Whenever he was given the opportunity, according to Rashid, the black man showed his natural superiority — in track and field, in baseball and football and basketball, and even in what he labeled “Jewish” sports — golf and tennis and bowling. (There were few great black equestrians, he explained, because that too involved subjugation and domination, of the horse by the rider.) Chess, for which he apparently had a passion, provided further proof of black superiority; a game of the intellect, it was studied out of books by the Jews and their followers, while black children took to it naturally and played it well without having to study it.
It was now the black man’s burden — his phrase — to separate himself entirely from white society, and to establish his innate supremacy in every area of human endeavor, exerting dominion over and, yes, enslaving whites if need be, in order to usher in the new millennium with the black-run human civilization that was essential if the planet itself was to survive.
Predictably enough, there was a strong move to oust him from his sinecure at Queens College. (Ray Gruliow represented him in his successful battle to hang on to his academic tenure, and insisted that he liked Rashid personally. “I don’t know how much of that horseshit he believes,” he once told me. “It hasn’t kept him from hiring a Jewish lawyer.”) He won in court, then resigned dramatically and announced he was starting his own academic institution. His supporters had managed to get title to a full square block in the St. Albans section of Queens, and there they constructed a walled compound to house the new black university and the greater portion of its students and faculty.
Julian Rashid lived there, with his two wives and several children. (Although the inevitable rumors had circulated of a passion for white women, both wives were dark-skinned, with African features. They looked enough alike, in fact, to give rise to another rumor to the effect that they were sisters, or even twins.) A guard was posted around the clock outside of Rashid’s living quarters, and a phalanx of armed men in khaki uniforms accompanied him whenever he left the compound, which in turn was fortified and guarded twenty-four hours a day.
At a press conference shortly after the news broke of Will’s latest open letter, Rashid announced that he welcomed the challenge. “Let him come. It is true that he embodies the will of his people. They have always hated us, and now that they can no longer dominate us they wish to annihilate us. So let him come to me, and let the will of the white race break itself upon the rock of black will. We shall see whose will is stronger.”
Nothing happened for a week. Then the police were summoned to the St. Albans compound, where they had never previously dared attempt entry. A group of his followers, some of them members of the uniformed bodyguard, others weeping youths and children, led the way to Rashid’s private quarters and into his bedroom. Rashid was in his bed, or rather his body was. His head had been placed upon a small devotional altar he had built at the far end of the room, and stared out from among a group of wooden carvings and strings of trading beads. He had been beheaded, a medical examination determined, with a single stroke of a ceremonial ax, itself a highly prized artifact of the Senufo tribe of the Ivory Coast.
How could Will have managed it? How could he penetrate the compound’s airtight security, slipping in and out like a ghost? Theories abounded. Will was black himself, one contingent maintained, and a comparative linguistics graduate student at Columbia was quick to buttress that argument with an analysis of Will’s letters, purportedly proving an African origin for their author. Someone else suggested that Will had disguised himself as a black man, darkening his face like a player in a minstrel show. The political rectitude of each position was held up to scrutiny. Was it racist to assume the killer was white? Was it more racist to assume he was black? The Senufo ax was not the only one around; everybody, it seemed, had an ax of his own to grind.
The debate was just warming up when the police announced the arrest of Marion Scipio, a trusted associate of Rashid’s and a member of his inner circle. Scipio (né Marion Simmons; Rashid had suggested the change with a nod to Scipio Africanus) had broken down under police interrogation and admitted he’d seized the opportunity of Will’s open letter to right a longstanding injury. Apparently Rashid’s libido had not been slaked by his two official wives, sisters or twins or whatever they were, and he’d had a fling with Scipio’s wife. Scipio only had one wife, and he’d taken this the wrong way. When his chance came around, he took the Senufo ax down from the wall and made Rashid a head shorter.
Will was so pleased you’d have thought he did it himself. His next letter, posted hours after Scipio’s arrest and confession became public knowledge, restated the theme of his letter upon the death of Roswell Berry. The people’s will had found expression. What did it matter who swung the ax?
And there he’d let it lie for the ten days or so since. There were other voices — letters and phone calls purporting to be from Will, but clearly not, a couple of anonymous bomb threats, one of which cleared a midtown office building. McGraw got a handwritten letter, “An Open Letter to the So-called Marry McGraw,” whose semi-literate author blamed him for Will’s reign of terror. “You’ll pay for this in your own blood, asshole,” the letter concluded, and it was signed with a large red X that covered half the page. (A lab analysis quickly established that the X was not in fact blood, but red Magic Marker.)
It took the cops just two days to pick up Mr. X, who turned out to be an unemployed construction worker who’d written the letter on a dare and then boasted about it in a saloon. “He thinks he’s hot shit,” he said of McGraw, but outside of that he didn’t really have anything against him, and certainly planned him no harm. The poor son of a bitch was charged with menacing and coercion in the first degree, the latter a Class D felony. They’d probably let him plead to a misdemeanor and my guess was he’d get off with probation, but in the meantime he was out on bail and not feeling terribly proud of himself.
And the city went on speculating about Will. There was a new joke about him every day. (Publicist to client: “I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news is you’re the subject of a column in tomorrow’s Daily News. The bad news is Marty McGraw’s writing it.”) He kept winding up in your conversation, as had happened at least once that very evening, when TJ assured me that computers would ultimately reveal Will’s true identity. There was, of course, no end of guesswork about the sort of person he was and the sort of life he was likely to be leading. There was guesswork, too, as to who would next draw his attention. One shock jock had invited his listeners to submit names for Will’s consideration. “We’ll see who gets the most votes,” he told his unseen drive-time audience, “and I’ll announce your top choices over the air. I mean, who knows? Maybe he’s a listener. Maybe he’s a big fan.”
“If he’s listening,” purred the fellow’s female sidekick, “you better hope he’s a fan.”
That was on a Friday. When he returned to the air on Monday morning, he’d had a change of heart. “We got lots of letters,” he said, “but you know what? I’m not announcing the results. In fact I’m not even tabulating them. I decided the whole thing’s sick, not just the poll but the whole Will fever that’s gripping the city. Talk about everybody’s baser instincts. You wouldn’t believe some of the jokes that are going around, they are truly sick and disgusting.” And, to prove the point, he told four of them, one right after the other.
The police, of course, were under enormous pressure to find the guy and close the case. But the sense of urgency was very different from that surrounding Son of Sam, or any of the other serial killers who had cropped up over the years. You weren’t afraid to walk the streets, not for fear of Will stalking you and gunning you down. The average person had nothing to fear, because Will didn’t target average people. On the contrary, he took aim only at the prominent, and more specifically at the notorious. Look at his list of victims — Richie Vollmer, Patsy Salerno, Roswell Berry, and, if indirectly, Julian Rashid. Wherever you stood in the social and political spectrum, your response to each of Will’s executions was apt to be that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.