbing, how could they have enjoyed it?

Mercifully, school started and the news coverage slowed and then stopped. Junior high gave me more than enough to occupy my mind. There was a girl I loved at church, another I kissed at school, and one I worshipped from afar. There were football and the locker room and whispers of sexual things. It’s strange, but now that I think about it, adolescence was wet too. Wet kisses I hungered for. The sweat under my arms that I suddenly noticed and became obsessed with. The spray of antiperspirants and the splash of my father’s Old Spice. The fights and the fears were wet. Love was wet. The longing and the sorrow and the desperation were wet.

Henley and Corll faded from my mind, and I thought no more of them. I lived in my body and in the present, as teen-agers tend to do. But the questions never left me. And they remain with me. I am still fascinated and repelled by serial killers. They are the bogey-men of the modern world. Because of them, we still fear the darkness. They are legendary and powerful in our minds, though in person they are weak and pathetic. And having entered the God business, so to speak, the existence of evil in our world has become something of a professional concern.

What is the deal with these guys? They hide in the shadows and prey upon us. The pain and suffering of others does not repel them or awaken in them any human compassion. No, pain and suffering excite them. They get erections when they stand in the presence of a tortured and suffering human being. Watching it helps them achieve orgasm. How is this possible?

rlp

* "Ted Bundy: Conversations With a Killer "
by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth

Coming next: Some thoughts and observations after twenty years of trying to understand evil.

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