The Sentence - Chapter 2: Method

     The judge tiredly slammed his gavel down, again and again, his eyes cast down to the bar, kneading his forehead with his other hand. Anyone could see how badly he wanted this to be over. It had been a long ordeal, and presiding over such a case is a dubious honor for a judge. His biggest responsibility is to ensure there is not a mistrial, which is no mean feat in itself. During the Manson Family trial, the antics of Charlie and his followers threatened to derail the whole thing, even going so far as to make an attempt on the judge’s life, in open court. If a mistrial is declared, the whole thing starts over with a new judge, new jury, new prosecution, less cooperative witnesses and possibly tainted evidence. Nothing could stop it now though. The verdict was in, and all that was left to the public’s imagination was the sentence.

      He rose to his feet, gathered himself up and bellowed “QUIET!” The effect was instant. “I will not hesitate to clear this courtroom and have you all charged with contempt of court.”

      “Believe me,” he uttered with grave force, settling back into his chair, “this court has plenty of contempt for anyone disrupting these proceedings further.”

      His honor had been faced with a difficult decision, more so than usual even for a murder case. Didn’t seem either of the possible sentences were suitable for the killer, considering how far off the map these killings were, and the motive behind them.

      The defense asked to approach the bench, and a frenzied exchange of whispers and gestures occurred. He pointed to the little man that had the defendant all flustered, and again, the monster visibly shrunk down in his chair.

      In the next few moments, my mind raced through the facts of the case one more time.

~

      The police took their sweet time finding the guy, partially because they were too dense to even consider the killings linked. For one thing, the only common theme any of these killings had was that they were brutal. Each crime scene was a frigging tableau, Jackson Pollack but with brains and guts instead of paint. No discernible m.o., just death and destruction. They figure, a guy’s a shooter, he’s a burner, he’s a stabber, a strangler, but he’s not usually all of them. They insist that serial killings are rigidly ordered. Me, I figure no serial killer really has what you’d call an orderly mind in the first place. But the jakes, they look for patterns and they rule out anything that don’t fit.

     Serial killers also like to take trophies or leave a calling card, and there was none of that either. No ears cut off, no esoteric symbols left at the crime scene. Sometimes they leave notes or write a letter to the paper, taunting the cops, playing cat-and-mouse, like they’re daring the cops to catch them, thinking they’re too smart to get caught, but again there was none of that.

      Probably the biggest reason they didn’t get hip was because he scattered the murders over so many jurisdictions. The Zodiac killer had done the exact same thing, and at first the different police departments would have dick-measuring contests over the bodies, jockeying for the collar, the bragging rights and commendations should they be the one to find the guy. Even after they begrudgingly cooperated, this was when fax machines were just coming into use, and certainly way before cell phones, the internet and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Guess what? He was never caught.

      Sometimes they catch the guy because the bodies start to pile up and his house smells like shit so the neighbors complain and somebody comes over, and they find out that the guy they thought was just another birthday party clown has bodies stacked up under the house in the crawlspace. Not this guy. Most of the time he left the bodies right there, although not every time, because he really didn’t have a pattern.

      His first victim, he burned to death. She was a junkie whore, and she burned up on a mattress in a drug den, so at first it didn’t even look like a murder, more like she passed out riding the white horse. Absolutely no investigation whatsoever, and not really much chance for an autopsy, there wasn’t much left of her. The fire was small and didn’t spread to the rest of the building, so it was a little while before they found her, and what the fire hadn’t consumed, the rats took care of. They close the case, and I write my little blurb and it’s over.

      His next victim, he shot point blank range under the chin, only the stiff was found holding the gun, and his hands tested positive for gun powder residue, so at first it was considered self-inflicted. They dig just a little bit and find out the guy’s life was a wash, he was totally fucked up and as far as they could tell, had every reason to off himself. Again, they wrap it up, I write an inch or so on page fifteen and move on, and none of us have a clue.

      The third, he hanged, and again it looked like another suicide at first glance. It happened a couple hundred miles away from the other two, the stiff swinging from a barn rafter. Maybe, just maybe, if they had been looking really hard for it, they might have found a footprint, but it still wouldn’t have helped, because believe it or not, he never wore the same pair of shoes, or even the same clothes, on any two kills. He was homeless, he’d been living on the streets for years and wore whatever clothes and shoes he could get from churches, the salvation army, whatever. So even when they really started investigating, they weren’t finding fibers from clothing that matched, because he simply didn’t leave any. He didn’t plan it out that way, he just lucked out by way of being a fucking vagrant.

      It wasn’t until he started stabbing, strangling and bludgeoning his victims that the only discernible link was found. A very small thing indeed, but it was too glaring to ignore.

       A disproportionate number of the bodies turned out to be killed by somebody left-handed.

      Even if they had known the first three killings were murders, nobody would have been wise to the real skinny on that. There is no way in the world to tell a fire was lit by someone’s left hand. Everything burns, including fingerprints. His second kill was quick, impersonal and effective. Better still, there was no way to identify the shooter as right handed or left, since the trajectory was from the victim’s own hand, all he did was squeeze. With the hanging, who can really say which hand yanked the chair out from under him?

      Now that I had a hunch that something deeper was going on, I started pulling all the info on every murder, suicide, accidental death and anything I found the least bit fishy, and once I had it all in front of me, it was too glaring to ignore.

      Without a trail of bread crumbs to lead them to it, a lot of these cops couldn’t find their own dick, plus there’s usually a decade or so worth of donuts hanging off the front end, blocking the view. So occasionally a concerned citizen such as myself volunteers some information. This is my beat, after all. I’m the crime writer, I’m supposed to know this stuff. Usually I don’t give a shit, but I knew I had to do something this time, because it looked like I was the only one to notice what was really going on.

      They tried to write off a few of them as gang related, but that didn’t smell right to me. The average gang-banger doesn’t bother to make a work of art out of a dead body just to prove a point, he just caps the guy and gets the hell out of there. He wants to make a point, he shoots up the funeral.

      Then they tried to say a few of the victims, which were prostitutes, were killed either by their clients or their pimps. The former was more believable than the latter, as no pimp is going to bother killing one of his bitches. She causes him trouble, he slaps the shit out of her, maybe cuts up her face so she can’t work for the competition, but he don’t risk the heat that a body will bring down on him. The second option didn’t seem likely either. It’s happened many times, believe me, but the guy feeds her to the gators or something, he don’t go all Jack The Ripper on her. Plus, there was no evidence of a sexual assault found on these particular girls, and to me that was the real proof. What john is gonna kill a whore he hasn’t done the deed with?

      Now, the cops all know me, and most of them don’t like me. The feeling would be mutual if I had any feelings left. Pretty sure I’ve sanitized them all away by now, between the whiskey and the masochistic career choice. Anyway, I knew they’d be indignant and ignore me if I actually tried to point this out to them, so I just did an end around and hit them where it hurts: the front page.

      I went to my editor and said I’ve got a story that is pretty hot, but it’s no good if it doesn’t go on the front page. Our town ain’t Manhattan, but it ain’t Mayberry either. I really had to compete for a couple inches of real estate on 1A, and I had to wait for a slow news day to run it, and still I ended up below the fold but the effect was immediate and forceful.

      I nicknamed the killer “Southpaw,” and ran a story that pretty much accused the cops of ignoring the fact that there was a serial killer on the loose. I wasn’t even totally sure if it was true, but that’s the beauty of my job, it doesn’t have to be.

      Surprised? Maybe you’re caught up in words like “accuracy” and “unbiased.” Where people ever got that idea, I will never know. The paper I write for is a business, and we sell what people want to buy.

      There’s no law that says newspapers have to print the truth, thanks to the 1^st Amendment. All we have to do is not print anything that will get us sued, so we use words like “alleged,” “supposed” and “suspected.” It’s a loophole that’s so gigantic you could drive an eighteen-wheeler through it. Whenever we print something that’s not a fact, we just have to admit it in print. If we’re making an assumption, we just call it that.

      Anyway, it worked. The public clamored for something to be done, and the local politicos made a big show of urging them to act swiftly. The cops were pissed but they had to bust ass to make it look like they were on the trail. Meanwhile I had to start riding the bus for a while, because any time I got in my car I was pulled over for something.

      “Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?” Yeah, because you’re a prick but you can get away with it because you’ve got your prick license pinned to your chest, and another one on your hip with 15 bullets in it.

      Once they were hip to something more going on than your usual insanity, they started finding other links to the crimes, mostly in the identities of the victims. None of them was a saint, if you know what I mean. One was a junkie, the next a hooker, another was a drug dealer, one was a sleazy lawyer with a taste for Italian suits (wink wink, nudge nudge), another was a doctor that performed abortions… you get the drift. Turns out, the real link was the motive, not the methods.

~

      Finally the slime-ball attorney defending the guy threw up his hands and stormed off back to his table. He’d tried every hail-mary in his playbook, and he was out of options. This sentencing hearing was the last of his obligations to his client, and he didn’t seem relieved at all. In fact, he seemed downright disturbed by what he figured was about to happen. The judge began,

      “It is the opinion of this Court that neither of the possible sentences for the crimes for which the defendant has been convicted will be suitable punishment. Therefor, the Court must now entertain… alternatives.” He gestured to the State’s table. “Counselor, proceed.”

      “Your honor,” the prosector said with a smug little grin, “the People call Dr. Stiller.”

     I’ll be damned, the guy's not a lawyer after all, he's a shrink.

Room 1025

She’s shriveled down to almost nothing. Each breath she takes is a labor. Still smiling, still glad to see me. I can’t bear to tell her the truth.

I was on my way to see her in the hospital, just outside of Charlottesville, and the Greyhound caught a shudder in the drive train. All engine noises ceased, replaced by various “what-the-fuck”s and “you’ve-got-to-be-kidding”s. Indignant first-timers’ protests, outraged by not getting their sixty bucks’ worth, mingled with veteran road-warriors’ one-of-those-days, happens-all-the-time mutterings.

“Did the bus just die?” asks a passenger who already knows the answer.

“Sho as shit did,” declares the driver, who was waiting for this to happen.

He waits a few, turns the key and hope springs eternal as the dinosaur coughs back to life, and we get another mile or two before the inevitable rises its ugly head and brief history repeats itself. This happens three more times before he throws in the towel and calls back to Richmond for help.

Acknowledging the circumstance, we all get off the bus, on the side of some poorly marked highway in front of somebody’s house. The more stoic passengers prepare for the long haul by producing from their bags all the available mind-altering chemicals necessary to keep from having an episode. The good-ol-boys on the porch offer rolling papers and a ride to the store. I sent a dollar with them for a water, and realized I should have sent three dollars for something stronger.

Turns out the company fed this poor driver to the wolves. They knew the bus was a goner, but sent him out with it anyway. He had to pick up a disabled passenger between here and Dallas, and this was the only bus equipped with a wheelchair lift. Luckily, among us passengers, the cooler heads prevailed and word spread that it wasn’t his fault, it was just The Man once again being an asshole.

Everyone gets more irate with each passing hour. The few snacks, beers and laughs available are exhausted quickly, but we’re all in it together. Everyone resorts to trading “where-ya-headeds” for “where-ya-beens” and various other bullshit. Two Arkansans, a seventeen-year veteran of the Fire/EMS department, and her 23-year-old son, twice divorced and proud owner of (no bullshit) over 750 misdemeanor charges, charm the hell out of me. Another guy, a 300 pounder on his way to truck driving school in Memphis, regales us stories of fights he’s been in, one in which he and his brother, after being insulted by some guy, chained the doors shut in a Denny’s, and beat every man in there until the strobe lights showed up. “Not one woman was harmed,” he bragged over his chinstrap/goatee. I tell them all that most of my life I’ve successfully avoided real violence by either being funny, patient or savvy enough to either run like hell, or carry an empty beer bottle in my pocket and when the time came, smash it over my head and yell, “YOU WANT SOME?!” The respect is mutual. The bottom line is we’ve all got scars and stories to go with them.

Chaz, a door-to-door salesman with facial tattoos and balls like grapefruits, pulls a Frogger across the highway to ask for some snacks for the huddled masses. “Five bucks says they shoot his black ass,” says the enormous would-be trucker.

“No bet,” says I. “First shot I hear, I’m ducking behind your fat ass.” We both laugh, hoping we’re wrong, but this is the Commonwealth.

He is successful, and we give him a standing ovation. He hauled in eight Dr. Peppers, 16 Pop-Tarts, and 20 packs of crackers, which we split between about 50 people. Life is good.

After three hours, a black pickup truck arrives, and the drunk redhead in the brown skirt yanks my sleeve. “Hey, you’re going to Roanoke, right?”

By now everybody knows I’m going to the hospital to visit my last grandparent, we’ve all bowed our heads together in prayer. These strangers care about her as if she were their own.

I hop in the back with Shay, a guy who builds prisons for a living, on his way to get the last of his stuff out of his girlfriend’s house, a junkie who pawned his brand-new Mossburg pistol-grip assault shotgun, which he had not fired even once. “I’ll get it back one way or another,” he yells over the din of the highway.

“Look at it this way,” I holler, “At least you didn’t get to love the gun before she hawked it. At least it wasn’t grandaddy’s gun.”  His eyebrows raise and a slight smile signals his agreement. “True.” Nothing else needs to be said.

Just as I begin to think that despite it being a shitty afternoon, I was on my way and there are worse fates than watching the Blue Ridge Mountains fly by, wind in my hair and all that, when the raindrops start to catch up with us. Somehow we raced them all the way to Mill Mountain, and I made it to the hospital just barely damper than when I started.

I dash into the elevator, hastily snagging myself a palm-full of hand sanitizer, trying to scour away a day’s worth of forehead-rubbing and head-scratching. I follow the signs to Room 1025, and there they all are, waiting for me.

She’s barely there anymore, but she beams at me. I tell her she’s beautiful and her hair looks great. We linger for an hour before it’s obvious she can’t take any more company, needs another pain pill and a good night’s sleep. We file out slowly, hoping she’ll still be there in the morning. I’m the last to leave, I kiss her and she asks me questions I don’t want to answer. I tell her I’ll see her in the morning.

The Sentence - Chapter 1

     So I’m down at the courthouse and the press gallery was packed. The sardine metaphor was so appropriate it ceased to be a metaphor. Packed, stuffed, canned. Contents under pressure. The hack in front of me, Frank from The Times, took a hanky to his forehead, and turned to the skirt-suit next to him, Janet from The Observer. Frank’s always wiping his melon with this handkerchief. The air conditioning could be on full blast, or it could be December, even in short sleeves, this guy he’s sweating like a sonofabitch.

     “Did you see the guy during the trial? Cold hearted-killer. Mean son of a bitch, you could see it in the eyes. Eyes were damn granite.”

     “Ugh. He made eye-contact with me when he walked past and I felt violated.” People around them chimed in with similar sentiments, and at times I felt the same way.

     You’re not supposed to write about it, of course, not in the news. Just the facts, right? You don’t write what you feel, you don’t make evaluative statements. You don’t feel like it’s Tuesday, it’s just Tuesday, so that’s what you write. That’s the when, one of your ‘w’s, you’ve got that base covered. Now you just have to fill in the rest. They start teaching you that in your eighth grade journalism class, before you ever try to make it a job, they teach it to you in school, it’s just the facts, and you fit ninety percent of the story in the first paragraph. The inverted pyramid, they call it. I always got a kick out of that, nobody knows how they built the pyramids, but hacks like us, we can build them upside down. 

     You got that image in your head now, a pyramid sticking in the sand point down? Buried under the sand is the capstone, the most mysterious part of it all. 

     I’ve known Frank for years, sitting in spots just like this all over town, for all kinds of stories. Today we’re surrounded by the marble, wood paneling, official seals with their gold leaf formality, but it might as well be a brightly colored big top. Same fuckin’ circus, same fuckin’ clowns. Each time, same story but thirty of us, each from a different outfit, and we’re all there. We’re just writing the facts, but it takes thirty of us to do it I guess. Some people I guess they buy Frank’s rag because they like that he writes “Something happened to somebody one day at an address,” and they buy my rag because they like that I write, “On this day, this guy did that thing over there.” And the sponsors, they try to figure out which one of our rags the demographic they’re  trying to sell to is reading, and buy ad space in it. Sometimes I just wish we could take turns covering for each other, one day I could take the day off and he could write both our stories for us, and the next I could cover for him so he could go sweat somewhere. As he usually does when seated near a woman, Frank tried some more talk.

     “And when they read the verdict? Jesus. They read off the counts individually and found him guilty of each one, and it was like somebody told him his shoe was untied, he didn’t move, didn’t blink. What a creep.” 

     Janet agrees. “And they wasted all that time deliberating I mean the guy was, like, just so obviously guilty, you could just, like, tell, you could see it in his eyes, he’s guilty.”  I decided to put in my two cents at this point. When I speak, Janet startles as if she forgot there were people around.

     “Well in that case,” I finally join in, “who needs a jury when they got us, right Janet?” I been on this job too long when I let a naïve college kid like Janet rile me up, but like I said I been on this job too long, so a few years back I took to drinking at work, and it’s mid afternoon, and I’ve already had my liquid lunch across the street at O’Toole’s when court recessed for lunch, and a nip in the bathroom, so now I got no filter. “Who needs em? Due process, pssshhh. We know what’s going on, we got the facts, why not let us tell it, right?”

     “Forgive my grumpy colleague,” Frank tells Janet, with a little touch on her shoulder. Good for you Frank, you’ve initiated physical contact, glad I could be here to be your wingman you sleaze. “He’s just sore the guy didn’t include him on his little killing spree.”

     “Not sure I take your meaning, Frank,” I return, “what, like as a victim, or an accomplice? You must mean a victim, because I think we both know that if I were the getaway driver, we would have made a detour past your house.” We both laughed because that’s the kind of gallows humor you can expect from us, a couple guppies in a big pond of crime, waiting for the official word from the judge that they got the great shark on the hook.

     “Take it easy on the kid,” he says, “She’s just saying that he looks mean, he’s got mean eyes.”

“Well what about me Janet,” I turn to her, smiling toothlessly and brows raised, “do I pass your eye test? Take a peek in the windows to my soul, tell me what you see.” She squints, then smiles and winks.

     “I see you’ve started your weekend a couple hours early.” I guess she had me there. Right on two counts, I had to admit. The guy, a week ago the defendant, now the convict, was the owner of one of the meanest mugs I had ever seen in my life. Not that that means anything, plenty of these psychos look like boy scouts. Not only did he look mean, but he had committed some of the most heinous crimes I’d ever heard of. Exhibits A through Z were enough to make the reuben on rye want to crawl back up my esophagus, but I seen so much of this shit it hardly phases me. Anybody who watches t.v. has, even if you don’t watch the news, they got a dozen sitcoms about the cops trying to catch another perpetrator of some ever nastier crime, like the news and the sitcoms are competing for who can come up with the gristliest crime scene, the most horrifying eyewitness account. The people want to see that stuff, read about that stuff, the bloodier the better, and none more than they want to hear about this guy, because I think he might have set some kind of world record for fucked up.

     Hence, the public interest in the case. They don’t want the news, they want to be entertained. They want blood, boobs or famous people, or all three if they can get it. Out of all the murders that happen every year, how many of them have this many reporters waiting around for the next little scrap to feed to the snapping piranhas we call our readers? None but this one, because it’s heinous. It stands out. 

     Dozens of people go missing a year, and the ones you hear about are the pretty white girls, the pretty white girl who was the congressman’s aide and the pretty white girl who was in those baby doll beauty pageants. Why? Because sex sells, even in murder cases. 

     Two guys kill two entire families, one white family and one black family, all the victims get a mention, but the photo that runs more often is the wasps with the two point five kids that own a toy store. 

     A dozen illegal dog-fighting rings get broken up and arrests made, but which one makes the news night after night? The one allegedly owned by the pro football player. The league gets to play the hero by insisting he can’t play, the public gets its sensational headline, followed by the scapegoat they so desperately need to blame, and the dogs, they get impounded, and later euthanized. It was never about the dogs. People who never previously cared or paid attention to issues of animal rights or animal welfare are suddenly at a rally with a sign, screaming for blood. 

     Well in this case they didn’t just get blood. 

     The judge invented a whole new kind of punishment for this creep, and that was what we were here for today, the sentence. I always got a kick out of that too. In school they teach you that a sentence has to have certain things, a subject and a verb, but not here under the big top though. You can get a sentence of just one word. Life. Death.

     The judge didn’t want to give the guy Life, and he didn’t figure Death would cut it either. He wanted the guy to suffer, but more importantly than that, he wanted to make sure that the body count wouldn’t get any higher. People are always fond of saying that you take a killer off the street so they can’t hurt anybody else, but that’s just plain naivety. They can hurt plenty of people, other inmates, corrections officers, infirmary nurses, prison chaplains, and on more than one occasion, their lawyers.

     The courtroom murmur gets louder as one by one the players enter the stage, the state prosecutor, the defense counsel, the judge, and finally, surrounded by sheriff deputies, shuffling along in shackles and a bullet proof vest, the killer. We don’t have to call him alleged anymore, he’s just the killer now.

     Then the tone of the noise changes. The crowd’s murmer is distinctly quieter, and yet perceptibly more alive and bubbling with comment, as if they now have much more to say but don’t want to be overheard saying it. Frank and Janet stop their strange flirtatious exchange to stare with their mouths open, and even a jaded drunk such as myself is rather bronzed by the moment.

     This brute, this horrid monster we’ve all learned to loathe, who just yesterday loomed as a menace, now tiptoes along like a squirrel between two rows of hungry dogs. He is cowed, bent over, eyes darting everywhere, as if the attack might come from anywhere.

     The courtroom doors open one more time, and he practically dives under the defense table, as a man who I’ve never seen before walks in and sits beside the prosecutors. He’s dressed like a lawyer, expensive suit, briefcase, neat hair and all that. Doesn’t appear to be at all out of the ordinary, in this environment he fits right in with all the other clowns, and yet this is the first we’ve seen of him throughout this whole process from arraignment to the trial to sentencing. Doesn’t really seem to pose much of a threat to the bad guy, but there he is, visibly shaking. 

     The buzz grows louder, and the judge has to bang for silence for a solid minute.