Indeed, there is nothing in his face at all. If the audience had expected the dark gaze that had met a news photographer’s camera when he was led into a federal courthouse on the day of his arraignment four years ago — a shot engraved in collective memory, deranged Eyes of a Killer — they don’t see it. If they had anticipated the beatific look of the self-described born-again Christian interviewed on 60 Minutes and PrimeTime Live in the last year, they don’t see that either.
The killer’s face is without expression. A sheet of blank paper. A calm and empty sea. A black hole in the center of a distant galaxy. Void. Cold. Vacant
The killer lakes his seat in the hard wooden chair. The state trooper hands him a cordless microphone before taking his position behind the chair. The arm restraints are left unfastened; the belts remain limp. Long moments pass as he opens the manila folder in his lap, then Charles Gregory Doblin — there is no way anyone here can think of him as Charlie Doblin, as his neighbors once did, or Chuck, as his late parents called him, or as Mr. Dobbs, as nineteen teenagers did in their last hours of life: it’s the full name, as written in countless newspaper stories, or nothing else — Charles Gregory Doblin begins to speak.
His voice is very soft; it holds a slightly grating Northeastern accent, high-pitched now with barely concealed nervousness, but otherwise it’s quite pleasant. A voice for bedtime stories or even pillow talk with a lover, although by all accounts Charles Gregory Doblin had remained a virgin during the thirty-six years he spent as a free man. He quietly thanks the university for inviting him here to speak this evening, and even earns a chuckle from the audience when he praises the cafeteria staff for the bowl of chili and the grilled cheese sandwich he had for dinner backstage. He doesn’t know that the university cafeteria is infamous for its food, and he could not possibly be aware that three cooks spat in his chili just before it was delivered to the auditorium.
Then he begins to read aloud from the six sheets of single-spaced typewritten paper in his lap. It s a fairly long speech, the delivery slightly monotone, but his diction is practiced and nearly perfect. He tells of childhood in an abusive family: an alcoholic mother who commonly referred to him as a little shit and a racist father who beat him for no reason. He tells of having often eaten canned dog food, heated in a pan on a hibachi in the bathroom, for dinner because his parents could afford nothing better, and of going to school in a slum neighborhood where other kids made fun of him because of his size and the adolescent lisp that he didn’t completely overcome until he was well into adulthood.
He describes the afternoon when he was attacked by three black teenagers who beat him without mercy only because he was a big dumb white kid who had the misfortune of shortcutting through their alley on the way home from school. His voice remains steady as he relates how his father gave him another even more savage beating that same evening, because he had allowed two niggers to get the better of him.
Charles Gregory Doblin tells of a lifelong hatred for black people that became ever more obsessive as he became an adult: the brief involvement with the Klan and the Brotherhood of Aryan Nations before bailing out of the white supremacy movement in the belief that they were all rhetoric and no action; learning how some soldiers in Vietnam used to collect the ears of the gooks they had killed: the night nine years ago when, on impulse, he pulled over on his way home from work at an electronics factory to give a lift to a sixteen-year-old black kid thumbing a ride home.
Now the audience stirs. Legs are uncrossed, crossed again over the other knee. Hands guide pens across paper. Eighteen hundred pairs of eyes peer through the darkness at the man on the stage.
The auditorium is dead silent as the killer reads the names of the nineteen teenagers that he murdered during the course of five years. Besides being black and living in black neighborhoods scattered across the same major city, there are few common denominators among his victims. Some were street punks, one was a sidewalk crack dealer, and two were homeless kids looking for handouts, but he also murdered a high school basketball star, a National Merit Scholarship winner recently accepted by Yale, a rapper wannabe who sang in his church choir, an aspiring comic book artist, and a fifteen-year-old boy supporting his family by working two jobs after school. All had the misfortune of meeting and getting into a conversation with an easygoing while dude who had money for dope, beer, or pizza; they had followed him into an alley or a parked car or some other out-of-the-way place, then made the mistake of letting Mr. Dobbs step behind them for one brief, fatal moment... until the night one kid managed to escape.
The audience listens as he says that he is sorry for the evil he has done, as he explains that he was criminally insane at the time and didn’t know what he was doing. They allow him to quote from the Bible, and some even bow their heads as he offers a prayer for the souls of those he has murdered.
Charles Gregory Doblin then closes the folder and sits quietly, hands folded across his stomach, ankles crossed, head slightly bowed with his eyes in shadow. After a few moments, the dean comes back out on stage; taking his position behind the lectern, he announces that it is now time for the Q&A session.
The first question comes from a nervous young girl in the third row center: She timidly raises her hand and, after the dean acknowledges her, asks the killer if he has any remorse for his crimes. Yes, he says. She waits for him to continue; when he doesn’t, she sits down again.
The next question is from a black student farther back in the audience. He stands and asks Charles Gregory Doblin if he killed those nineteen kids primarily because they were black, or simply because they reminded him of the teenagers who had assaulted him. Again, Charles Gregory Doblin only says yes. The student asks the killer if he would have murdered him because he is black, and Charles Gregory Doblin replies that, yes, he probably would have. Would you kill me now? No, I would not. The student sits down and scribbles a few notes.
More hands rise from the audience; one by one, the dean lets students pose their questions. Has he seen the made-for-TV movie based on his crimes? No, he hasn’t; there isn’t a television in the maximum security ward of the prison, and he wasn’t told about the movie until after it was aired. Did he read the book? No, he hasn’t, but he’s been told that it was a bestseller. Has he met any members of the families of his victims? Not personally, aside from spotting them in the courtroom during his trial. Has any of them attempted to contact him? He has received a few letters, but aside from the one from the mother who sent him a Bible, he hasn’t been allowed to read any correspondence from the families. What does he do in prison? Read the Bible he was sent, paint, and pray. What does he paint? Landscapes, birds, the inside of his cell. If he could live his life all over again, what would he do differently? Become a truck driver, maybe a priest. Is he receiving a lecture fee from this visit? Yes, but most of it goes into a trust fund for the families of his victims, with the rest going to the state for travel expenses.
All this time, his gaze remains centered on a space between his knees, as if he is reading from an invisible Teleprompter. It is not until an athletic-looking young man in the tenth row asks him, in a rather arch voice, whether he received any homoerotic gratification when he committed the murders — an erection, perhaps? perhaps a fleeting vision of his father? — that Charles Gregory Doblin raises his eyes to meet those of his questioner. He stares silently at the pale young man for a long, long time, but says nothing until the student sits down again.
An uncomfortable hush follows this final question; no more hands are raised. The dean breaks the silence by announcing that the Q&A session is now over. He then glances at one of the guards standing in the wings, who gives him a slight nod. There will be a brief fifteen-minute intermission, the dean continues, then the program will resume.