Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer
M. William Phelps
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in this book is based on interviews, letters, diary entries, individual memories, and other primary and secondary sources. Scenes and conversations are, at times, built around those sources and also witness accounts.
The childhood and familial life of the serial killer in this book is told, mainly, by the use of over six hundred pages of separate recollections (beyond thousands of pages of letters) he wrote to me over a five-year period, hundreds of interviews I conducted with him over those five years, Video Visits (recorded Skype conversations), and in-person visits. This is his account of those years and the life he lived.
In instances where there would have been an exorbitant amount of ellipses in quoted dialogue or letters excerpts, I opted not to include them (to keep the flow of the narrative moving), providing those deletions did not affect context or meaning of the statement.
The book is a bit of a departure from the type of journalism I generally write. I consider this book a hybrid: somewhere between a memoir (my story) and biography (the killer’s story). All of the thoughts, reflections, and quotes from the serial killer in this book are his and his alone. There are many occasions where the only source available to explain a particular scene/occurrence is the killer.
It isn’t so different, the way we wander through the past. Lost, disordered, fearful, we follow what signs there remain; we read the street names, but cannot be confident where we are. All around is wreckage....
—Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
PROLOGUE
SHE IS DEAD.
On a metal slab. A sheet covering her body. A tag hanging from her big toe. Manner and cause of death will be determined soon.
Murder by strangulation.
He is, contrarily, alive. Standing in my kitchen.
I walk in.
He appears to be waiting for the ding to tell him the Howard Johnson’s Macaroni & Cheese dinner in the plastic frozen boat he placed inside the microwave has been fully nuked. But I notice the carousel inside the oven is not making that squeaky noise it does when it is on. Also, he is not moving. His head is bowed, as if he’s trying to touch his chin to his chest, the folds of his neck fat exposed like rising dough. His eyes are closed. His right hand is on top of the microwave; his left by his side. The familiar-smelling richness of the melting cheese is not there, and this is an aroma that permeates the kitchen air whenever he cooks this meal. In a strange moment of reflection, I don’t see my oldest brother nodded out in a methadone-induced coma while standing erect in front of the microwave, but a corpse—a dead man standing. All he cooks is mac-n-cheese and those baked stuffed clams, full of bread crumbs, in the half shell. He lives off pills, methadone, beer, cheese, and gluten.
“Mark?”
He does not answer.
“Mark?”
Nothing.
I toss my keys on the kitchen table. Walk over. Shake him.
It is April 12, 1996. I am twenty-nine and separated from my wife for the past two years; I will be officially divorced in a few months, remarried six months later, on New Year’s Eve, to a woman I haven’t yet met. Mark is living with me in a house the bank is about to foreclose on; we’re both biding our time, waiting for the sheriff to come and tell us to leave. He has recently split with his “wife,” Diane, who is living in Hartford, Connecticut, on Garden Street, not far from Asylum Hill. A forty-one-year-old woman was murdered the previous year on Huntington Street, just a mile away. Unbeknownst to any of us then, a serial killer is on the loose in the Asylum Hill section of Hartford, plucking women off the street, raping, beating, and killing them. Hartford is twelve miles from my house.
Last I hear, thirty-four-year-old Diane (her actual name is Diana, but we all call her Diane) is pregnant. Mark isn’t sure if it is his child—and this tears him apart. He tells me he’s done with her, for good this time. It’s over. Yet in the twenty years they have been together, we have all heard this: after each fight, after each one has had the other arrested, after they hit and scratch and berate each other in front of their kids at retail stores, restaurants, and all sorts of other public places.
“Hey, man, wake up,” I say, and shake him again.
Mark is thirty-nine. That’s young, I know. But he looks fifty, maybe older. The life he’s led has taken its toll. “The silent killer,” hepatitis C, is coursing through his veins.
“Mark . . . wake up, man.”
A snotlike length of drool hangs from his mouth.
After he comes to, figures out where he is, acclimates himself to his surroundings as if he is on a boat, trying to manage large swells, he takes his half-cooked mac-n-cheese and heads down the five flights of stairs to his space in the house. He mumbles something I cannot understand. I can decode what he says about 20 percent of the time. Later on, I will have to clean up after he spills the macaroni all over himself, on his bed, the floor, before passing out again. The used boat his food came in will be on his lap, now an ashtray, and the juxtaposition of the ashes and leftover cheese, a cigarette butt stabbed into a piece of elbow macaroni, will remind me that life is, in the end, about choices.
*
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, DAYLIGHT has given itself to night. Mark is standing in my kitchen again, staring out the window, waiting, anxious as each car drives by the house, headlight beams like a Hollywood premiere strobing across the wallpaper. He is somewhat coherent. His belly full of cheese and pasta, the methadone and pills have worn off. After he leaves, it will occur to me that as he stood in the kitchen, an image of his face reflected in the windowpane as he waited for a ride, I saw myself standing in the same spot, at fifteen years old, waiting for my friend, older and able to buy liquor, to come and pick me up so we could go get loaded.
“Shopping,” he says after I ask. “A friend is on her way.”
“Don’t come back all drunk and high,” I warn. “I won’t let you in.”
He looks at me. Doesn’t respond. Lifts his cigarette up to his mouth, his fingers stained Listerine-yellow from the nicotine, hep C, or both. He inhales deeply, blows what’s left of the smoke at the windowpane, fogging it up.