In September 2011, I wrote to this man, one of the nation’s most notable, nicknamed serial killers. My goal at the time was to convince him to act as a consultant, an anonymous profiling source on my Investigation Discovery television series, Dark Minds. Concerned about glorifying his crimes or revictimizing the eight females he murdered, his identity remained secret throughout his tenure on the series and after. He was known to audiences only as “Raven,” a disguised voice on the telephone explaining what was going through the mind of the serial killers I hunted and profiled each week. But as the series aired and our relationship progressed, something happened.
We became “friends.”
“I can help you look at your sister-in-law’s murder,” he continues, “and offer my understanding. Hard to believe a convicted serial killer has something valuable to say, but what I offer is insight into the mind of how this killer thinks. I see through cases because I have witnessed this kind of evil firsthand, lived with evil twenty-four hours a day.”
I had no idea how to respond to this.
He encouraged me to “listen and learn.”
As we began, the true emotional, physical, and spiritual impact this relationship would have on my life, or how his “insight” would affect my everyday thinking, on top of the relationship with my family, was hidden—a series of blows I could have never imagined.
“Sorry for your loss,” he says. “Don’t make excuses for her. She was doing what she wanted to do.” We play at a cost. Then someone dies and we look at ourselves for answers.
My five-year friendship with a serial killer, same as my relationship with Mark and Diane, would not only change who I was, but break me.
*
THERE HAD BEEN TOO many times to count when all of us—my brothers Tommy and Frankie, mother and father and stepfather, wives and cousins and uncles and aunts and friends—had said, I wish Diane would go away for good. For me, personally, I’d considered a number of times how I wished to hell someone would take Diane out. She’d caused our family so much pain, so much grief, it was drama every day with her. We all wanted her out of our lives.
And now, suddenly, just like that, she was “I’ll tell Mark when he gets back,” I explain to my brother Tommy.
The details are hard to come by in a day and age without Internet and cell phones, but with a few calls, I piece together that someone put a pillowcase over Diane’s head and strangled her with a telephone cord. At least that’s what has been reported. She was found inside the Hartford apartment she’d been living in since her split with my brother. She was, it had been confirmed, five months pregnant.
After hanging up and sitting at my kitchen table, I go back to the previous night. Mark had been out—all night. A recluse, saddled by his addictions, he never went anywhere other than to the methadone clinic, liquor store, and market to get his mac-n-cheese and clams, Coke, cigarettes, and thirty racks of Busch beer. But last night, he was gone. If the cops come around my house asking questions, there’s no way I can vouch for his whereabouts.
I walk downstairs into Mark’s section of the house. Stare at his belongings, not sure what I’m looking for. This house, which I have lived in since I was thirteen years old in 1980, raised two kids of my own in, is nothing more than a body without a soul. It’s empty besides Mark and me. Vacant and soiled. All of this mess down here, the remnants of his life, is beyond sad. A few trinkets, a few photos of Mark’s kids and Diane, his TV Guide, his New York Giants pennant and hat, his remote control and television, a few Hefty bags of clothes, is all he has left. The anger I feel toward him comes from the fact that I’m his caretaker. He is the older brother, the one I should be going to for advice and security, but I am all of that and more.
Before he returns home from shopping, I have to decide how I will tell my brother that his wife, a woman he has known since she was a teenager, is dead—as it occurs to me that he might know already. I have this sick feeling. I don’t know what it is. But it’s real and it is gnawing at me.
PART ONE
FRIENDS
1
MEETING MY “FRIEND,” THE PSYCHOPATH
“Well, evil to some is always good to others.”
—Jane Austen, Emma
THE CHECK-IN ENTRANCE FOR A PRISON VISIT AT OREGON STATE Penitentiary looks, ironically, similar to the facade of a downtown Chicago, 1930s-era, gangster hotel. There’s a canopy overhanging two sets of concrete stairs, each fanning out in opposite directions, like praying mantis legs. The stucco wall leading to the door is grimy, the color and texture of cantaloupe skin, chipped and covered with mold in places. Walking in, you are overwhelmed by the potent smell of sweat, stale perfumes, and mildew.
Once inside, I couldn’t help but notice a young pregnant woman with lots of tattoos, a disappointed look on her face, sitting alone, staring at the floor.
“Denied access,” the guard behind the counter explained after looking up and asking for my photo ID. “She’s been here for hours. Name? License? Who are you here to see?”
I tell him.
He taps away at his computer. Turns to me. “You cannot wear those clothes. You’ll have to change. Or you cannot go in.”
My blue jeans and button-up shirt were not part of the dress code. Any clothing similar to what an inmate wears is off-limits.
The day had begun on a high note, with baby-blue skies, soft white cumulus clouds, warm air radiating from the tar in hazy waves. It was Friday afternoon, September 14, 2012. The coast-to-coast journey from Connecticut was exhausting, plagued by airport idiots causing unnecessary delays. I didn’t know it then, but after my prison visit, I’d be robbed in downtown Salem of my passport, iPad, phone, rosary beads, and other personal possessions by a meth addict bearing an uncanny resemblance to one of the Backstreet Boys. By the end of the night, I’d be staring at the ceiling of my Portland hotel room, a warning a dear friend gave me before I left keeping me tossing and turning: “If the Devil knocks at your door and you invite him in, you had damn well better be prepared to dine with him.”
After sorting out my garment issue, a guard walked me and several others through a metal detector, then down an incline similar to a handicap ramp, where we stopped at a set of barred doors. A guard sat behind tinted glass in a kiosk to our left. The smell here was heavy, stuffy, and wretched: think of a laundry hamper full of dirty clothes. Ahead of us were a series of old-fashioned, iron prison doors that made loud, echoing, steel-against-steel latching noises as they snapped and locked shut. I’d been in over a dozen prisons. It is the supermaxes, like OSP, that have a sticky coat of scum on everything.