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The discovery of fear
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The discovery of fear
  In my column week before last, I mentioned my Discovery of Fear, and said it was another story I’d tell sometime. I meant to do that last week, when it would have tied in perfectly with National Victims’ Rights Week. But last week the horrible, horrible mosquito invasion seemed timelier and, spurred on by the growing number of itchy welts on my body, I wrote about that instead.  So here I am, a couple of weeks late, writing about victim’s rights and the Discovery of Fear. I make no apologies – life’s like that. My Discovery of Fear came when I was 12 years old. “Late bloomer,” you’re thinking. But I’m not talking about fear of getting caught playing where I wasn’t supposed to, or fear of falling off my bike, or of dropping my tray in the school cafeteria, or of being different, or any of the other small, familiar fears that lurk in the heart of a 12-year-old girl. Those are internal fears, fears we make up ourselves, fears whose grounds we can, to some degree, control. I’m talking about fear of the world outside—the realization that horrible things can happen to you for no reason. It was late July, 1966. I had been 12 for only a couple of weeks. “Life” magazine arrived in the mail and I, as was usual during summer vacation, fell upon it and began devouring it as a hungry lion devours its prey.  My mother entered the living room where I sprawled on the floor with the magazine open in front of me. She took one look at the pictures, and snatched the magazine away from me. It was too late. I’d already seen and read the entire cover story. It was about a man whose name I won’t write for reasons I will explain later. A man known before July 13, 1966 only as a petty criminal, and after that as an unspeakable monster.  This man broke into a Chicago townhouse on July 13, 1966 and killed eight student nurses who lived there. He bound them and kept them in a room together, removing them one at a time to other rooms where he either stabbed or strangled them, sometimes raping them first. That was horrible enough, but what chilled my 12-year-old heart through and through was the story of the ninth nursing student, who rolled under a bed while the killer wasn’t looking, and survived there, waiting hours after he had gone before working her way out and going to a window ledge to scream for help.  I spent weeks trying to figure out what would make a person do such a horrible thing. I wasn’t naïve enough, even at 12, to think people never did horrible things, but until then I thought they had a recognizable reason – money, perhaps, or fear, even spite. It had never occurred to me that people might do horrible things simply because they could or, even more unfathomable, because they enjoyed doing them. After I read that story, I developed a rigorous bedtime ritual of checking doors and windows that had always before remained unlocked, and of looking not just in my closet and under my bed, but in all the closets and under all the beds. I had nightmares of waking up alone in the house. The media loves serial killers, and can’t be condemned for it, because the public loves serial killers. Serial killers, both real and imagined, are the subject of innumerable books and movies. A television show, “Dexter,” features as its hero a serial killer who uses his sociopathic powers for good.  Years after that Chicago story has ceased keeping me awake at night, as a reporter, I would have occasion to interview several serial killers. What I found was not intriguing, or exciting. Certainly not glamorous. What I found was simply broken people – people who have no feelings for others and who, because they have always felt that way, are convinced the rest of us are like that as well, and fake feelings, as they do, to get by.  Yet serial killers’ writings and artwork and personal belongings have become collectibles. They get loads of mail, and keep up with many penpals. Women marry them in prison. Their names are famous, practically glorified. Which is why I refuse to write the name of the killer whose story frightened me all those years ago. And why this column is tied into victims’ rights.  That killer is dead now, but you would recognize his name, even if that story didn’t have the effect on you that it did on me. Here, instead, are the names you haven’t read a million times, the names of those who were not made famous that horrible night in 1966, the names of those who never got any mail or had any penpals – the names that really matter: Gloria Davy  |
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