I Knew a Serial Killer

Never really shared this with too many people. The other day I was talking with a church member and the subject of evil came up which led to a discussion about serial killers.

I was reminded of my family's and my experiences with one. You can read the story here and here.

I was in high school and this man, his wife, and her baby moved into the trailer court where we lived. My mother and sister (four year's younger than I) babysat for them on regular ocassions. They would come get the baby sometimes as early as 2 or 3 in the morning. He came over many times by himself!

My sister babysat at their trailer till all hours of the night and early mornings and even went with them to Memphis on one or two ocassions!

One Saturday he came over and asked me to go to Tupelo (about 30 miles from Houston) to help him move his sister. I did. On the way he got stopped on the Natchez Trace Parkway (a national roadway). The speed limit was and still is 50. He was going about 65, I think.

Anyway, as I think back, I thank God no one in my family was hurt by this madman. We never really know whom we associate with, do we?

 

Whew!

I've dealt with murderers, of course, but never a monster like that and I NEVER rode in one's truck.

 

What is really scary is that the article implies he had some outstanding warrants. I just cannot even imagine if the park ranger that stopped us had known this and attempted to arrest him or something! The ranger and I might have both been killed.

Very scary, scary indeed.

 

Paging Steve!

 

Jimmy,

This does make you think, especially when you have children!

Your right about one thing, you never do know who you may associate with, but then again you could associating with angels.

Your guardian angel was with you that day!! "Psalm 34:7"

 

Re: Re: I Knew a Serial Killer

Called my mother and sister today after I posted and this subject came up. They wanted the URL's. I did make one error in my initial post. My sister went to Memphis with him and her but not the baby which makes it all the more scary, especially since the article said he tried to rape two girs early in his career of crime.

God surely was looking out for us the whole time Putt lived in the same trailer park as us.

 

Criminy, Jimmy, yer already faymus. Don' need ta name-drop.

 

Ha! [LOL & ROFL]



Okayokay... here's mine...

When I was a teenager, back in Northwest Indiana, in the late-60s/early-70s, I was in a Masonic-sponsored youth organization (some of you may know it: The Order of DeMolay) with a guy whom the rest of us always kinda' knew was a little weird; who had a slight speech impediment, a learning disability, and some kind of physical abnormality that made him look and walk just the tiniest bit strangely; but who seemed to have a good heart down in there somewhere. He was... lemmee think... a year or two older than I was, as I recall. Probably still is. [grin]

As he grew to the age when most DeMolays kinda' begin to lose interest and drift away, I, for one, had begun to notice his increasing general frustration, and inability to cope with life. One time when our competitive rifle team was preparing for the state finals on a makeshift rifle range that had been set up on this guy's father's rural farm propery in Portage, Indiana, he got angry about something and went into the house and came out with a pistol which he began firing into the air and at the down-range targets from wherever he happened to be standing until said pistol was finally empty. Then he threw it, angrily, into a little ditch or ravine and stomped back into the house... leaving the rest of us sort of ashen-colored and looking at one another with eyes wide and mouths agape.

A few years later a string of obviously-related murders was stunning the sensibilities of Northwest Indiana residents and was widely reported in the Gary Post-Tribune and what was, back then, The Hammond Times newspapers. Imagine my surprise... or was I really all that surprised, now that I think back on it... when it turned out that that same guy with the pistol -- a guy with whom I had shared many rides in many cars over the years (some with him driving), and with whom I had sat in seemingly countless chapter meetings, and whom I had slept near in tents or cottages in camp-outs or at summer camp -- turned out to be not only a member of the gang that had been committing the murders but, even more frighteningly, was actually the guy who shoved-in the knife and/or who pulled the trigger, as appropriate, during most of them.

Needless to say, he's in prison today -- in Michigan City, Indiana, I believe. As I recall, he did not get the death penalty, for some reason.

[silence]

Hmm. Now that I've told that story, I'm suddenly very sad. I always wanted to talk with him after it happened... to try to understand. He was an anguished and tormented young man whose problems seemed so insurmountable that none of us ever dared to try to even know what they were, much less to understand them. He wasn't a murderer when I knew him... just miserable and so frustrated that he had no way to express it; and he needed to express it often. He was derided by those around him; and viewed as something of a freak. I know that how he turned-out brought unspeakable pain to his parents. I cannot even fathom what 30 years of prison -- mostly with the hardest of hard-core inmates from the notorious Gary/Hammond, Indiana area -- has done to him. Trying to imagine furrows my brow.

[sigh]

Now I wish I hadn't brought it up.

 

Wow! We disagree so much politically but we have something in common here. I often wonder how many other people have had similar experiences but never know it because they didn't hear about the crimes, arrests, etc.

Michigan City? I don't know about now but that used to be a very nasty prison. In my first few year's in ministry I made a few pastoral visits there and I hated it.

Probably hasn't changed much since then (early '80's).

Well Des Elms, you and I hopefully never ran across anyone like your guy and mine since our experiences.

 

Ha! "Faymus" and alive!

 

You know what's gonna happen, sure as God made little green apples? Another forum is gonna start up its bullroar about associates of serial killers on degreeinfo...

 

Considering we're speaking about serial killers I think the operative words are not "little green apples" but "rotten apples."

 

People are in the company of dangerous nutjobs more in their lifetimes than they realize -- especially in big cities. If they only knew.

It's quite bad. A couple of guards there used to work for me once in a while when I needed cable-pulling crews and what not. They had some pretty frightening stories to tell. But Michigan City is nothing compared with a place like... oh... let's say... Pelican Bay, for example. And there are countless others. We should probably all avoid getting into some kind of weird "you think the prison near you is bad... listen to this" discussion here.

Not a bit, from what I hear.

You mean like Scott Peterson, for example?

"An' it don' rain in Indyanaplis in the summertime..." Oh... er... um... sorry... got distracted, there for a sec.

And prostitutes, too, Janko. Don't forget the prostitutes.

You know what I say about those knuckleheads? F_ck 'em if they can't take a joke! You should adopt the same policy... you'll live longer.

You know who has that viewpoint on them even more than I do (and to his credit, I might add)? Chip. Take a page from his book: Don't give 'em the time o' day.

 

I knew one too

Two words:

Karla Homolka

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serials/bernardo/bernmain.htm

 

My turn...

This isn't a murderer story, but an interesting encounter nonetheless. When I was in high school, I briefly went steady with/dated this raven-haired girl with a beautiful olive complexion who was as sharp as a tack--straight As. She ended up being class valedictorian.

She was a real moralist on many levels, if you said something that was a bit off-color--which I occasionally did--she'd give you quite a glare. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, not a party-goer, just a good all-American kid with Mensa brains.

She had one weakness, though: sex; I don't know how to put it more diplomatically than that. She was rather passionate in our little petting sessions in my old junker car, we steamed a few windows. I'm not proud of sharing her weakness nor encouraging it, not proud of my general catting about as a high schooler. In retrospect, I know I was pretty much a selfish user of other's bodies.

Anyway, we drifted apart, went to different colleges; she ended up marrying an old mutual friend and settled down to what appeared to be a comfortable existence as a young mother, wife and well-regarded high school science/math teacher. Saw her only once or twice.

And then, a few years ago, she turned up in the news, made Inside Edition: "High School Teacher Pregnant by Student". No, it's not Mary Kay Letourneau, her name is Diane F-------. She was tried and convicted of something or other, I don't know what her state's criminal code calls for, but she received probation. Of course she lost her job, got a divorce, and on a very sad note, the baby of her and her paramour died in infancy.

It was a real stunner, never would've believed it. She was straight as an arrow. Perhaps she put too much pressure on herself, and once she found that the chink in her armor was there and couldn't be denied, that she couldn't overcome this desire for a 14 year old boy, she just gave in entirely and the whole works came crashing down.

If she couldn't be perfect, couldn't control herself perfectly, at least she could control her destruction. I don't know about the psychology of it, someone smarter than me will have to figure that out.

 

UPDATE: In my earlier post about the guy I knew as a teenager who later killed someone and got a life sentence, I linked to his info on the Indiana Dept of Corrections (INDOC) web site. I didn't really read the INDOC record very carefully because I thought I pretty much knew what it said; but when my partner read it she spotted the word "Discharge" in the "Facility/Location" field.

"Does this mean he's been released?" she asked. "Doesn't 'discharge' mean essentially that? Or would they have use the word 'released' instead; and, if so, then what does 'discharge' mean when used in the 'Facility/Location' field?"

Good questions. Then, again, she always asks good question, so I don't know why I should be surprised.

At any rate, I didn't know. So I emailed one of my contacts at INDOC and I asked him not only what the deal was with that particular prisoner, but also what "Discharge" meant when it appeared in the "Facility/Location" field.

I learned that the prisoner, to my initial surprise, was released from the prison in Michigan City, Indiana on September 30, 2002 after 26 years of incarceration... supposedly for life. I learned, further, that after successfully (which doesn't surprise me, actually) serving his post-release parole period, he was finally discharged from the corrections system (i.e., no longer under the control or supervision of the state for the crime of which he was convicted)... hence the presence of word "discharge" in the "Location/Facility" field of his INDOC record.

Live and learn, eh?

Hmm. Interesting. Knowing the viciousness of the crimes, and remembering what I read of the victim's family's feelings at the time, I'm a little surprised... but, then again, knowing the guy -- what he was before it all happened, and what the effect of prison must have been on him -- I suspect after all these years that he'd be about as typical of the kind of lifer who should probably eventually get freedom in spite of his deeds as anyone.

I wish him well, I guess. Maybe I'll look him up sometime and get caught-up. I'm sure it would be weirdly interesting... along with being chilling, no doubt. We'll see. [sigh] Maybe certain chapters shouldn't be circled back around to, eh? Who knows.


At any rate, on other matters...

RE: Karla Homolka... I hope we're not now going to turn to the likes of the CourtTV web site -- and other places similar -- to get our stories for this thread. Lord knows that all one has to do is channel surf A&E or TBS or LifeTime or any of the other second-tier networks late at night and one can get all of this kind of crap that they can stomach. Ever since the O.J. Simpson trial, true-life murder stories have attracted a box-office following. Most of them are women... many of whom become downright junkies for it; and a disturbingly significant number of them actually make decisions about things in their own lives based on the hysteria within them that the constant barrage of such stories drums-up. I have developed a deep and abiding disdain for this kind of television. I hope we don't bring it here, too.


And on to another subject...

Interesting story, there, little fauss -- especially the part where you flogged yourself for having fairly normal teenage hormones and acting more or less predictably in light thereof. I'm not defending your "catting about," mind you... but you should probably be a bit more understanding of it and not spend your life in some kind of eternal moralistic regret.

The sad thing -- or at least one of them -- about your story is that that 14-year-old boy probably never saw himself as a victim; probably thought he was the luckiest S.O.B. on the planet; and had the whole "getting caught" thing not happened, he would probably be bragging about it to his friends (and may be doing so anyway) for the next decade or longer.

I'll tell you exactly the psychology of it: She was sexually molested as a child or as a teenager by someone she trusted. Simple as that. Mark my words.

Maybe it was her father or one of his friends; maybe an uncle or a cousin or even a brother (but, in any case, it was almost certainly someone who was sufficiently older than she that he was more of a father-like figure than a cousin or a brother would typically be). Maybe it was her divorced mother's boyfriend (if, in fact, her parents were ever divorced or her father died and left her mother to remarry, or whatever). It could as easily have been a neighbor... or... oh... wait... [sarcasm]why didn't I think of this before[/sarcasm]: One of her teachers! Think back, little fauss... though you may not realize it, you probably even know who it was (since he was probably one of your teachers at some point, too).

It helps explain her behavior with you in the back of your old junker car, too. A voracious sexual appetite -- and by that, in this case, I mean something extraordinary, as your having singled it out in your memory from among your other teenaged sexual conquests would seem to suggest is the case -- with other boys her own age (and/or with men older than she) when she was a teenager; plus becoming a sexual predator of minor boys once she became an adult, is a fairly classic behavior of women who suffered child sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted (and the operative word, here, is "trusted") adult.

When I was researching my still-unpublished prostitution book (from which I had to take a few years off lest it emotionally consume me, but to which I hope to return someday) I came to the purely anecdotal conclusion that while all women who were sexually-molested as children by a trusted male adult certainly do not become prostitutes, nearly all prostitutes were sexually molested as children by a trusted male adult. Since my research of the subject, generally, quickly lead me away from the perhaps more titilating sexual aspects of it and, instead, to the stunning raft of actually far-more-interesting abuse-related issues, I also learned that child molesters -- especially when said child is of early teen-aged years -- is yet another thing that women who were sexually abused as children by a trusted adult often become.

We could get into a lengthy discussion, here, of how the consequences of the loss of "trust," and not sex, is actually one of key issues -- if not the pivotal issue -- in understanding how it all works; and how young women who are victimized in this way then try to desperately compensate using sex both as children and teenagers and, usually most disturbingly, later... as adults. But I, for one, am just not up for that discussion right now. Maybe there's a psych major here who'd like to tackle it. Or maybe what I've written, here, explains it enough.

Let's hope it's the latter.

My, how easily we moved from murder to mere molestation... not that the former isn't damned wrong and very serious, mind you. But it still ain't murder. Does the fact that its been proffered here in a "serial killer" thread portend that maybe some see it as sufficiently as serious as murder that it deserves a place here?

 

How far apart do murders need to be to be called "serial"? Douglas Dean, the man who has been writing the "degrees for prisoners" chapter in Bears' Guide for many years, was convicted of killing five members of the same family at the same time, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in 1971, when he was 19. Everyone agrees he was high on LSD when arrested. He claims he was given it unknowingly in a drink by high school cronies who didn't like him, and that he has no memory of the crime. He doesn't think he did it, and that it was done by people out to get him, but he acknowledges he cannot be certain. But at his trial, an expert somehow determined that he had taken the LSD after the murders were committed, and he was sentenced to life. He led an exemplary life before, and for the 34 years he's been incarcerated, earning a BA, MS (U of Wisconsin) and Ph.D. (U of South Africa) and is a licensed psychologist working with inmates and prison employees. When the state of Hawaii held a contest to design all aspects of a distance learning university, with the first prize being a bundle of cash and two weeks in Hawaii, Dean won it. He lives in (diminishing) hope that 60 Minutes or some other entity will look into his case, and find evidence of his innocence. He is theoretically eligible for parole, but each time it comes up, the family of the victims mounts a major public relations effort to persuade the parole board not to do it.

 

In this particular case, I need not turn to outside sources - my high school graduation yearbook has a picture of her as a Sophomore. I also lived less than 1/2 mile away from where Kristen French was abducted and knew many of Karla's friends. In fact, the father of one of her best friends was my favorite physics/calculus teacher at the same school.

Cheers,
Mark

 

__________________________________________
Interesting story, there, little fauss -- especially the part where you flogged yourself for having fairly normal teenage hormones and acting more or less predictably in light thereof. I'm not defending your "catting about," mind you... but you should probably be a bit more understanding of it and not spend your life in some kind of eternal moralistic regret.
___________________________________________


Perhaps I laid on the self-flaggelation a bit heavy, I'll agree, but every girl I ever tried to put my grubby mitts on was someone's little girl. And you start to see it a bit differently--more from a moralistic point of view--when you have a couple girls of your own approaching their teenage years!

___________________________________________
The sad thing -- or at least one of them -- about your story is that that 14-year-old boy probably never saw himself as a victim; probably thought he was the luckiest S.O.B. on the planet; and had the whole "getting caught" thing not happened, he would probably be bragging about it to his friends (and may be doing so anyway) for the next decade or longer.
___________________________________________


Of course, every school boy's dream.


___________________________________________
I'll tell you exactly the psychology of it: She was sexually molested as a child or as a teenager by someone she trusted. Simple as that. Mark my words.
___________________________________________


You know what? I believe you. I can't believe I never really formulated the thought until this moment when I read your post. I guess I always felt that there was something dark and shadowy around her, her family; I just never thought much about it; I was a kid.

___________________________________________
Think back, little fauss... though you may not realize it, you probably even know who it was.
___________________________________________


Yeah, I think I do, not I teacher I don't think, but yeah, there was something there.

___________________________________________
It helps explain her behavior with you in the back of your old junker car, too. A voracious sexual appetite -- and by that, in this case, I mean something extraordinary, as your having singled it out in your memory from among your other teenaged sexual conquests would seem to suggest is the case
___________________________________________


Yeah, she was almost desperate about it, surprised me, scared me a little.


You're not a bad amateur psychiatrist, I perceive.

Best to you.

 

FIRST, A LITTLE HOUSECLEANING: Wow... did I ever make a mistake. In the following thing that I earlier wrote:

• My, how easily we moved from murder to mere molestation... not that the former isn't damned wrong and very serious, mind you.

I meant "latter," not "former." Must have been tired. Sorry.

Though it was clearly not really your central point, the question bears answering. In my opinion -- and I think this is the way law enforcement views it, too -- it isn't the amount of time which passes between incidents but, rather, that there were multiple incidents at all. In other words, assuming that any murder or murders committed in a single incident is but one incident, the mere fact that there was a second (and/or successive incidents) makes it (them) "serial."

Man... too bad about Douglas Dean. So, he has a PhD, eh? Hey... didn't Steve Steurer, Executive Director of the Correctional Educational Association, tell everyone that murderer Jon Marc Taylor was the first person to get a PhD in prison? And wasn't that PhD a worthless Kennedy-Western degree, to boot?

SEE: http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17082

Ah... okay... now I see the connection to you. You should have provided the tie-in in the first place so we'd all be able to see the thematic near-miss aspect of it.

Understood.

Sadly, some would argue that that, on its face, makes him less of a victim. They'd be wrong, of course, but I've heard it argued.

No... I just like being right! [kidding... er... well... sort of]

And it probably wouldn't be a psychiatrist so much as, more likely, a psychologist, who would get to the bottom of something like that. But I'm not a good amateur one of those, either.

But what you do seem to be saying, perhaps without realizing it, is that all those years I tracked-down and interviewed, for my book, all those prostitutes, cops, prosecutors, johns, prostitutes, battered women's shelter operators, community group leaders, prostitutes, anti-prostitution activists, pro-prostitution activists, pastors, pimps, prostitutes, drug-dealers, health department heads, mayors, councilpersons, and, did I mention, prostitutes, etc., etc., etc., etc., wasn't a complete waste of my time; and that I actually learned something from it that I was later able to use here.

Whew! There's a relief. And I thought I almost went bankrupt and insane just for the sport of it.