Part One
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 little 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
Coming next: Some thoughts and observations
after twenty years of trying to understand evil.
* "Ted Bundy: Conversations With
a Killer "
by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth
