Fortunately, Sarah’s brush with Braae did not end with any skull shooting. “Cowboy Mike” (that’s what everyone called him at the bar) merely danced with her twice (and he was a pretty nifty dancer). We all watched them from across the room. When they finished, Sarah sheepishly ditched him and returned to our table of well-acquainted drunks; later that night, we teased her about having a new boyfriend while picking up some relatively terrible food at a Jack in the Box restaurant. And we never thought about Cowboy Mike again…until the Olympia cops apprehended him four weeks later. Sarah got to see his charming face on the front page of her newspaper. It seems he had jumped off a bridge into Evel Knievel’s Snake River, fleeing from local authorities who didn’t want him to kill any more of his guileless, enthusiastic, red-haired dance partners.
Somehow, I seem to have acquired three friends who have known serial killers. I find Sarah’s encounter especially intriguing, mostly because I happened to witness it firsthand; by total coincidence, I was visiting the very night Braae tried to flirt with her. However, the reason I find that encounter so interesting is not because I sat five feet from an alleged monster, nor is it because I’ve casually looked into the eyes of evil, nor is it that I feel like I’ve vicariously brushed against some twisted version of celebrity. It’s mostly because something now seems different about Sarah, even though she’s exactly the same. There’s a sexy residue to the whole Serial Killer Experience; somehow, it morphs the way I look at all the people who simply happened to collide with them (either by choice or by accident). There’s something amazingly modern about meeting a man who kills innocent strangers arbitrarily. It has a way of making someone’s personality abstractly sophisticated.
This is probably because serial killing is the most modern of high crimes, even though it’s not new in any official sense (Jack the Ripper’s 1888 London spree is the most obvious proof of this, but there are certainly others). The metaphoric newness of serial killing has nothing to do with chronology; it has to do with its meaning. At least culturally, there is something accelerated about the notion of killing strangers for no valid reason. It’s one of those nightmare situations we collectively try to rationalize into nonexistence, almost as if it’s entirely fictional. And most of the time, that rationalization makes sense: If a man is trying to kill you, his reasons—though flawed—are still usually within the scope of explanation; perhaps he wants to shoot you because you’re sleeping with his wife (or perhaps he just thinks you are, which is just as bad). If someone is trying to break into your house after midnight, he probably has a clear motive; he probably needs money to buy crack or crystal meth or Wonder Bread. Most American crime is no random accident. I suppose nobody deserves to die, but it certainly seems like most people in America who get murdered have put themselves in a position where getting shot or stabbed is not an unthinkable consequence; their lifestyle dictates a certain degree of risk. However, that’s not the case with serial killer victims. I realize serial killers tend to ice prostitutes more often than anyone else, but they’re not killing them because they’re prostitutes; it’s not like serial killers are sexual moralists.[62] Hookers are simply easier to kill (no one notices when they disappear). If given the choice, the typical serial killer would just as soon shoot a dental assistant. In fact, he’d just as soon shoot someone like you, and maybe someday he will. This is why serial killing strikes me as such a modern act: It validates the seemingly irrational fear that someone you’ve never met before will just decide to capriciously end your life. It’s not figuratively senseless (like a gangland killing, which is stupid but still explicable), it’s literally senseless (inasmuch as there’s no connection between the two involved parties and no benefit to the assailant, beyond giving him the opportunity to masturbate on—or into—a corpse).
My obsession with serial killers began when I was ten years old. My fourth-grade teacher told our class that we should never hitchhike, because the only people who picked up hitchhikers were perverted serial killers. This advice was complicated by what my fifth-grade teacher told us the following year; she said that we would all have driver’s licenses in a few years, and the one rule we always needed to remember was never to pick up hitchhikers. This was because all hitchhikers were serial killers. According to what I learned in public school, every person on every freeway was trolling for destruction. I used to imagine nomadic, sadistic drifters thumbing rides with bloodthirsty Volkswagen owners, both desperately waiting for the first opportunity to kill each other. Hitchhiking seemed like an ultraviolent race against time.
Keeping this threat in mind, I began casually studying serial killers in my spare time, mostly through TV documentaries on PBS and British books with comical names like The Mammoth Book of Murder and The Mammoth Book of Killer Women. Due to my age (and my interest in the band W.A.S.P.), I suspect part of me was intrigued by the necrophilia gruesomeness of the police reports. However, what I found more fascinating were the skewed details about the killers’ lives, all of which seemed more original and more clichéd than anything I experienced through literature or film. It didn’t “almost” seem funny; it seemed completely funny, pretty much all the time. I will never forget the 1985 arrest of Richard Ramirez, the infamous California “Night Stalker.” At one point in his court hearing, Ramirez held up his hand with a pentagram scrawled on the palm and hissed the word “Evil!” My cousin Greg and I were twelve when this happened, and we saw this particular image on television while attending a weeklong Catholic retreat that was hosted by local nuns. For the whole week, we drew pentagrams on our paws with ballpoint pens and constantly said “Evil!” in the hope of amusing the girls at this event, most of whom loved Culture Club and wore Esprit T-shirts. This was the same week we learned how to be altar boys.
However, my interest in guys like Ramirez went a little further than Greg’s, since he only saw all this as comical. At a very early age, an understanding of serial killers seemed important to me. The fact that Ramirez and I had the same favorite AC/DC song ( “Night Prowler”) didn’t freak me out, but it certainly made me wonder if I was somehow predisposed to freakish impulses. My all-time favorite serial killer was the never-captured Zodiac, the San Francisco–based mastermind who bragged to newspapers about his murders through a byzantine code and may have actually killed people because of his interest in math.[63] Somehow, that sounded like something I would come up with. I didn’t relate to these guys, per se, but I always wondered if I was a “serial person”—a Midwestern Zodiac who simply had no desire to kill.
This is why I can’t resist badgering my acquaintances who have encountered genuine madmen; perhaps my obsession with serial killers has less to do with what makes them different from everyone else and more to do with what makes them similar to those of us who don’t feel compelled to kill hookers. As I said, I have three such chums: Beyond serving as a firsthand witness to Sarah’s dance-a-thon with the second-rate death machine Cowboy Mike, I also know a guy who became friends with John Wayne Gacy (the much publicized “Clown Killer”) and another who attended high school with Jeffrey Dahmer (the most stridently prototypical serial killer in pop history). Much to their unilateral annoyance, I continually find myself compelled to ask them different versions of the same question: What does it mean to know a serial killer? And it seems like the answer is the same every single time.
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1. It should be noted that certain experts disagree with me on this point; some are prone to classify one genre of serial killers as “mission-oriented,” which means they aspire to kill specific people (such as hookers) in order to improve society. Other classifications include “visionary motive” types (who imagine voices inside their head), “thrill-oriented” killers (who find the process of murder exciting), and “lust killers” (who actively get a sexual thrill from torture and execution).
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2. One of the Zodiac’s many coded missives included a reference to the semi-esoteric mathematical concept of “radians,” which are 57.3-degree arcs used to calculate circles (2 × pi radians = 360 degrees). Amazingly, it turns out Zodiac’s victims were always found at perfect radian intervals in relation to the summit of nearby Mount Diablo. It does not appear that this could be a coincidence, especially since one of Zodiac’s victims was a cabdriver who was instructed to drive to a specific location before being shot. This kind of “evil mathematical genius” behavior is part of the reason some people erroneously suspected that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had been the Zodiac Killer as a younger man.