Living Next Door to John Edward Robinson, Or: What’s It Like Playing Atari in a Serial Killer’s House?
Travis LeBlancThis article is not going to be political. It’s just an interesting anecdote. John Derbyshire at VDare has his story about how he was once an extra in a Bruce Lee movie. This is my Bruce Lee story; a pre-Dissident Right brush with history. I’m going to tell you about the time I used to live next door to a serial killer.
There are apparently a lot of people into serial killers. They love watching documentaries about them, reading books about them, watching movies, listening to podcasts about them, etc. I’ve always thought serial killers were a pretty morbid thing to be into. It used to be pretty fringe and you looked with suspicion on the guy who seemed to know a little too much about serial killers. But now it’s a mainstream subcategory of True Crime. Netflix is pumping serial killer content.
In June of 2000, I got a voicemail message from my brother: “Just so you know, the John Robinson that is all over that news right now is the same John Robinson that was our next-door neighbor.” At first, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I hadn’t been watching the news that day, and I wasn’t sure who John Robinson was. I’m not sure if I ever knew that his first name was John. I only ever knew him as “Mr. Robinson,” or maybe “Chris and Christie Robinson’s dad.” My family moved around a lot and I lived in six different houses throughout my youth. I thought it might be possible that one of those other houses contained a person named John Robinson.
So, I called up my brother to get clarification, and it turned out that ol’ Chris and Christie Robinson’s dad had become a serial killer. The decomposing bodies of five women were found in barrels on two different properties owned by Robinson, making national headlines. I hadn’t thought about that guy in 15 years, except fleetingly whenever I saw a bag of Guy’s potato chips. I will explain that last bit later. Guy’s potato chips will be an important motif in this article.
From age 4 to 8, John Edward Robinson was my next-door neighbor. This would have been from 1981 to 1985. Now, when I say he was my next-door neighbor, I don’t mean we lived in the same neighborhood or on the same street. I mean he literally lived in the house adjacent to mine. My brother was friends with his son. I remember playing Atari in his house. As the facts about his various misdeeds came rolling in after his arrest, I would find out that he killed at least two people while I lived next door to him, or possibly more.
John Edward Robinson is now considered the world’s first internet serial killer, although only half of his eight known victims met him online. His first two known victims were Paula Godfrey and Lisa Stasi (both 19), in 1984 and 1985 respectively, whom he killed while I lived next door to him. His third victim was Catherine Clampitt (27) in 1987. With these first three women, Robinson met them by promising them jobs at his non-existent companies. He would have them sign blank pieces of paper, kill them, and then type out a letter on the paper to their families saying that they never wanted to see them again. Then the killings stopped for a while as Robinson went to jail.
John Robinson was something of an anomaly. He was both a violent criminal and a white-collar con artist; a Renaissance Man of sociopathy. Serial killing, embezzling, fraud — he did it all. By the time I lived next door to him, Robinson had already been arrested for embezzling a few times. He was arrested again for fraud in 1987 and sent to prison for four years. While inside, he met 49-year-old Beverly Bonner, the prison librarian and wife of the prison doctor. Bonner fell in love with Robinson, and when he was released from prison in 1991, she left her husband to go live with him. He promptly murdered her. Oh, what would Andrew Anglin say? Nevermind. I’m not sure I want to know.
John Robinson had been interested in computers since the 80s when they were still a rarity and something only nerds knew how to use. I’m reminded of the 1985 song “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” by the Pet Shop Boys. There’s a verse where the narrator is bragging about how smart they are. After mentioning that they went to Sorbonne and got a doctorate in mathematics, there’s the line “I can program a computer.” Nowadays, you might hear that line and think “You and a bazillion other people,” but in 1985, that was a serious flex. 80s movies like Revenge of the Nerds or Weird Science depict nerds using their knowledge of computers to get one over on their cooler and more popular rivals. The image of computers was that you had to be pretty big-brained to know how to work the damn things.
But John Robinson saw their criminal potential of computers early on and threw himself into learning as much as he could about them. So when the internet came along, he was right on it from the beginning. He began frequenting BDSM chat rooms under the name SlaveMaster looking for submissive women. When he found one, he would promise them heaven and earth if they would move to Kansas and enter into an S&M relationship with him. The first person to bite was Sheila Faith, who moved from California with her wheelchair-bound daughter in 1994. Both were promptly killed upon arrival. Next was Izabela Lewicka, a 21-year-old Polish immigrant who met Robinson in a BDSM chat room. Now, I would think that if you were pushing 60 and found a 21-year-old willing to have sex with you for free, that woman would be a keeper. But no. John Robinson killed her shortly after she moved there from Indiana. Robinson’s last victim was 28-year-old Suzette Trouten, who moved to Kansas from Michigan to travel the world as Robinson’s sex slave and ended up dead.
What finally brought Robinson down was a few things. One of his potential victims managed to escape, and she went to the police. There were also a couple of ladies in the BDSM scene who were friends with one of his previous victims, and they committed themselves to bringing him down. Plus, there was the fact that Robinson’s name kept coming up again and again in missing persons cases. Eventually, police got grounds for a search warrant, and the rest is history.
That is the short version. I’m leaving out all sorts of villainy, or else we’d be here all night. Needless to say, even without the murders, John Robinson was a huge piece of shit. But I’m not here to give you his entire life story. If you want to know that, there are a bunch of documentaries out there, and three books. The only one I’ve read is Anyone You Want Me to Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet by John Douglas and Stephen Singular, but if you’re into this sort of thing, it will tell you about each one of his little scams and con jobs. I’m just here to recount my memories of living next to him.
The story takes place in a town called Stanley, Kansas, on a street called Arapaho. Neither the town of Stanley nor the street of Arapaho exist anymore. Stanley was annexed into Overland Park in 1985, and Arapaho became West 156th Street. Oddly, Arapaho Lane still shows up on Google Maps, but if you click on any of the houses, it gives you an address for West 156th Street. Weird.
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You can buy It’s Okay to Be White: The Best of Greg Johnson here.
I was born in Saint Louis, but when I was 4, my dad got transferred to Kansas City and bought a house in Stanley. Stanley was very white, very middle class, and very Protestant. We had to drive 45 minutes every Sunday to get to the nearest Catholic church.
Stanley was a small town, but did boast one local celebrity: pro wrestler Harley Race lived there. I was on the same wrestling team as Harley’s son Justin, although he was a few years older than me. Harley used to show up to our practices and meetups all the time. He was a friend of the family and once got us tickets to see him wrestle Ric Flair for the championship. He was a nice guy, but his wife was an odd duck, and some suspected that she was a cokehead.
There were only four houses on Arapaho Lane. There was the LeBlanc house. Facing my front door, the Robinson house was to the left. To the right was the Edwards house, which was Mrs. Edwards (a divorcee if I recall) and her daughter. My mother was good friends with Mrs. Edwards. Then, at the end of the street, there was the Davis house, which was an elderly couple.
Now, most of my memories about John Robinson himself are pretty hazy, but I remember people talking about him a lot. It was known all throughout town that John Robinson had been to jail for embezzling money from Guys Snack Foods. Guys is a regional potato chip company based out of Overland Park. The company claims to have invented the barbeque-flavored potato chip.
There are layers to understanding what John Robinson embezzling money from Guy’s Potato Chips meant to the people of Stanley, Kansas. First of all, these were more innocent times, and the idea that someone you knew had been to jail was quite shocking by itself. Secondly, he didn’t steal a bunch of money from just anyone, but from a beloved local success story. Guys started as a mom-and-pop shop in Kansas and now their chips were sold all over the Midwest. People bought Guys over Ruffles as a matter of local pride. John Robinson stealing money from Guy’s Potato Chips made his crime that much more treacherous. Third, the story was just more fun to tell: “You know Guys Potato Chips? You know Mr. Robinson stole a bunch of money from them?”
Lucky for John Robinson, his trial for embezzling from Guys occurred around the same time as the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse which killed 114 people and dominated local news for a long time afterward. Had it not been for that, his embezzlement would have been a much bigger local news story. Regardless, everyone in my neighborhood knew about it. Robinson always insisted that he was innocent and that they got the wrong guy.
I spent a lot of time around John Robinson’s fraternal twins Chris and Christie Robinson. They were the same age as my oldest brother. My brother was best friends with Chris for a while, but their friendship became strained over time. Chris Robinson was pretty ruthlessly bullied at school for being the kid whose dad stole a bunch of money from Guy’s Potato Chips. As they went into middle school, my brother drifted into the popular crowd while Chris remained a social pariah. From what I understand, Chris felt that my brother didn’t do enough to stick up for him.
One day, Chris Robinson and my brother got into a fight, and in the heat of the moment, my brother said “Oh yeah? Well, your dad is a criminal!” Chris went back and told his dad. About an hour later, John Robinson showed up at my house and chewed out my mom. John Robinson was really, really pissed that my brother called him a criminal. I don’t know if he was mad because he was protesting his innocence or if he thought it was wrong to use his crime as a weapon against his kid (which, to be fair, is a low blow). Whatever the reason, he was irate.
After that, my mother sat me down and told me that I was not under any circumstance to talk about the fact that John Robinson had been to jail. Don’t talk about it. Don’t joke about it. Don’t tell anyone. She told me that it wasn’t nice. That is one of my two most vivid memories of John Robinson.
One of my overriding impressions of the Robinson family was that they had a lot of cool stuff. They had a cool TV and an Atari with all the hot new games. They were the first family in my neighborhood to get a VCR. They had a swimming pool, one of two houses in the neighborhood with one. But by far the coolest thing they had were go-karts. John Robinson bought Chris and Christie go-karts — and not just one for both of them to share. He bought each of them their own damn go-kart.
When you are 6 years old and see some kids with their own go-karts, your natural instinct is to think their dad must be the coolest dad in the world, Guy’s Potato Chips be damned. I was never allowed to drive their go-karts, but I do remember riding in them while someone else drove. I can only imagine how much suffering I must have inflicted on my parents asking them why they couldn’t get me a go-kart too. In hindsight, I realize that all that cool stuff was probably bought with stolen money.
A problem for me in those days was that I was the youngest kid in my neighborhood by several years. When I was going into kindergarten, most of the other kids were going into middle school. I had no one to play with most of the time. Sometimes, but not often, my brother would take pity on me and let me tag along with him and his friends. More often, my mom would make him bring me along.
One day, when I was about five or six, the boredom and loneliness got to be too much and I got a rush of blood to my head. So I went over to the Robinson house and asked Chris if he wanted to play with me. I knew it was a long shot, but I figured it was worth it if for no other reason than the fact that they had fuckin’ go-karts. Understandably, Chris the 6th grader did not find the idea of hanging out with a kindergartener appealing. But then his mom came down and ordered him to go play with me, presumably out of pity.
I don’t remember what Chris and I did that day. I don’t even remember if we rode go-karts. But I do remember it ending with John Robinson walking out into his driveway and calling Chris in for dinner. That is my other most vivid memory of John Robinson. Yeah, it’s not much of a story, but it is my most vivid memory of him. It was memorable to me because that was the only time I hung out with Chris Robinson myself. All the other times were with my brother.
Whenever I tell people about having lived next door to a serial killer, there are a few things they always ask me, so I will preemptively address them.
The first is something along the lines of “Oh, that’s scary! I bet you feel lucky! Does that ever spook you?” The implication is that I dodged a bullet. Honestly, I’ve never felt like that. Serial killers have a type and John Robinson’s type was women. Sure, if I lived next door to John Wayne Gacy, I would probably be dead now, but honestly, I have never felt like I was in danger.
The other question I get is “Did anyone ever sense that there was something wrong with John Robinson?” The answer is yes. People knew there was something really messed up with John Robinson and there were rumors.
John Robinson put on a good front. According to my mom, he was charismatic, charming, quick with a joke, and had a lot of interesting stories. But something happened that irreversibly changed everyone’s perception of John Robinson. He was an Eagle Scoutmaster and taught Sunday school. One night, Mrs. Edwards’ house next door to me was struck by lightning and caught fire. John Robinson was the first person out there with a hose trying to do what he could to help put it out. He would occasionally make the local news for some bit of charity he did, or supposedly did. Considering it’s John Robinson, I wouldn’t rule out these charitable acts being staged hoaxes.
I’ll tell you a John Robinson story that you won’t find on Wikipedia or any of the documentaries. Maybe it’s in one of the books, but it wasn’t in the one I read.
Earlier I mentioned that there were no other kids my age in my neighborhood and so I had no one to play with. There was one slight exception to this. At the end of Arapaho, there was Mr. and Mrs. Davis. They had a grandson who was my age who would sometimes stay with them. He was only there every once in a while, but when he was there, I would go play with him.
I don’t even remember this kid’s name. I only remember two things about him. The first was that his parents were divorced. The second thing is that he always referred to the place he lived as “the blue house.” I guess this was as opposed to whatever color his dad’s house was. But the funny thing was that I never, ever heard him refer to the place he lived as “home.” It was always “the blue house.” He had such-and-such toy, but he didn’t have it with him. He left it at “the blue house.” Perhaps to him, “home” was a place where he lived with his mom and dad, and because he didn’t have that, he didn’t have a home. Just a blue house and a whatever house. I did go to his house one time, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t blue.
Mr. and Mrs. Davis were fairly old, and Mrs. Davis had part of her leg amputated. She had a golf cart that she would use to get around outside if she needed to get the mail or pick up the newspaper. The Davises were also big believers in John Robinson. When John Robinson said that he was innocent of embezzling money from Guy’s, Mr. and Mrs. Davis believed him. They thought he was a great guy.
One time, the Davises went to Chicago for a two-week vacation. Before they left, they gave Chris Robinson the keys to their house so he could water their plants while they were gone. When they got back, they found out that all of their bank accounts were now empty. John Robinson must have gone through their house and found their bank information and cleaned them out.
Here’s the cherry on top. The Davises had the snazzy floodlights in front of their house. John Robinson always admired those floodlights. While they were gone, he ripped those floodlights out of their yard and put them in his. When confronted, he showed them a receipt, which was probably forged. He insisted that it was just a coincidence that someone stole their floodlights at the exact moment that he went out and purchased the exact same floodlights with his own money. The balls on this guy. He destroyed this couple, and he didn’t care if they knew it was him. In fact, it was like he wanted them to know.
Mr. Davis told everyone about what happened, and after that, Mr. Robinson was persona non grata around the neighborhood. So to answer the question, yes, people knew that John Robinson was a bad man and that there was something wrong with him. But did anyone suspect that he might be a murderer? There were rumors.
There was a guy who lived in the neighborhood named Carl Keaton. He was a contractor and actually built our house on Arapaho. In addition to contracting, he also did a little bartending on the side. When you are a bartender, you pick up a lot of gossip. People come in from all over (police, courts, media), have a few drinks, and start getting loose-lipped and telling secrets. Apparently, Mr. Keaton had picked up some rumors that some women had gone missing and that John Robinson was suspected of being involved. He told some people around the neighborhood.
There was another time when my mother and Mrs. Edwards went to the theater together. While there, they ran into a friend of Mrs. Edwards who worked at the county sheriff’s department. Mrs. Edwards introduced my mom to him as her next-door neighbor. The guy looked at my mom and said “You’re not Robinson, are you?” I guess there was something in my mother’s response letting him know she was not, because the next thing the guy says was “Oh, we’re gonna nail him!” Then he started telling my mom about all this dirt they had on John Robinson. The missing women and all this other shady stuff he was connected to but that the police couldn’t get a smoking gun on. Apparently, just laid it all out. He told her, in my mom’s words, “more than I wanted to know.”
So to answer the question, yes, at least some people in my neighborhood knew that John Robinson might very well be a murderer. Some speculated that John Robinson’s eldest son John Jr. might be involved. John Jr. was working at the hotel where Lisa Stasi was staying when she went missing. Her last phone call ended with a knock on the door and Stasi saying “They’re here.” The “they” implies that there was more than one person at the door.
So that’s my story about living next door to a serial killer. Hope you liked it.
Sorry if you were expecting my normal material. I’ll get back to being racist and making fun of wignats next time.
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21 comments
Someone should forward this to him on death row and ask him if there was anything he’d like to clairify (perhaps if he’d like to come clean about the flood lights). Also ask him if he would like to apologize for using the Internet handle “The Slavemaster” in the BLM era. It could work, after all, Jeffrey Dahmer reportedly became indignant at the suggestion he was racist. It would be quite rich if we could get a serial killer to disavow Mr. Leblanc!
Good one! Totally go for it! At least it’ll give him something to read other than fan mail by young women with hybristophilia.
<i>Also ask him if he would like to apologize for using the Internet handle “The Slavemaster” in the BLM era.</i>
Ohhh! This would be brilliant! He would 100% love to signal how non-racist he is and disavow LeBlanc.
Strangely related to being physiologically incapable of any sense of shame, empathy, fear and guilt, psychopaths are also incapable of holding any sort of “principle” — in the common understanding of the word. This means that when articulating something that for humans would pass as “their world view”, they simply repeat the views they perceive as most prominent in the society they inhabit (since they cannot a personal world view).
That’s why not even the most frothing Jewish psychologist would call Hitler a psychopath; and why I think that once technology allows for accurate identification, we should mandatory euthanize these creatures regardless of their life history.
For me, the most interesting part of this article is some insight into what it’s like to have community interaction. Local heroes that you might bump into? Local business success stories? I’m grew up in Los Angeles, so in theory I should have more of this “community” stuff than anybody, but all I have is stories about great companies that used to be here but have been driven away, and instead of heroes we’ve got vapid celebrities.
Cherish your childhood, Trav.
Wow thanks, that was more interesting than wignats! I’m rather interested in serial killers in an amateur way, together with other major psychopaths such as the unabomber. But as soon as I start reading about them, I often get depressed and stop reading, I assume because the material is so dark and depressing in it’s nature, and serial killers are not that important in the scheme of things. I’ve always wondered if that intelligent person knew the person well, if it would’ve been obvious they were off or that something was wrong with them. You’re anecdote would suggest so. I grew up around certain lesser psychopaths, and if you knew the full candid backstory of them, they were a lot worse than most people would superficially guess. Also like you say doing obvious virtue signaling things to increase their apparent status in the community.
Jordan Peterson says that psychopaths often understand how they are, and learn that people will pick up on them if they interact much with others and they move around from place to place so people can’t get a bead on them. Like a vampire almost. Interesting.
” I’ve always wondered if that intelligent person knew the person well, if it would’ve been obvious they were off or that something was wrong with them.”
In a couple essays here on C-C (reprinted in my new book, Passing the Buck, reviewed earlier this week by Spencer Quinn), I discuss the movie Manhunter (made by Michael Mann around the time LeBlanc is writing about). I point out that one major difference from the later Silence of the Lambs is that Lechter (apart from being spelled Lektor) is played by Brian Cox very differently than Anthony Hopkins. He looks and sounds, as someone online said, like someone who’d sit next to you on a bus, strike up a conversation, and the next thing you know, you’d be tied up in his basement. Hopkins plays him like the Phantom of the Opera or Dracula (including the underground cell), and while that’s Demme’s approach, which was successful in the sense of popular, he just seems too obviously evil to be believable as a practicing psychoanalyst. Cox looks a bit like this Robinson guy, and in the later film LIE he plays a suburban neighborhood pederast who’s quite popular with the kids.
I meant knowing the person over time. Psychopaths tend to have expansive personalities that are superficially charming. From trav’s description, Robinson sounds like classic antisocial personality disorder, albeit an extreme case. (I also love studying the personality disorders.) but if you knew him well, there were some big obvious tipoffs that something weren’t right.
I grew up in southern California and there always seemed to be character actors living among us in the San Fernando Valley. My fun tale is of casually riding my bike around the neighborhood, for exercise or whatever, and this man picking up his mail motions me to come over for a second. It was someone that looked kind of familiar and had only recently moved into the area. He asked me to check out his eyes. I did and noted they were two different colors. This was before contact lenses were commonplace. He said he was wearing a blue one for a new part he was filming. He was friendly and non threatening. He was Ed Lauter, a familiar character actor. These days in my old neighborhood, I don’t think I would recommend going over to say hi to a stranger. But that was the life in LA in the Valley in the 70s. Of course the Manson Family were residents at that time in the outer reaches of the Valley so there is that too.
I read a couple of books about serial killers such as John Wayne Gacey before I realise it wasn’t very healthy. The thing I enjoyed about them the most were the detailed snapshots of local life in the bygone era of the ’60s thru the ’80s, exactly the sort of thing in this article.
I tend to be extremely trusting, because of the safe and loving environment I am accustomed to. I am almost a textbook example of the opposite of a sociopath. Unfortunately the old, “The guy you’d least expect” idiocy put me into a bad spot until a slight misunderstanding was cleared up. In the meantime I met a few likely cases:
Mr. A was conceited and quiet. He raped a girl then cut her throat. (I think he later murdered someone else as well.) I angered him somehow and he looked at me through plexiglass and grinned at me almost amiably. Being the sucker I was, I thought this nice man would be receptive to a conciliatory approach.
Someone warned me off, saying I should just stay off the radar. An apology would only ignite his penchant for violence. Mr A was sent up to the supermax soon after. I heard he had a warm greeting, having every one of his fingers and toes broken. I somehow doubt he learned his lesson.
Mr.B was quite sociable and charming. I suspect he was sexually abused, because the admins decided to punish a child killer by setting him up with Mr. B. The screaming for help went on for quite some time. Mr. B definitely enjoyed violence. The child killer may have deserved it, but I almost vomited in horror.
Mr. C tried to befriend me. He was very contained and polite, but at night would suddenly kick the toilet, shriek and then go silent. I heard he was also in the dangerous offender unit because he took to the habit of raping his bunk mates.
Now that I think of it, there was also a Mr. D, a Mr. E, oh yea and definitely Mr. F… Maybe Mr. G.
Maybe it’s a gradient since some people get hardened, perhaps by sexual or physical abuse – necessities of survival. Maybe some people just have a bad day and kill someone before raping their corpse like Mr. H. Some people were just soldiers and would carry out killings without much of a though afterwards. But there is no doubt that some of these were unreformable, bloodthirsty and sexually depraved psychopaths.
Hollywood has given people a flawed idea of what a sociopath is. People like to think that if they met a psychopath, they would know because they would exude a sinister vibe or that there would be something conspicuously “off” about them.
In my experience, the reality is the opposite. The real tell of a sociopath is not that there is something obviously “off” about them but rather that they come off as a little too perfect. They are too perfectly nice, their back story is too perfectly interesting, they have all the right opinions, they are never in a bad mood, etc.
There is a website called lovefraud.com which is a resource people who have been in relationships with sociopaths. If you want to feel better about your bad breakup, read some of the stories there. The most heartbreaking stories you will ever read in your life. One of the things everyone in those stories say is that when they met their sociopath that “they were SO PERFECT”.
I was on a bus in Los Angeles about 10 years ago. Wilshire Boulevard near Santa Monica. Sitting across from me was a white man, mid-forties, normal and clean, not homeless, but with hard, hard facial features. Someone who I sensed I should avoid eye contact with at all costs. I don’t know why, but call it female intuition. He was talking to someone sitting near him, and he said, rather casually, “I slit the throat of a woman once.” Naturally, my eyes darted over to him. He was staring right at me. He wasn’t talking to me, but staring at me. He then said, “And I’d do it again.”
I jumped off the bus at the next stop (as did the woman sitting next to me, who heard him, too). I got sick into the trash bin right there on the street. The woman stayed for a moment to comfort me. It was chilling. That is the only time in my life that I can remember ever feeling like I encountered someone who was evil. There are a lot of mentally ill people in Los Angeles, and a lot of people who obviously haven’t taken their meds, but this was very, very different.
Maybe I’m obtuse, but it sounds like you spent some time in the slammer, and met some “interesting” characters.
BTW, I think ethnomasochistic liberalism is a form of psychopathy. At least, the idea that it might be should be explored.
Thanks for another makes-you-think article, Travis LeBlanc.
In a civilized society, say the future Ethnostate, the state would have something like an Institute for the Scientific Study of Man, which would, inter alia, study the genetics of psychopathy with the purpose of eventually discovering enough that we could eliminate such monsters in utero.
I read the Wikipedia entry on Robinson and it doesn’t mention the potato chip embezzlement episode. It does say he failed out of X-ray tech school and tried to impersonate an X-ray tech. These people tend to be real losers and seldom are able to complete professional programs, save for the occasional lawyer.
Wikipedia does mention “In 1980, he was arrested again on multiple charges including embezzlement and check forgery, for which he served 60 days in jail in 1982”. That was the Guy’s potato chip episode.
Psychopaths, especially the subspecies of psychopath known as the serial killer, have an acute form of mental retardation that is insidious because it is not immediately apparent. Mapping their brains through neural imaging shows that they are all quite clearly stunted and impaired in a tangible, physical sense, with certain areas of the brain related to decision-making, self-awareness and emotional awareness atrophied or shrunken in comparison to those of healthy, normal and functional individuals. It leaves them pointlessly violent and unable to learn from their mistakes. They act the way they do because they are sick, in a literal as opposed to a metaphorical sense.
I loathe the fascination with serial killers in a sensationalist sense, because it mystifies them and prevents us as a society from looking at them objectively. Because all these people really are, is not genius, or diabolical, or cunning – they are the niggers of the neural spectrum.
Alright, I just read on Wikipedia, how he killed a woman and basically SOLD her four month old baby daughter to his brother and sister-in-law because they wanted to adopt a child. Enough internet for today.
@ Travis LeBlanc; Thanks for an interesting read. I too have had close encounters with psychopaths:
In Junior High a guy stalked me and said he was going to kill me because he didn’t like the shirt I was wearing. This was Daniel Johnston of Pawling who would go on to become a rapist/slasher/mutilator now serving two life sentences.
Hitchhiking on the PCH I was picked up by a guy in a sports car who had two opened bottles of Heineken ‘ready to go’. I said thanks but no thanks. Years later whilst reading ‘Angel of Darkness’ I realised Randy Kraft had wanted to dope me, bite off my nipples, and then strangle me.
I did follow DeAngelo, the so called Golden State Killer, and did suspect he was a bad cop. The Vidalia Ransacker phase was particularly fascinating what with stealing Blue Stamps and piggy banks, so I was awaiting a detailed psychological report—-I guess that’s off now.
Great story and comments. I see I’m not the only one here who believes he brushed with a serial killer. When I was 10 or 11, around 1985, a man tried to lure my little brother and me into his car promising candy bars and comic books, textbook serial killer stuff that we had been being warned about at school. He was insistent and pushy, and got visibly frustrated and frazzled that we wouldn’t, tried to cut off our escape, and we got away. I was scared out of my mind and remained traumatized by the whole thing for some time. Fast forward 20 years and I’m watching forensic files. Lo and behold, they had found dead boys in the wooded area about a half a football field away from where he tried to get us. I didn’t recognize the guy or anything, but am sure it was the same dude. He was caught and (eventually) executed. Looking back, the “stranger danger” briefings we were getting at school were probably because kids were disappearing.
The pitch-black under-belly of suburban life. I’ve seen it before. I’ve developed an immune system against it.
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