Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

Death triumphant.

The War to End All Wars.

You didn’t really care about this, though. School was in a few weeks, you’d hear plenty of it then. The other magazines you found, though . . . you weren’t going to hear Ms. Garza talk about them in a classroom. Not ever.

Time had not been especially kind to them. The pages were yellowed and slight water damage left waves on some of the covers. They looked like comic books at first, which might have been interesting anyway, but then you saw they were something else. They bore the title SHOCKING DETECTIVE. The covers were illustrated, united by a theme similar to the Life coverage of the War to End All Wars.

The theme was women.

Women in various stages of undress.

Women in peril.

They all looked like Hollywood starlets who lived in the same apartment building. They could have been sisters, these redheads, brunettes, and blondes. They were all beautiful, they were all voluptuous, they were all terrified—their mouths set in a silent scream that seemed to resound far beyond the barriers of the page.

They all had male visitors.

Men with masks and black gloves.

Men with knives.

You were initially disappointed when you opened these issues of Shocking Crimes and discovered they weren’t illustrated after all; only the covers were artistically rendered. You were still interested enough to read them, though, even if there was going to be plenty of that in school, too.

Who could have resisted the allure of the articles, though? Such titles! “Madman Mutilated the Missouri Mother!” “Sadist Slaughtered Six Southern Belles!” “Fiend Filleted Aunt Frieda!”

The promise didn’t stop there. Even a cursory glance of the articles revealed several highlighted captions throughout which presented the horror in bigger letters and bolder print.

For instance:

“Her husband of fifteen years couldn’t even recognize her. Several blows to her face and an aborted attempt to burn her remains resulted in damage too extensive for identification. ‘You’d never believe that twisted mass of burnt decay was ever a human being,’ said coroner Brad Zeller.”

But not to be outdone by:

“The murder weapon was obviously an axe. There were deep grooves consistent with overhead swings of said instrument in sixteen wounds on her body. There were also footprint indentations on her rib cage, as though the killer stood on her to help him withdraw the axe so that he could swing it again . . . and again . . . and again.”

They were always crimes of passion, if not necessarily in the traditional sense. This wasn’t about retribution because of a cheating wife. This was something deeper. You understood that then, even if you could never have verbalized it. This was about a sacred drama, scenes from a ritual unfolding in unremarkable corners of Everywhere.

Where does something like this begin?

It began with Shocking Crimes and a simple connection.

You then became I, and I have killed six women. He knew little about the Slave Murders and it would have stayed that way were it not for the special report on Channel Two News. Maybe he wouldn’t have even watched it had Jana been there, but of course she was not.

“Residents of Bartok vividly recall the terror of twenty-five years ago when the murderer who called himself the Slave Killer stalked these very streets.” The platinum blonde reporter, Geisha Hammond, gestured dramatically behind her to reveal the horror of Bartok pedestrians and middle class cars. “It was here in this peaceful community that the notorious serial killer took the lives of a confirmed four victims. Some experts believe the number could be as high as eighteen.”

Cut to:

A so-called expert: Dr. Julius Vincent. “Why would he stop at four? This guy liked what he was doing. Nothing short of incarceration or illness would stop him.”

Geisha Hammond returned. “Was the Slave Killer imprisoned for an unrelated crime or possibly committed to a mental institution? These questions cannot be answered definitively now, but one thing is for sure: After twenty-five years, some believe the Slave Killer has picked up where he left off.”

That got his attention.

They played familiar news footage from the year before. Forensic experts and detectives got in each other’s way as they scoured an open field. Like the point of a painting from which all lines emanate, a crumpled form lay behind them under a white sheet which fluttered in the autumn wind.

“The body of Deborah Willis was discovered on October 15th,” Geisha narrated. “No one could know that it was only the beginning of a reign of terror.” News footage from an almost identical crime scene intervened. “When Leslie Kinderman turned up under similar circumstances on November 17th, however, it began to seem chillingly familiar to long-time residents of Bartok.”

The crisp picture of Leslie Kinderman’s discovery became a more washed out, shaky clip from twenty-five years ago. More cops converging on an outdoor crime scene, with thicker hairstyles and cheaper looking suits. Disco Inferno after the body clean-up.

“The death of Anita Banks was a far more puzzling crime then, seemingly without any kind of motive. The perpetrator was thought to be a drifter, but the murder of Helen Mitchell a mere month later complicated this theory. The victims had little in common, except that they both caught the eye of a dangerous killer.”

JOURNAL ENTRY, FEBRUARY 1

They were all whores. There’s no story if the papers come right out and say it, because no one cares if some slut winds up dead in a ditch somewhere. So they try to portray them as responsible citizens. They paid their taxes, they provided for their children, they filled up soup bowls so a bunch of worthless bums wouldn’t starve to death, etc.

If only everyone could see them the way I do, though. If they could hear the things I do when I notice them. Thoughts loud enough to be voices.

“That gleam in her eye—naked sexual lust. Something for you to see, but never experience. That’s her game. Maybe you should follow her and teach her your game.”

Maybe I should indeed. He always found it strange and somewhat desensitizing when commercials interrupted something like the special on the Slave Killer. It created a subtext along the lines of “the murders of Deborah Willis, Leslie Kinderman, and Megan Ballard are brought to you by General Motors and Burger King—Home of the Whopper.” It made it all seem like it was only a TV show; an eighteen-minute sitcom minus the canned laughter. This week’s episode: Janet Lynn decides to hitchhike on Highway 88 and gets picked up by a bloodthirsty killer, who has more in his pants for her than just a butcher knife.

Channel Two News returned.

“But how did the Slave Killer come to be known by his chilling moniker?” Geisha Hammond asked viewers.

So-called expert Dr. Julius Vincent made another appearance. “He chose the name himself in the first of his many letters to the local newspaper, the Bartok Daily .”

Cut to:

The first letter, as the camera slowly panned across each word while a narrator tried to affect the murder’s clinical lack of emotion (he succeeded only in sounding bored). A disclaimer appeared at the bottom of the screen: DRAMATIZATION.

Much like car commercials, he thought.

“I am the murderer of certain young women who keep turning up in ditches, fields, and drain pipes. These are fitting places for them, don’t you agree? I stashed the scum where they wouldn’t bother anyone, and now they’re waiting to serve me when I leave this world. I would appreciate it if you would refer to me as the Slave Killer from now on, because that is what I am.”