He’d approach them. Engage in small talk. His innate charisma and allure made him easy to trust.
He’d make them feel comfortable. They would confide in him. Talk to him about their problems. Their lives. His affable personality was unassuming and non-threatening. He was likable.
They never knew, until it was too late, that death could hide anywhere.
Even at the hands of a man pretending to care.
Slitting their throats then cutting off their hands, he’d kill them then dump their bodies in places he hoped they’d be found. He wanted the glory of having his work showcased and reviled.
He craved the shock. Longed for the trauma felt far and wide as a result of his vicious actions.
He put on the perfect show, and everyone played their part.
And mine was in some ways, the most important one of all…
According to the news reports, my father had made his first kill at the tender age of twenty-three, the same year he had married my mother.
He was young when he discovered his hunger for cruelty.
Eight months after slitting the neck of a young runaway named Stella Arnold, my mother became pregnant with me.
My father opened his hardware store and seemingly devoted his life to the care of his family, hiding the truest parts of himself away.
Years passed and he would indulge in his depraved fantasies all the while building a home and a life for the people that depended on him.
For ten years my father went undetected.
Ten years he perfected the guise he had created.
Ten years to convince himself that he’d never be caught. That he was smarter than everyone else.
And maybe he was smarter.
Craftier.
Shrewder.
Because for all those years he lived his double life, his wife and his children had no idea that the devil lurked beneath the face of the man they loved.
And my brother and I later had to live with the realization that our childhood was an illusion and our reality was a nightmare.
After my father’s arrest, I had lived a lonely existence.
I didn’t make a habit of knowing people long enough for a connection to form. When I was younger I had been bubbly and happy. I lived a life of playdates and birthday parties.
The years that came after that fateful day when I discovered, along with the world, exactly whom I was born from, were cocooned in confining isolation.
After my father went away, my mother became depressed. Despondent. And in complete and total denial. She refused to acknowledge the gossip and accusations that followed us everywhere we went.
When Matthew came home after being beaten within an inch of his life by a group of children that called him the “murderer’s son,” she looked the other way and went about her day as though Daddy was off on another fishing trip and not in a federal prison.
When media camped outside our home and local police had to be stationed for our “protection,” she closed the curtains and made us our favorite macaroni and cheese.
She never went to my father’s trial. She avoided any and all mention of his name and his crimes. There were times I was envious of her head in the sand. But most of the time I hated her.
She left Matthew and me to bear the brunt of our town’s malice. Never interceding. Unseeing. Blind.
My father had put a target on our backs that never went away.
The twenty dead girls weren’t the only victims of my father’s crimes yet somehow we became vilified simply by loving him. For not knowing his secrets.
Even when I begged her to move, to find somewhere else to live, my mother wouldn’t hear me.
“This is the house your father bought for me after we were married. I want to live here and I want to die here,” she had said tiredly when I demanded to know why we couldn’t leave.
And die there she did.