Dogwoods Grow In The Shade

I’ve been considering this meeting for a long time. For weeks I debated even allowing it to take place. After that, I pondered the direction I would allow it to take. You see, it has been decades since I’ve allowed myself to make a decision without meticulous calculation. Emotions outside of the realm of serving myself have always been a foreign notion to me, but I learned how to emulate them early on, which obviously contributed to my successes.

Before I carry on, I should mention that the conclusions I reached in regards to this interview included the resigning of my personifying façade. After all, my friend, I have been incarcerated and I am hours from leaving this plane- I think I’ve earned the chance to learn what vulnerability feels like. But I digress.

I’ll spare you most of the early life biography, it really isn’t that captivating. It unfolds as you would expect any young psychopath’s. I found myself able to quickly analyze information at a tender age, but struggled with things as simple as a facial expression. I had almost unstoppable urges to kill animals and start fires, sometimes simultaneously. I wet the bed past the age that it was acceptable. Yes, the trifecta that would make any psychiatrist balk. My parents, astoundingly, did a sufficient job at keeping my atrocities a secret. My country-bumpkin instructors wrote my cold behavior off as a phase that I would eventually grow out of. Really, I was fortunate in that my childhood was less trying compared to others with my condition.

Anyhow, not being forced to contend with quack pediatric psychologists allowed my teenage curiosities to take hold. It was obvious that I wasn’t like everyone else. I started there, researching my own intellectuality, and consequently further developing my niche for analytics, cause and effect. I found this convenient, as my advanced ability to foresee consequences kept my hormonally driven desires from converting me into a meandering Neanderthal. My cold demeanor put off most female prospects, so I often considered simply taking what I wanted, but as I mentioned, consequences forbade my desire for conquest. I’ll pause a moment while you cope with the fact that I am not a repressed homosexual.

Moving on, there came a day in the late 1970s, just before I entered college, that I found the maiming of animals no longer satisfied. Fittingly, I began to consider the prospect of performing my atrocities on humans. You may find it odd that I never shrank from the concept. I simply realized that to do so would require extensive preparation if I was to remain a free man.

The university allowed me time to construct my feigned humanity. While I double majored in psychology and chemistry, I attended theater, constantly comparing the thespians’ performances to the reviews in the papers, deciphering which expressions were convincing and so on. I took human anatomy as an elective, devouring information so efficiently that I impressed many of my professors.

I will conclude this portion with the revelation that my first murder came in my third year of undergraduate. I simply could not bottle my thirst for blood any longer. Needless to say, it was sloppy and rudimentary, but I improved rapidly via repetition and revision. Eventually, and after a few close calls, I began to savor the juncture at which my victims’ expiration became imminent, their pleading and desperation giving me further insight into the spectrum of despair, hopelessness, and regret.

Most of what I did between the years of 1978 and 1982 is now a matter of public record. I avoided the senseless, unraveling spiral that you see out of control criminals initiate in film. I got out of the scientific field and into the real estate business, as sitting in a lab all day wasn’t conducive to meeting potential victims. I found some entertainment value in predicting the markets. Little did I know how wonderful this decision would be. I quickly became bored with simply murdering one person at a time. I wanted to broaden my horizons, so to speak, but I was a little short in regards to abstract creativity. But then came the Tylenol incident, and it was a revelation.

Anyone familiar with pharmaceuticals knows that tamper resistant packaging was a direct result of a still anonymous individual who placed cyanide randomly in Tylenol packets in 1982. Seven people met their demise. But you know that already. My first reaction was one of jealousy, knowing that I could never be so original. So, I decided I would do it better.

By the time I had finalized my plan, cameras in pharmacies were already on the rise. The aforementioned packaging was becoming more and more prominent. But I was not discouraged. I had already prepared for the need to frame some poor schmuk. That person turned out to be Stella Nickell.

I learned from the public data on her previous convictions that she was a prime candidate for a framing. Through observation, I learned that her relationship with her husband was so rocky that if I should make him a victim, she would certainly be a suspect. All it took was a trace of algaecide from her aquarium and some strategic planting of what I must say was some exquisitely produced cyanide in a few Excedrin bottles. In the end, I didn’t get to my casualty goal of five, but two was still better than what I had achieved to that point.

I moved to a different area of the country and let my work come to fruition for the next few years in court. Nickell went to prison for ninety years for something she hadn’t done but wished she had. Had I been capable of guilt, I predict I would have felt minimal amounts. I began planning my next masterpiece in 1984, stemming my desires with the simpler “one at a time” method at which I had become so proficient.

An early fascination of mine was the Zodiac killer. Everyone knows the story, so I’ll spare you the recount. I had spent what little leisure time I had in late college studying his letters, and although they confounded me, I viewed this less as a failure and more so as an homage. He or she was famous, but anonymous- credits without the consequences- my highest aspiration.

Heriberto Seda was the next subject of my discrete visitation. He was an interesting fellow, yet troubled, and once again he had various qualities that made him an easy scapegoat. He shared my fascination with the Zodiac killer, and also like me, had aspired to mimic him. Yet, he was embarrassingly sloppy, and therefore the circumstances were easy to manipulate. I watched from afar as he failed to murder two victims, and then I proceeded to kill three in his name as he continued to allow other victims to live.

I would venture to say that his setup was an easier task than Nickell’s. I wrote two anonymous letters with a similar style to the original Zodiac’s, which to my dismay were initially dismissed as a hoax, but eventually Seda was caught in 1996, and his desire for notoriety was so that he even confessed to the three murders I had committed. I was elated.

Let’s take a break, shall we? Surely you are curious as to what happened to my victims interspersed between my more infamous bloodletting. Well, I eventually lost count. But at one point in the late nineties I was averaging two a month. You see, real estate had become such a profitable venture for me that it consumed too much of my time for me to effectively design anything more grandiose than a bathtub dissection or heparin induced exsanguination.

I have professed already that I lack the necessary cortex for any variety of respectable creativity. What little expression I did attempt came in the form of disposal. I put various new twists on dismemberment, scattering parts by mail from multiple postal locations-you remember the panic- and disintegrating them with various concoctions. I buried people with lye, and incinerated them slowly while alive. I once allowed myself to lose control and removed someone’s head by repeatedly smashing them with a car door, the same vehicle they found in that pond in Boone, North Carolina.

Yes, I’m clearly a monster. But to maintain any semblance of what I consider happiness I had to constantly become more extravagant. Much like one’s taste in pornography, I had to constantly become more grotesque to achieve the desired effect.

Meanwhile, I became a multi-millionaire. I didn’t truly care, murder doesn’t cost much at its base, but my access to the superfluous allowed me to constantly experiment with more elaborate methods. There’s not many things on earth that are more enjoyable than disposing of someone on your yacht and then enjoying a ten thousand dollar bottle of red in the middle of the Atlantic.

Again, I will digress. In the early 2000s, I found myself idolizing Jack the Ripper. I found myself fancying our similarities- anonymous, multiple victims, knowledgeable in anatomy. I turned control of the day-to-day realty over to an associate who had been kissing my ass for a decade in order to permit myself time to plan. By 2008, I was ready.

Derek Brown was yet another idolizer, much like the aforementioned Seda. Regrettably, he had previous convictions regarding rape and had been a suspect in another murder. What’s more, he lived in the Whitechapel area, where prostitution was still prominent. I chose two women, and kept them sedated in one of my estate’s basements for several days while I ascertained access to Brown’s apartment.

I waited for him to depart alone, preventing an alibi, and brought both women into his bathroom. I injected them both with a compound similar to midazolam as I returned to the car I had stolen for my tools. I had, over time, purchased a set of what would have been surgical tools in the 19th century- for once I decided to be authentic. I proceeded to dismember both women, being as incautious as possible with their fluids, and then spent some time in the apartment as if I lived there. Then I left without my tools or tidying up.

It didn’t take long for the local authorities to interview Brown and search his apartment. In his panic upon discovering that his flat had been used for something grisly, he elected to cut out the carpet and have the walls repainted. Obviously, this was a mistake.

As Brown became a convicted murderer, I came upon a seminal moment. I never thought it could happen, but serial killing was, well… monotonous. I actually tried giving it up for a few months. Ha. During my self-prescribed abstinence, I came upon a second realization- given the fact I hadn’t even been suspected of wrong-doing for a quarter century, I deemed it safe to adopt the belief that in most instances, the illusion of security was present as a deterrent, but little beyond.

I decided in 2012 that domestic terrorism would likely satiate my desire for something more. The concept seemed simple enough- slip something into a large gathering of some variety. A sporting event would suffice, as there were always hired guards, but usually nothing to intimidate the more dedicated. Even if I were exposed, I could brutalize my way in and be gone just as the explosion destroyed any evidence of my being there. I could easily alter my appearance for any cameras and my extensive resume in the chemical field only added confidence.

My downfall, in the end, was my lack of respect for the upper levels of federal law enforcement. The locals were of no consequence, but the digital age has infiltrated all aspects of discretion. Despite my utilization of several reliable back channels, two of my acquisitions were flagged by the CIA. Three days before my plan came to fruition, a team of operatives entered one of my residences in Aspen and apprehended me.

Thus my reign as the world’s most sophisticated savage came to an end. Surely you can appreciate my run- not a soul knew that I was an active serial killer for over thirty years. The trial only revealed half of what I had done, and it was more than enough to imprison me here. Yet, my desire to kill persisted, and I have no intention of opposing it.

Speaking of resistance, did you notice that the guards have been gone for some time? Of course not, you are under the impression that I adore the sound of my own voice, and I am well aware of how numbingly captivating my story is, especially to a sensationalizing muck -rake like you. Is it a surprise that my financial success brings me considerable sway with the common man? As I mentioned, I have no intention of giving up my cause. After all, I’ve never killed anyone on national television before.

Credit: Pen_Phantom13