Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  Victimology is a criminalistic study of the victims, their characteristics – female, blonde hair, Asian, dark skin, light skin, red skirts, pony tails, works in a bank or a kitchen – which might then, stepping into the mind of the killer, start to provide a profile of who he is.

  Or, more to the point, who I am.

  —

  I’VE OFTEN WONDERED who he is. The real killer. I’m going to extinguish him now, the man who put me here, erase him out of my mind, make him invisible, no longer an entity with a heartbeat but, before I do, one last consideration of the man, the killer, who shut down my past eighteen years.

  Where are you now?

  What are you doing? Do you live in a house with kids and a wife? Maybe you have a dog. What do you think about alone in your bed? You haven’t killed for the past eighteen years, since I was convicted, so I wonder how you’ve managed to keep those secret, longing desires from turning into actions. It must be hard for you. Not to kill. I read about the way you folded back the heads of your victims, resting their almost-decapitated heads onto their left shoulders, the way you cut into either side of their mouth creating a bizarre grin and the way you carved Taranis onto their chests, the way you pulled out one of their teeth – how did you manage to squash what must have been a massive rush of satisfaction for you?

  I can’t imagine it. It makes me want to vomit. But now I must. And will. In your footsteps. Where are you now? Are you still alive? Are you that man covered in tattoos? Nils Marnell. Who terrified me with just his appearance. Who chopped at a man’s head in Papua New Guinea. Are you that man? Whoever you are, maybe you died soon after I was convicted. Maybe you went to prison for something else. Maybe you found God and turned your wicked life around, into the arms of angels.

  I am scared of you. You fill my nightmares.

  But now you no longer exist, because I am about to become you.

  —

  THE PAROLE BOARD is going to want to know why I did it and how I did it.

  I want to kill middle-aged white men. They are wealthy but not extremely so. The first one lives in the Ascot/Clayfield part of town, which is where I lived, upper middle class, and he and his wife are settled and well off. They, all of my victims, work in the city. They wear suits and ties. They like to go out at night. They walk through the Gardens or along the Kangaroo Point clifftops. Is there a connection? Something that links three men walking alone at night, alongside the Brisbane River. In the rain, too. This was just before the river burst its banks, when the city had been deluged with rain for over two months. Just like we are now afflicted by drought, year after year.

  Why do I want to kill them? Why have I targeted these men? Why not younger men? Why not women? Am I gay? Was I abused as a child? Am I the victim of domestic abuse? Was I a young woman who wanted to take it out on married men? But women rarely kill; all the killers in Wacol did it because the cheating, lying, evil, brutal husbands got what they deserved after too many years of meting out bashings, when finally, murder became the way out for these women, even knowing that prison would follow. The amount of times I have heard, ‘At least the cunt is dead.’ Followed by, ‘I saved myself,’ or ‘I saved my kids.’

  Even my gorgeous Rosie – who cut and diced then cooked her husband with carrots and spuds – did what she did because he would beat her and place a hot iron on the soles of her feet while she slept and vowed to chop off her fingers.

  Maybe it’s just the thrill. I’ve read and studied that too. No childhood issues. No anger issues. Just the thrill of a kill. The rush of a hit, like a jab of smack. Was it that? A hundred and fifty years ago, prosecutors would often cite menstruation as a common motive for a woman to kill. My prosecutor alleged I had anger issues towards men. Is the motive as prosaic as ‘It was fun’?

  I don’t think you are a woman. I’m sure you are a man, but whatever led you to kill as you did, it is of no relevance to me. Because I am the killer. I did it. Not you.

  Anger towards men is as good as anything. Why not, as I embrace my guilt and seek atonement, agree with what the prosecutor has already said.

  But I must also explain Taranis. In my mind, somehow, as I cut your throat and fold back your neck, cut the edges of your mouth and pay homage to the god of thunder, I must feel as though I am communing with a violent Celtic culture. Do I really believe I am making a sacrifice to a make-believe god who existed in the minds of people two thousand years ago? That is either really twisted or really childish. Or am I just appropriating it to be cool? To stand out from the other killers? To leave my mark on history? To be remembered? Have I written a diary? Maybe I have. I think I have. I think I wrote down how it felt to kill each of those men. Did I snip a lock of their hair? No. It’s the teeth. Why not ears? Didn’t the prosecutor mention my love of Ogmios to the jury? The ears of his followers tied to a golden chain, linked onto his tongue? The teeth have to be a trophy. Yes? Teeth last. Ears would go mouldy. Have I formed those teeth into a hidden chain? Is it hidden in a box in an attic? Like Robert Hansen, the Canadian serial killer who took the lives of at least seventeen women; he had locks of their hair in a box in an attic. The police ignored him for ages because his victims were prostitutes, so it was their fault they got killed. (He got 461 years. That’s Life on steroids.)

  What is it about my victims that sheds a light on me?

  What is it about me that sheds a light on them?

  Did I know them? Did I cross paths with them? Or maybe I knew their kids? Did any of their kids go to my school? Was I a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl having sex with them? Would I meet up with them in a bar in the Valley with a fake ID card and then lure them away so I could kill them?

  What did I say to these men? Did I say anything or did I rush at them with my knife? And we’ll get to the knife, the method of killing, in a minute because that too is going to tell me something about who you are, Jen.

  Stay with them. Be patient. Build up the stories and profile of who they were, try to find a common link and then create your motivation. The why.

  Then create the how.

  James

  JAMES. VICTIM NUMBER ONE. THIRTY-SEVEN, MARRIED TO Lynne with two kids, Matt and Diane. It says here that Lynne read out a victim impact statement to the court and screamed at me for taking away her husband. It says here that Matt and Diane were in the court and had to be led out because they were weeping.

  I cannot remember any of this.

  James was an architect, working out of a modern city tower with Thai and Japanese restaurants on the ground floor and an expensive cocktail bar on the rooftop. He worked long hours; he had his own key and therefore after-hours access to the office space. He would often get to work at seven a.m. and leave at six p.m. Sometimes later. Like, eight or nine. James liked then to go to the Valley, and there is a hint that he was bi, a suggestion he had a lover down there at a bar called CRASHED, but on the night I killed him he’d been to see his friend Nick, who lived around the corner from Kangaroo Point, and then took a slow walk to the highway to hail a cab. Nick was too drunk to drive his friend home, and James said he needed some fresh air.

  James was short and trim. He went to the gym. He was good looking. Thick brown hair and a nice, warm smile. The sort of guy you might linger a glance upon. And I think he knew it too. I think he was a little vain but he was a good and caring father. He and Lynne were childhood sweethearts which was nice and they’d holiday on Lord Howe Island every year.

  Perhaps James and I were lovers and I discovered this other lover down in the Valley, which infuriated me; I could handle him being married because he kept telling me he was going to leave her: Just wait until you turn eighteen, Jen, then we can run away together. But maybe I discovered he had a secret gay life with this guy in the bar called CRASHED.

  James lived a couple of streets away from my house. His daughter did not go to the same school as me. But maybe, on those days I played truant and hung in the city mall, maybe instead of doing that I went around to his house and
we had sex. Maybe I wrote about him in a lover’s diary, which I have since burnt.

  He was a soccer player, and he encouraged his kids to play the game and pretty much every Saturday the family would drive to the local field and watch the game and, according to the victim impact statement from his wife and indeed from testimony regarding his character, from friends and colleagues, he would never engage in aggro like the other soccer mums and dads.

  He was just the sweetest guy.

  Yeah, he was and I killed him.

  I think he was my lover and I got jealous and killed him because of that. But what about the other guys? That’s a lot of middle-aged lovers, Jen. Let’s just put that scenario on hold and move on.

  Brian

  BECAUSE THEN I KILLED BRIAN. HE WAS ALSO THE SWEETEST guy. He had a silly mop of hair and would sing Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling at parties. Also married, to Jacinta. With three kids and two dogs, and they all lived in Paddington on the other side of town. Not as upmarket as Ascot but a wealthy inner-city suburb. Jacinta read out a victim statement too. I’m reading it now. I skipped over Lynne’s because it made me sad, but I have to read them because I have to show great empathy for these wives, widows, whose lives I tore apart.

  I made an application to the court to have these transcripts sent to me. I didn’t have to wait very long; Anthea paid for them.

  Anthea and I don’t talk about the murders. We don’t talk about the trial. We don’t talk about who might have done it, who the real killer might be and where he is now. We talk about everything but the killings. It’s better that way.

  Brian was a solicitor for a city law firm. He had a thing for old Renaults, which he restored in his garage. I killed him in the Botanic Gardens, on the other side of the river from where I killed James. Then I killed Fabio, less than a week later, also in the Botanic Gardens. Look at those dates: I killed three men so quickly, one after the other. Fabio had had a late dinner, on his own in a restaurant across the road from the Gardens and decided to take a walk afterwards.

  I could have had sex with James. At a pinch. Even though he was old enough to be my father. But Brian? Eek. No. He was pretty ugly. Yeah, he was the sweetest guy but he had a big nose and fat lips and he looked as though he’d sweat a lot.

  The Third Man

  THIS IS WHERE THE LOVER ANGLE GETS REALLY DIFFICULT. No-one is going to believe that I had sex with three random middle-aged men. The prosecution suggested I had a rage against older men and left the issue of motivation there, not really bothering to linger on why, moving on to the evidence, circumstantial and otherwise.

  Otherwise meaning the knife.

  The knife has haunted me every day and night for the past eighteen years. Who planted it and how, and how, also, did they get my fingerprints and place them on the blade, along with James’s blood? But those worries are gone now because it was my knife and I did hide it in my locker at school and I forgot to wipe it clean or throw it away because I was overwhelmed with the rush of my first kill. And, to explain the knife and the other two kills, well, that’s easy. I went and bought another knife. Bigger. Longer. Sharper.

  I could get away with being James’s lover; that would work. But also with a guy from Paddington? And another guy called Fabio? They must have been a spontaneous attack of blood lust. I must have been waiting for them, on those two separate nights, in the Gardens, having got the thrill of it after James. And because I had gotten away with killing Brian in the Gardens, it had become a secure environment for me to kill Fabio.

  But if James’s murder was driven by raging jealousy, why didn’t I stop there, once I had scored my revenge, the revenge of a teenage lover-girl thwarted by her middle-aged man who’d been playing up with another lover down in the Valley?

  How did you find out about the other lover? You followed him, yeah, because you were suspicious. Yeah, that works …

  … actually, maybe it doesn’t.

  Maybe the lover thing is just too much; they are going to ask me where we met and how it happened and how many times and they might also want to know what his house looked like and what he said about his wife; you know, on reflection, it’s going to be too tangled to spin that web of lies. Just be a female Jack the Ripper. Easier that way. Keep it simple, Jen. Blood-lust. No other motivation: you just wanted to saw into the heads of three random guys.

  Which takes me to the gory bit. I’m not exactly squeamish but this is disgusting and, again, I blocked it all during the trial. I had no clear memory of what the police said about how the victims were killed, not until I began to immerse myself in the killer, reading the trial transcripts, to become him. I have a vague memory of the courtroom being full and people gasping in horror and the widows, who sat together holding hands and staring at me every minute of every day, weeping, and I think there might been an adjournment when the judge said we should take a break.

  But here it is in black and white.

  The victim was initially struck from behind with a strong blow to the back of the neck. This blow was most likely from a machete or similar type of blade, its width less than a millimetre. In each of the three murders, the blade cut deep into the back of the neck, causing the victim to fall. In each of the three murders, a second blow was sustained to the side of the neck and around to the throat, where the accused then proceeded to slice into the neck. In each of the three murders, this led to near but not complete decapitation. Then I cut into the edge of their mouths and created a grotesque-looking smile, and then I pulled out one of their teeth, a maxillary canine, third from the middle, the one that looks like a long fang.

  None of the guys I killed was tall. Each of them was my height or a bit shorter. And I caught them by surprise, from behind, so there was no lingering issue with the fact that a seventeen-year-old girl had the physical wherewithal to do it. I guess I must have sat on them while I finished them off. And contrary to what you might imagine, sawing off a person’s head – or almost – is not especially hard. Just apply pressure and don’t stop. In other words, it was pretty quick, each of these killings, which helps explain why I wasn’t seen by any witnesses. But there was eyewitness testimony from two different people who said they had seen a person on a skateboard, wearing a hoodie; it might well have been a girl.

  It was a girl.

  It was me. Me, the killer.

  Where did I get the knife, or was it a machete? How on earth does a person get a machete? Maybe it was a kitchen chopping knife like those wide-bladed ones that Chinese chefs use to chop a chicken or a duck. I could have got one of them easily. I went down to the Valley, into Chinatown to one of the Asian supermarkets and got it there and packed it away in my school bag next to my actual knife, my flick-knife, which I had gotten from an Asian market in the Valley, the one that I kept secret from mum but used to stab trees and some of the girls at school, little stabs, not big I-am-going-to-kill-you stabs.

  Well, this speaks to a significant level of premeditation, Jen, so … why. Tell us why you committed these murders.

  I’ve been wondering that myself as I now grapple with my guilt and desperate need to atone and seek forgiveness through my process of rehabilitation and thanks for asking that question because it’s like, you know, what I’ve been going through with the therapy sessions where I get the chance to consider and reflect upon my past behaviours in order to erase automatic responses and enter into a really strong, you know, process of behaviour modification but, yes, I think it was me watching all the porn and then going down into a rabbit hole of violent S&M and bondage and finally, like a junkie, staring at snuff movies. As I look back and reflect, I think that unleashed an anger towards men. You know, seeing them subjugate women in that way, made me want to subjugate them.

  How does that sound? Will that do?

  Additionally, as a teenage girl in search of an identity because of self-esteem issues, which is, sadly, so common with teenage girls, I fell into the grip of the Goth and Celtic world and this had a twisted, violent influence on m
e and so, as I killed the three men, I imagined myself invoking this god of thunder. Also, Ogmios, which is why I desecrated the bodies by cutting the mouths and removing the teeth and carving Taranis’s spoke. Being in prison has really allowed me to escape these thoughts and, as my psychologist attests, I have not had these thoughts for many, many years now. I am a completely different person.

  How does that sound? Will that do?

  I feel so ashamed and embarrassed by this and so remorseful for the hurt I have caused the families of my three victims. And I also have to confess to the parole board, and this has been hard for me to acknowledge, that yes, as the prosecution said, I felt this rage against men. I think it also relates to my father, in that he was largely absent as I grew up. I loved my father and still do but he was never around as much as I would have liked and I think, as I strive to really understand this, that I built up a growing anger towards men like him. You know, successful, middle-aged married men. This is also why I stupidly invoked the cult and god of Ogmios with the cutting of the sides of their mouths. To humiliate them. Same with the removal of the canine tooth. To humiliate and then debase them.

  How does that sound? Will that do?

  I have been working really hard to deal with these issues, and strange as it may be for you to hear this, being inside prison for all these years to this point where I am in my late-thirties, I feel I have really come to terms with this and I certainly have no such anger issues regarding men or my father anymore. I have also been working on addiction therapy and I am totally comfortable with, you know, one of the parole provisos, if indeed I am granted parole, not to drink or smoke, and not to go online. Ever again. I am more than happy to give my parole officer my IP address should I actually get a computer so he or she can ensure that this promise is adhered to.