At age nine, the illiterate Otto burgled a neighboring farm of twenty-nine cents hidden in a flour jar and a “plump laying hen.” The money was traded to another farm boy for a rusty clasp knife. The bird was found off the pitted dirt path that led to the decrepit Retzak homestead, gutted, its eyes scooped out, its head yanked off manually.
When confronted, Otto admitted his guilt “with no sense of childish shame, on the contrary, he boasted.” Beaten by his mother with special severity, he was turned over to the neighbors, who added their own lash-work to his tender back and worked him as a barn-hand for a month of fourteen-hour days.
The day after returning home, Otto stabbed his younger sister in the face without apparent provocation. As Superintendent T. W. Joseph Teller recounted: “A cold eye, even a sly smile, he did present to all those in attendance as the girl shrieked and wept and bled.”
The local sheriff was called in and Otto was locked in a cell with adult miscreants. Two months later, the boy, bruised and limping, was brought before an itinerant magistrate who warned him about “substantial characterological degeneracy” and sentenced him to five years in a state reform school. There, Otto claimed to have learned that “mankind is not glorious nor good nor fashioned in God’s image. Rather it is a dung-heap of stink and sin and hypocrisy. The hatred that was to drive me for the entirety of my accursed life took hold and was fed in that dark place. The outrages that were done to my person and mind in the name of spiritual cure were of benefit to me in a manner that could not be predicted. They turned my belly to iron and my mind toward revenge.”
Bound over for two extra years because of chronic disciplinary problems, sixteen-year-old Otto, now strapping and hard-muscled, was released. “Of a surprising pleasant countenance when not enraged, Retzak presented the thoughtful mien and demeanor of a man in his twenties. Yet all that could change in a trice.”
During his stay in the reformatory, the boy had been befriended by the wife of one of the guards, a woman named Bessie Arbogast. Impressed by Otto’s drawings, she brought him paper and charcoal sticks and it was to her house that he headed on his initial day of freedom.
“Once free of his bonds, the incorrigible repaid Mrs. Arbogast’s kindnesses by entering her bedroom through an open window.”
What commenced was described in Retzak’s alleged words, though the flowery language made Isaac wonder if Teller had taken substantial literary liberties.
“In the chamber of her common little snuggery, enriched by the pleasure of violating her worm of a husband, as well as her flabby person and dewy-eyed soul, I used a wooden hairbrush in plain sight to bash him energetically about the head. Feeling quite fond of myself, then had my way with her in manners all the more pleasurable to me for their unspeakability.”
William Arbogast survived the beating as a cripple. His wife’s trauma rendered her “virtually mute.”
Retzak escaped on foot and avoided capture. Traveling the country by hopping freight trains, he survived by eating pilfered domestic animals and produce, and meals donated by kindhearted housewives. Often, he repaid them by doing odd jobs before moving on. Sometimes he left them drawings that were “universally appreciated. The young man was capable of capturing garden scenes and furniture with utmost accuracy. It was only the portrayal of the human figure that posed technical problems for him.”
“Interestingly,” Teller went on, “during this period, Retzak did not choose to inflict similar punishments upon these altruistic women as he had upon Mrs. Arbogast. When I inquired as to the cause of this discrepancy, Retzak seemed genuinely puzzled.
“I do not know why I do what I do. Sometimes I have the urge and other times I don’t. Sometimes my brain remains cool and other times it boils like a cauldron of lard. I am not controlled in my impulses as are most men and I do not regret the lack of restraint in my soul. I have been anointed by Satan or howsoever you recognize The Dark Angel to behave in the way that I do and I have obeyed my Master with the same mechanic idiocy as the fools and worms who squander their wretched little lives kneeling before the altar of some blabbering lying Diety.”
It was, Teller concluded, “a great puzzle of medicine and characterology, in that Retzak’s entire anatomy, including his brain, has been examined by learned physicians and found unremarkable. This has included detailed measurement of his cranium by practitioners of the discipline called phrenology, now considered of questionable scientific merit by some, but employed in the hope of ascertaining basic truths about the fiend. That analysis deciphered nothing out of the ordinary, as did all other analyses. One can only hope that exposure to the twisted workings of this monster’s soul as put forth by this humble tract will benefit mankind. That is, in fact, the purpose of The Author.”
At the age of eighteen, Retzak made his way to San Francisco, where he was hired as a deckhand aboard the steamer Grand Tripoli bound for the Orient. The ship made a stop in Hawaii, where Retzak took shore leave and abandoned his post.
“In Honolulu, Retzak embarked on a course of drunkenness and debauchery with numerous women of ill repute. Soon, he was living in common law with a prostitute, a fallen Alsatian girl named Ilette Flam, spectral and pasty as such types tend to be, and an opium addict. Retzak appointed himself Ilette’s procurer and for a period of nearly one year, sustained himself with her ill-gotten earnings.”
On Retzak’s nineteenth birthday, Ilette threw a party for him at a waterfront dive. During that celebration, she made an offhand remark that annoyed Retzak and when the two of them returned to their flat, an argument ensued. Retzak claimed not to recall the precise manner in which Ilette Flam had offended his sensibilities. However, when challenged by myself on this point, he owned up that “it was something about my being lazy. The sow was hazy with dope and booze and believed my intake of rum would dull my thinking and allow her to insult me with no consequence. Just the opposite! My senses were heightened and every stupid remark from her flapping sow lips served to inflame me further! When she uttered another taunt- perhaps it was something that challenged my intelligence- a definite thought crossed my field of vision like a beacon: your sow brain is that of a mindless animal.”
Waiting until Ilette had fallen into a drugged stupor “because she’d earned me a fair bit of money and for the most part she wasn’t all-bad,” Retzak put her to bed, turned her on her stomach, picked up an iron pry bar and bashed the back of her head.
“The skull cracked like an egg and gobbets of brains seeped out, accompanied by a clearish liquid, then some blood. The sight of it thrilled me as nothing had thrilled me before. New feelings took hold of my mind and I maintained a focused wielding of bar against bone. Specks of the tissue sprayed out like the finest mist and adhered to the walls. When a large brainy clot slipped down the back of her dress, I stared at it, amazed that this ugly grayish pink gelatin might very well house what Christian fools considered the seat of the soul. Could there be anything more hideous? Just one look at the cloudy mucus would inform any logical man that religion is rot. Suddenly, I was awash in calm and sat gazing at my handiwork with rapture. It was a new feeling and I quite liked it. I fetched my tablet of drawing paper and some pens I’d stolen from Berringer’s Department Store in Waikiki. As the sow lay there, leaking and seeping and Demonstrably Dead, I drew her. For the first time I was able to capture the human form with a degree of accuracy.”