Behold the Monster: Confronting America's Most Prolific Serial Killer (New True Crime Nonfiction Books)

Prologue

The day I was almost strangled to death was an oddly warm and fogless one, in the late summer of ’97, in the gentrifying Mission District of San Francisco. The single kitchen window framed a clean, blue sky.

I’d meant to put a curtain on that window for the entire year and change I’d lived there but never got around to it. That day, its nakedness seemed a glaring indictment.

I loved the place when I moved in. It was a postage stamp–sized, shotgun flat in a buttercup-yellow Victorian. I hand-stitched the leopard-print pillows on the bed myself. The only other furniture was a set of overflowing IKEA bookshelves, a trash-picked dresser, and a vintage kitchen table with rusted chrome legs. I had moved in with happy dreams of graduating college, finally. Writing, ultimately. It seemed a possibility.

Not three feet away, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Billy sat at the table, arms outspread, palms down, forehead on the marbled red Formica. A tangled mop of sandy-brown hipster hair fell over his face, and his shoulders shook with sobs I found both heartrending and embarrassing.

Though it was still morning, the world shimmered with a lazy, hazy gloss, imparted by the pea-sized dollop of black tar heroin I had just smoked off my last sheet of aluminum foil. You couldn’t see the shine anymore, it was so streaked with smears of brown-black sludge smuggled across the border in the ass of some poor fuck way less fortunate than I.

When I was being realistic—as drug addicts are apt to do only first thing in the morning, when the jones sets your nerve endings alight—I knew it was demented that I was regularly ingesting a drug that had recently killed two acquaintances of mine. They had unwittingly fired up not just the precious opiate but also a flesh-eating bacteria. Over the next three days, both they and their friends helplessly watched as their bodies dissolved, cell by decimated cell, into the bloody hospital sheets beneath them. There was nothing the doctors could do to arrest the progress of the bacteria. There was nothing we bystanders could do but watch in shock and awe as our friends fell to pieces in front of our eyes.

At the time, it seemed to me the worst way to die—medieval torture where you die being eaten by rats, starting with your toes. Start with my brain, my heart. Overdose. Myocarditis. Anything other than flesh-eating bacteria.

I continued to suck a cloud of heroin smoke through a rolled-up dollar bill so caked with tar it held together by itself.

To the outside world, I was a functional human being. I held down a job at a high-end women’s clothing boutique. I was the fun sales girl, dressed in a vintage cocktail number and Keds, always looking like I was going swing dancing straight from work. I flirted with the well-heeled women and their bored chaperones alike, working it for a pathetic commission. I had terrific sales numbers. My father always said I could sell sand in the Sahara. I had honed the skill during years as a stripper putting myself through college, though I never seemed to actually finish.

I was through with all that now, trying to get my life together. Even though I had just dropped out of school mere moments before graduating (again), I was not entirely bereft of ambition.

I could still walk away from these poisonous drugs, this equally poisonous guy. I was chipping: using on weekends. Though little by little, the weekends had been growing longer. Friday was now solidly a weekend day. Thursday too, occasionally. As long as you were clean come Monday morning, you wouldn’t get strung out and wind up under a bridge.

This was Monday, and I was high. But it was an especially horrible Monday.

I love you, I’d told Billy the night before, after he had placed the heel of his hand against my sternum and pushed me up against the wall one too many times. And I’m leaving you anyway.

That morning, I wrapped each mismatched piece of glassware in packing paper, placed it in a box, and struggled to manipulate the tape gun under his gaze. Heeding the advice of concerned friends, I had secretly rented a storage facility the week before. For weeks, I had been making plans to move out of town. A clean break. Los Angeles. New Orleans. Austin. Paris. Madrid. Marrakesh.

Los Angeles was good enough for now.

I’d visited the City of Angels a couple of times over the years and noted how literally they take the name. Never was there a city with so many representations of wings. You could find a majestic expanse of white painted on any available flat surface. It was so on the nose, and still, no one could resist.

Wings were a possibility. With wings, you could soar, if you could just figure out how to turn into the wind. A mother’s wings could fold around you, a downy soft tent.

Wings could also break, the hollow armature fragile as a wafer. Wings could appear strong, even work fine at first, but prove to be held together with wax from a birthday candle. Wings could get too close to the sun and melt, dropping feathers one by one until you fell like a stone into the ocean.

I had a friend in Los Angeles who was a high-end hairdresser. She told me if I got my cosmetology license, I could come work for her. It sounded like a palm-tree-lined day job.

Something to support me while I plugged away at my novel.

I placed one glass after another into the box to the rhythm of Billy’s sobs. He had a right to express his pain. I deserved it. Who hadn’t I hurt in the swath of destruction I cut?

Nevertheless, it was time to go. And when it’s time to go… I whirled around.

Why are you doing this to yourself? Why don’t you leave?

Because if I leave, he said without taking his head off the table, I’ll come back and you’ll just be gone.

I almost doubled over. Instead, I imagined my spine to be fashioned of steel. You can do this. You can leave. I turned on one bare heel toward the cabinets.

I didn’t spin more than a few degrees before the world was upended like glitter in a shaken snow globe. I have no memory of the time in between plucking a mason jar from a shelf of peeling paint and waking up, confused, aware at first only of the throbbing back of my head against the linoleum. Slowly, my shoulder blades, my upper arms, my wrists, my hips, the backs of my calves, my heels existed again, even if they belonged to a different body.

I was underwater. It was so quiet. I wondered if I was dead and my soul would begin to rise. Would I look down at my candy-apple-red hair, nerdy glasses, cutoff jeans, chipped blue nail polish and see, in death, what I suspected the rest of the world saw every day of my life? Another entitled, reckless, college girl gone a little bit too wild. A whorish junkie. A junkie whore. A girl who had been too hungry. A girl who had asked for it.

My neck burned, and then it itched. I swallowed a tennis ball on fire, and it lodged in my esophagus. I clawed at it. I still have the white threads of scars you’ll only notice if I inadvertently get a tan.

I was alive.

Billy straddled my chest, hands in a position of surrender, face a mask of disbelief. I studied him for what felt like a long time.

The night I met him was wildly tilted, humming with possibility, fizzy with laughter. We were at a house party in the Castro. There had been a drag queen selling Tupperware, a bowl of punch floating with shrooms, a lesbian band with a topless singer, a famous porn star turned tantric healer, flashes of color, sparkling twinkle lights, a roomful of people delighted with their youth and beauty, enthralled by their cleverness. Billy held court in the corner—the most beautiful and cleverest of them all. We talked about college things, like Milton and Jung and Elliott Smith. It was morning when he went home to the girl he lived with.

The next day, he called to tell me he was walking his dog outside my door. I hadn’t recalled even giving him my number, much less telling him where I lived, but there was plenty I had forgotten about the previous night. I blew him off at first. He lived around the corner with some girl who had a trust fund and two shar-peis. Who needed that shit?

He wore me down. He pursued me relentlessly, prolific with the poetry—a dilettante James Dean, the same tortured azure eyes. I felt adored.

I looked up into those eyes—bloodshot, deranged, exhilarated. I wasn’t sure if the exhilaration came from the fact that he had stopped himself or the fact that he had finally strangled me.

This sadistic loose cannon on top of me had been there the whole time, if I had looked. If I hadn’t been so busy inventing him.

I didn’t know anything about anyone.

As if we’d reached a tacit understanding, Billy stood, wiped his palms on his jeans, and held out a hand. I took it and allowed him to pull me upright. To this day, it is the moment I most regret about the incident. I still fantasize about running into him and saying, I could have made it back onto my feet on my own.

Maybe he fantasizes about saying, I could have killed you, you broken bitch. So easily. And you never would have had the chance.

1

THE BLACK DAHLIA

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

OCTOBER 2017

One of LA’s most infamous murders is that of the Black Dahlia: twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth (Beth) Short, whose bisected, exsanguinated body was discovered on January 15, 1947, at the edge of a field in Leimert Park. The media went nuts for this baroque and brutal murder of a young white woman. Widely mythologized and never solved, the murder of the Black Dahlia fascinates to this day: the ultimate cold case.

In the fall of 2017, I was writing a mystery novel called How to Saw a Girl in Half, with references to Beth Short’s famous murder. Every cold case in Los Angeles has a custodial detective. The Dahlia will never be solved, in spite of several competing ghost stories and an endless parade of TV miniseries. There is no physical evidence and no reason to prioritize the case beyond the insistence of its cultish following. Being the custodial detective of the Black Dahlia case means you’ll be inundated with tips, conspiracy theories, creeps, and kooks. Every detective knows that one is a dog.

Legendary Robbery Homicide Division Cold Case Special Section Detective Mitzi Roberts took the case. She couldn’t resist. Only she and her captain held the keys to the battered, gray filing cabinets stuffed with the original Dahlia archives. All sorts of rumors floated about what they held.

While researching the novel, I scored a much-coveted, rarely granted interview with Roberts. I hoped to gossip about Black Dahlia, but I was also hungry for any current leads I could charm out of Roberts: something no one else had done.

I’d been planning to write fiction, but truthfully, into the late hours of the night, after every baseball practice, after I got my two kids to bed and made the lunches, I dug deeper into the world of true crime. Was I obsessed? Not quite yet. I saw a glimmer of opportunity to make a meaningful change, bringing to light stories from which most people turned their heads. I had a strong stomach, insatiable curiosity, and the dead calm afforded me by PTSD. I was hooked.

When I first faced Detective Mitzi Roberts across a booth at Little Dom’s in Silver Lake on a warm October day in 2017, I felt only the faintest tug of the undertow that was about to drag me into far deeper waters than I’d planned.

The real person behind Michael Connelly’s wildly popular fictional Detective Renée Ballard was laid-back and hawkeyed, wearing a pin-striped suit and shiny badge.

I envy that you get to go through people’s drawers, I said to Roberts.

The waiter refilled our iced tea.

So you’re weird and want to read people’s diaries and shit, she said. Okay, so how that works—when we’re at a search warrant, we have a protocol. You get there, you can’t touch anything until the photographer comes, so we can prove we didn’t jack up the house. I scope out the best-looking room with the good shit. I don’t want the kid’s room. Anyway, it’s mostly gross. Roaches and dirty chones and some cop always waving a dildo around. I more want to look through a murder book. I want to be the one to find that thing somebody didn’t. Find that nexus. Solve it. Go to these families. It’s true to some it didn’t mean anything. To a lot, it meant everything.

I asked Roberts what case she was most proud of.

I’m proud of them all. She stirred the last watery remains of her drink while watching the parade of almost supermodels pushing strollers and Reiki healers headed to the cold-pressed juice bar.

I did catch a serial killer named Sam Little once. That was pretty cool.

How did we skip that?

I’m not the one doing the questions.

Roberts told me she suspected this killer of many more murders across the country. Little got away with it for decades by cherry-picking his victims—drug addicts and prostitutes on the fringes, largely women of color. Less dead homicide victims, a term credited to criminologist Steven Egger, have historically been not as thoroughly investigated as their wealthier, whiter, and perhaps more sober counterparts. Pretty white college students are the most dead. Black transgender hookers with addiction issues are the least dead.

A stone of recognition dropped into my gut. I knew the concept well. I had talked to cops who worked in the 1980s, when hooker after hooker turned up in dumpsters every morning in South LA.

The calls came in: There’s 187 [a homicide] corner of Fifth and Main. NHI.

NHI: No humans involved. Or simply a no one. Body found in a dumpster on the corner of Fifty-Fifth and Central. It’s a no one.

Roberts had tried to mobilize other police departments across the country to investigate their cold case files for possible connections to Little’s patterns, possible evidence that might still hold his DNA. To her frustration, not much happened. She’d recently heard seventy-eight-year-old Little, sitting in prison just miles away in Los Angeles, was in poor health.

Who knows how many victims are out there? How many families will never know?

My midnight dives into evolving forensic technology led me to believe in the possibility of leveling the playing field, restoring the names of unidentified victims from marginalized and often dismissed populations. Attitudes in law enforcement were changing, as were its demographics. And an intriguing detective had just dropped an underreported serial killer into my lap, with potentially many more victims to be identified.

What my research turned up that night set me down the path toward a years-long dialogue with a serial killer. In a wild stroke of luck, I landed in the middle of a current investigation. Little was about to spill his gruesome well of secrets to the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with a cocksure Texas Ranger in a tall hat at the helm, who would bring in hundreds of detectives from local jurisdictions. It was the story of a lifetime. Dozens of victims long lost in boxes of buried evidence might find justice, and their families would finally know the truth.

Samuel Little would eventually be identified as the most prolific serial killer ever to stalk America’s streets. I had no earthly idea about the scope of his crimes when I first wrote to Little, but I sensed an energy gathering behind the man, the monster.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

In 2014, Samuel Little was convicted for three murders committed in the late eighties in Los Angeles. I scrolled through mug shot after mug shot of this evasive drifter and smooth criminal, with a one-hundred-page rap sheet that spanned twenty-four states and included arrests for theft, battery, assault, rape, and even murder. For this sixty-year swath of crime he cut across the country, forty of those years involving murder, he’d served a combined total of approximately ten years before the triple life sentence he was serving when Roberts mentioned him to me.

I’d had my own run-ins with drugs and violent men and usually talked my way out. People want to talk to me. If I don’t feel like hearing anyone’s life story, I wear headphones in public. I’ve always imagined myself an undercover private detective, a member for life of the Nancy Drew Fan Club. I like asking the questions. What if I could get this guy talking? Think of the questions I could ask.

While the media might lead us to believe society is littered with serial killers, in reality, they are quite rare. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. I might be able to bring a little heat to the story, get law enforcement interested in these long-cold cases. I could make a difference.

Corny? Overreaching? Maybe. In any case, it was a hell of a story.

I pitched the story to my editor, Laurie Abraham, at New York magazine. She agreed the idea was intriguing.

Keep at it. There’s something, but we’re not going to do another gruesome serial killer story. You need an angle.

We agreed. I needed an angle. I wrote Samuel Little a letter.

The letter I received in return and those that followed didn’t disappoint—if I was looking for a spooky movie prop. He wrote voluminously on torn scraps of yellow legal pads, in handwriting that veered from careful cursive to serial killer ALL CAPS. He included doodles of what I think was either a monkey or just a man with enormous ears. When the monkey had a sad face and tears, you were in for a creepy letter. When the monkey had a happy face, it was worse.

He maintained his innocence and railed against the lies and injustices of his upside-down case, with the constant refrain that DNA just proved he was there, not that he did it.

I also did my homework on psychopaths. If all went well, I was about to talk to one. You don’t want to be underprepared. As many mistakes as I made, at least I knew not to underestimate a sexual serial killer.

Through a diagnostic lens, opinions differ as to whether psychopathy and sociopathy are the same. The American Psychiatric Association acknowledges neither as a clinical disorder. The clinical designation is antisocial personality disorder, or ASPD.

The Mayo Clinic website describes it as such, based on the psychopathic traits as laid out by Dr. Bob Hare, one of the early innovators in the field of antisocial behavior, in his classic psychopathy checklist.

Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental disorder in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to antagonize, manipulate or treat others harshly or with callous indifference. They show no guilt or remorse for their behavior.

Antisocial personality disorder signs and symptoms may include:

Disregard for right and wrong

Persistent lying or deceit to exploit others

Being callous, cynical and disrespectful of others

Using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or personal pleasure

Arrogance, a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated

Recurring problems with the law, including criminal behavior

Repeatedly violating the rights of others through intimidation and dishonesty

Impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead

Hostility, significant irritability, agitation, aggression or violence

Lack of empathy for others and lack of remorse about harming others

Unnecessary risk-taking or dangerous behavior with no regard for the safety of self or others

Poor or abusive relationships

Failure to consider the negative consequences of behavior or learn from them

Being consistently irresponsible and repeatedly failing to fulfill work or financial obligations

If you’re wringing your hands and wondering…breathe. The answer is almost certainly no.

I spent hours on the phone with my aunt, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University for forty years. She’s known for being an incisive diagnostician. I asked about her experience with ASPD. My father’s twin sister is a brilliant, odd beauty, with wild red hair. I loved her Cambridge condo as a kid. A sixties black-and-white photograph of her naked in a field of tall grass hung in the entryway. Her closet smelled of cloves, not Bounty.

My grandfather, their father, was a proctologist and also the family physician at Bamberger’s department store in Newark, New Jersey—when there was such a thing as Bamberger’s and family physicians. He was dismissive of the soft science of psychiatry, but the two still came up with names for the shingle they’d hang outside their shared practice:

Odds and Ends

Rears and Queers

Nuts and Bolts

Our clan came from Polish Ashkenazi stock who turned turnip carts into one of the biggest discount supermarket chains in the tristate area:

Why pay more? Shop at a ShopRite Store!

If you didn’t work for the company store, the only options were MD or the president of a local Hadassah chapter.

I grew up surrounded by brilliant and eccentric proctologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, teamsters, social climbers, Wall Street tightrope walkers, and Ponzi schemers who took holidays in the Caymans. Not much freaks me out.

The night before I faced Samuel Little, I freaked out.

I rubbed my neck and paced my upstairs hallway, demanding my psychiatrist aunt give me the magic key to unlock the mystery of this monster I was about to face.

Psychos? Meh, said my aunt. "Everyone wants to talk about psychopaths because they’re an aberration. If you’re almost anyone, psychos make you look good, feel good…in comparison. You didn’t bludgeon coeds to death in their beds? Hey! You’re okay! Any diagnosis is a moving target. I usually start with trauma and move from there.

"Psychopathy is like Jeopardy, she continued. All answers are questions, and don’t expect to win. Psychopaths have a way of being extraordinary liars while telling you exactly what they’re doing. I can tell you what it feels like to be around a psychopath. It works better than the questionnaire: He will steal the shirt off your back. He’ll tell you he’s stealing the shirt off your back. Still, you will be inexplicably compelled to give him the shirt off your back."

It’ll be an adventure, I said.

It will be what it will be. Don’t expect to tease the truth from the lies. He may not even know. This takes time. Don’t wear an underwire, she concluded, sounding strangely sad. You’ll set off the metal detectors.

2

THE SERIAL KILLER

CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 2018

California State Prison, Los Angeles County, is located in the city of Lancaster, roughly eighty miles northeast of the palm tree–lined boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it might as well be eighty million. The prison is an ecosystem unto itself, where over three thousand men live sandwiched between a sunbaked terrain inhospitable to much more than scrub brush and a wide, unforgiving sky. In the early morning hours, when dawn lights up the desert in dusty shades of rose, there’s something almost peaceful about the way the outside world recedes quickly, beyond the fifteen-feet-high, maximum-security-specification mesh fencing. In the flat heat of midday, when temperatures regularly reach one hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the desert winds blow so hot and wild they could sear the eyelashes off your face, the landscape holds a biblical feeling of punishment.

The prison campus is strewn with identical two-story tan-colored buildings that blend into the expanse of sand and rocks beneath them. The only flashes of color are the garish turquoise doors with industrial grade locks and matching windows the width of butter knives. On the morning of August 8, 2018, after waiting for seven hours for my number to come up, I finally faced its iron security gates, but I kept setting off the metal detector. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten my aunt’s advice. I wound up having to pry the underwire out of my bra with my teeth, because there were no sharp objects available. The prison wives carefully coiffing their children’s hair in the bathroom beside me cheered me on.

You go, girl. Gnaw that shit out. You got this.

It would be my first time inside a men’s maximum-security prison. It would most certainly be my first time talking to a serial killer that I was aware of. I was as prepared as I could be, but you always forget something.

Once I made it through the metal detectors, I waited with a group of ten women and children, as a tall iron gate opened. We stepped into the cage that formed the liminal space between freedom and its opposite. I was an impostor. These people were there to visit loved ones, because they had no other choice. I was there to visit a monster, because I wanted a story no one else had.

The gate behind us whirred and clanked closed. We stepped out onto the prison campus. I walked on shaky legs toward B Block, my knees actually knocking together. Such a cliché. But the body is the body, and fear is unoriginal.

I carried a clear plastic baggie full of quarters and a key fob. My friend Sasha had once done time in the same prison, and I’d called him for tips.

It’s impossible to get an appointment, he told me. You have to show up at six in the morning and wait in a line of cars outside the gate. They don’t start letting you in until nine thirty, but if you line up later than six, you’ll never see him. Bring quarters. You’re not cool if your visitor doesn’t bring quarters for the vending machines.

Criminal psychology had fascinated me since my first fix, Manson—the gateway drug for many a true crime buff. The outrageous crimes documented in Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s seminal true crime classic Helter Skelter signaled the end of the sixties. Manson and his family upended the burgeoning ethos of tuning in and dropping out. How can you twist peace and love into the evisceration of innocent human beings?

In the same way, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood documented not just the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, but also the end of the fifties white-bread meritocracy of the American dream. Surely if you were a hardworking, virtuous, cherry pie–making, white, midwestern nuclear family, you would thrive and succeed. You can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough! Life is a system of just deserts. Isn’t it?

No, it isn’t. For the Clutters, it wasn’t. For the LaBiancas, it wasn’t. What do you do with that lesson?

Manson himself was overrated, a mediocre mind at best. At any senior prom, stoned quarterbacks spout deeper platitudes. Manson got press, superfans, fawning groupies for his theatrics, his emptiness, and his girls.

The gravitational pull of these famous multiple murders could make you give up on not just ideals but humanity in general. How can you still view with anything but cynicism the human animal, capable of such casual cruelty? Or it could be a puzzle. It could be a career maker. I had a voracious and reportedly infuriating level of curiosity, plus a strong stomach for both gore and narcissism. I had a chance.

I approached what I hoped was B Block, as the hot wind lashed my hair to my face and sheriff’s deputies passed by me in SWAT vests. Some smiled and said hi or remarked on the weather.

I handed the guard my ID.

You here to see Little? he asked. How you know Little?

He’s a friend, I said. I wasn’t sure how this thing worked, but I knew enough to not say I was a journalist.

A friend? My ass, the guard said cheerfully as he put an enormous brass key into an enormous brass lock and admitted me to a cinder-block room full of families huddled together at plastic tables. Along one wall was a play area with Astroturf and a few tubs of oversized LEGOs. Next to the play area was a gray seamless background where you could get your picture taken with your loved one for a two-dollar token.

I used the quarters to buy Funyuns, a Coca-Cola, and some Little Debbie Honey Buns. I put them on the table and tried to figure out where to train my eyes. At the door? At the red line behind which the inmates stood until given permission to sit?

Instead, Little wheeled up on me from behind and startled me.

Hello, Sam.

Sam was wheelchair-bound, suffering from diabetes and a heart condition. He wore standard prison-issue shapeless denim pants, a blue cotton T-shirt with CDC printed on the back in block lettering, and a pair of orthopedic white sneakers due to a toe amputation. The tail end of a baby-pink heart surgery scar the size of an earthworm peeked out from the top of his T-shirt. He sported a thinning pelt of kinky white hair and a beard to match. Age spots discolored his skin, giving him the appearance of a molting lizard. At first glance, he appeared a frail and pitiable grandpa, but you could see the evidence of the man he once was: a six-foot-one powerhouse with catcher’s mitts for hands.

Gravity had done its inevitable work, dragging his jowls into lazy folds around his jaw, but you could still make out the strong cheekbones, the handsome face, the glittering pale-blue eyes that once put his victims at ease. The sound of children, chatter, and vending machines bounced off the cinder blocks.

Sam wagged a finger at me. You! he said. You my angel come to visit me from heaven. God knew I was lonely and he sent me you. You want a story for your book? Oooooeeeee, do I have a story.

I came prepared to do battle with a dragon, and instead I faced a lonely old man over a bag of Funyuns. Sam spoke in a soft patois, cobbled together from what I would soon learn were his Georgia origins and his years growing up in the Ohio steel town of Lorain. I leaned in, then leaned in some more, until I was approximately a foot from the face of the man I knew had strangled and brutalized at least three women and who knew how many more. My eye twitched.

Sam and I talked that first day about our childhoods, about our first loves, about his family tree, which includes (it really does) both Malcolm X and Little Richard. We talked about my kids. We talked about baseball, boxing, and his long-term girlfriend, Jean, who had been a master shoplifter. We talked about travel. We talked about art. He was good at only two things in his life he told me: art and boxing. Later he’d admit to a third at which he was far better.

Sam had learned to draw in the Ohio State Reformatory as a young man, and it was still his preferred pastime.

What do you like to draw?

Oh, girls. I mean women. I mean ladies, he said, searching for the term I’d find least offensive.

Was the answer victims?

I can draw anything. Paint, pencils, whatever I can get. I can do all the light and dark. Just like I see you right now.

What was he seeing? What had he seen in them? How do you find someone simultaneously worthy of the kind of deep attention it takes to render them and also disposable?

I live in my mind now. With my babies. In my drawings. Not with these robots in here. The only things I was ever good at was fighting and drawing.

We talked about his hero, Sugar Ray Robinson, and the prizefighting career Sam had almost had. He was once a middleweight champion in the prison boxing ring who’d been called mad for his speed and fury. The Mad Daddy. The Mad Machine. The Machine Gun.

I sat with him for hours that first day and returned the next, committed to it being my last go at him. If I couldn’t make a dent in his bullshit, it wasn’t worth the gas mileage.

After about six hours total, he lingered on a story about a woman in Florida. I want a TV, he said.

I want things too.

His eyes went dead flat. I had almost forgotten to be afraid of him. You going to buy me a TV?

I don’t know, Sam. Am I?

He laughed and drummed his half-inch-long, dirty yellow fingernails on the table. Okay, okay, you got me! What do you want to hear about for your story, little miss? You want to hear about the first one?

I dug my toes into my shoes. Was this really going to happen? I don’t know why it shocked me. We’re all dying to spill our secrets. It just takes figuring out what will nudge us over the edge into free fall.

She was a big ol’ blond. Round about turn of the new year, 1969 to 1970. Miami. Coconut Grove. You know Coconut Grove? Nah, you wouldn’t know Coconut Grove. She was a ho—he corrected himself—a prostitute. She was sitting at a restaurant booth, red leather, real nice. She crossed them big legs in her fishnet stockings and touched her neck. That was my sign from God.

With that, he began an incantation of murders. He remembered eighty-six, give or take a couple. With astonishing detail and near photographic recall, he took me back through his past, when the road was his home and the back alleys and underbelly bars of city after city across the country offered a feast of low-hanging fruit, women whose eyes were half-dead already, women who Sam believed in his heart had only been waiting for him to show up and finish the job. Back to better times, when Sam believed God himself gently placed neck after willing neck, still pulsing with life, into his hungry hands. He imagined himself as some kind of angel of mercy, divinely commissioned to euthanize.

I put every word in my mind’s lockbox and stayed on track. If I lost the thread, I’d lose control of the interview. Sentiment, horror, shock: these were things that could wait. What could not wait was the confession: a confession I could do nothing but mentally record while I robotically responded, because this confession was fucking nuts. Eighty-four? Eighty-six? Could he have possibly killed that many women?

My subconscious did the calculus while I looked the man in the face. I kept my legs crossed at the ankles, knees pressed so tight they could hold an aspirin, hands clasped in my lap—when I didn’t have a friendly, encouraging palm on his arm. I thank my mother for my Emily Post posture. I used to judge it until I realized all that clenching effort can help you keep a calm face.

I only ever told this to one other person in my life. Texas Ranger Jimmy Holland. Him and you. You’re my only friends, said Sam.

Who? Was Sam delusional? Was that a ridiculous