by Pat Brown
“They just let you go?” I asked. “I didn’t think they let anyone go just because they decided military life wasn’t a joy ride.”
Walt acted as though I hadn’t commented and he changed the subject.
“They just hired some new girl to work in our mail room. She’s pretty cute.”
The next day he stepped into the kitchen while I was preparing dinner and offered a new explanation for his separation from the air force.
“Actually, I left the military because I had to shoot a bunch of the Grenadians and it really depressed me. I don’t like violence.” I raised an eyebrow, but he abruptly turned and left before I could ask questions again. I found his stated dislike of violence rather ironic considering he was obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and watched The Running Man again and again during the short time he lived in my house. He liked to pretend to be Arnold as well.
“I’ll be back!” he would announce, striking a pose, hands on his hips and head turned sideways.
A week later, he had a new ending to the story.
“I got shot in the leg and that’s why the air force released me,” he told me. He seemed to be searching for an explanation that I would actually believe.
“Oh, I see,” I said, and I didn’t push for further information. My acceptance of this version seemed to end his need to talk to me about his short military career.
Though Walt professed a desire to avoid violence, he appeared to have problems with violence finding him. One night, he told me that he was attacked on the way home by a knife-wielding stranger who stabbed him in the thigh. He claimed he had been jumped while walking down the bike path that ran the two miles between Kim’s house and mine—he carpooled with her from work to her place and then covered the remainder of the route home on foot. Walt told me he had already sewn up the cut himself. I glanced down at his upper leg but he was wearing jeans that covered the “damaged” area. I saw no rip in the cloth and wondered about the veracity of this story, which didn’t quite ring true.
“Why did he attack you?” I asked, skeptical.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then he went back to his room.
A few days later, Walt claimed he had been assaulted again, this time by a homeless man at a bus shelter. He said he was forced to punch the man. By the end of the week, another tale: he subdued a man who wanted to fight him in a bar. I commented rather dryly that my husband had never experienced all this criminal behavior; that Walt, at five eleven and 220 pounds, should have been less of a target for assault than Tony, who had the smaller build of a West Indian soccer player.
THERE WERE OTHER odd stories. On my only visit to Walt’s room since he moved in, I noticed a framed photograph of a lovely young girl displayed on his nightstand. She wore a black graduation gown and a gold chain with a cross hung around her neck. Clearly, the photo was a high school yearbook picture.
“Who’s the pretty girl?” I asked.
Walt sighed.
“She was my high school love, Tiffany. We were going to get married, but on prom night, while I was waiting for her to show up at the dance, she got into a traffic accident. Her car was hit by a truck and she got decapitated.”
He looked at me sadly; then he added, “That’s why I haven’t had sex since.”
After quickly picturing the headless girl in my mind, my next thought was that this man had not had sex since he was seventeen years old. I counted the years, seven of them. And he had been a military man, albeit for a short period of time. I found the likelihood of this self-imposed celibacy hard to swallow, especially since I had come to realize he was not particularly religious (in spite of his recent church attendance) and he talked often about how women were always coming on to him, calling them “sluts,” “bitches,” and “whores.” He even commented that a number of women he had gone out with weren’t interested in sex with him because they were closet lesbians.
He had other peculiarities. The all-black clothing Walt had changed into while at the amusement park had become his regular uniform. When he came home from work, he would morph into his “costume” and disappear out of the house for hours, returning home long after dark. He relished stalking about at night pretending he was a ninja.
“I’m the Avenger!” he informed me, clearly envisioning himself as an invincible gladiator, some superhero straight out of the comic books he loved. I soon discovered he knew nothing of karate outside of making “HA!” noises and striking a stance with bent knees, a fist, and a knife hand. He was like a child who never grew up.
It was during the third week of his stay in my home that Kim told me she was considering breaking off her romantic relationship with Walt.
“He’s beginning to really creep me out,” she confided. “He makes people at work uncomfortable with his bizarre behavior and his ridiculous stories, which none of us think are true. He avoids doing work and makes excuses for not getting tasks accomplished. He usually blames someone else for his poor work performance. Some of the women think he’s stalking them.” She reached into her pocketbook, pulled out a ring with some kind of jewel in it, and shoved it at me. “He told me he bought this to celebrate our one-month anniversary and that it cost him over a thousand dollars! Supposedly he has to make payments on the ring for the next six months!” She grimaced. “I was mortified that he had spent so much money on a present for me when we had been dating only a few weeks. I tried to refuse to accept it, but Walt acted all insulted and insisted I take it. As soon as he left, I began thinking that maybe he was lying about the cost of the ring, that it was really a piece of costume jewelry.”
I looked at the ring, but I was no expert. Save my engagement and wedding rings, I never wore any jewelry in those days.
Kim continued. “I took the ring to a store to get it appraised. The jeweler told me it was definitely not real and probably worth about fifty dollars.” She shook her head. “I have to get away from him. I am going to tell him I don’t want to continue dating when I see him on Saturday.”
As she left the house, she turned and apologized to me. “Sorry I pushed you into renting to him.”
I told her not to worry. Everything would work out just fine.
Little did I know how my life would change.
That night, after tucking in the children, I lay in bed with Tony, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. I felt pretty much like Kim and her coworkers.
“Tony,” I said, “we need to give Walt notice on the first of July. I don’t think I want this guy in our house any longer than he needs to be here.”
Tony surprised me by arguing against getting rid of him. “Why? What has he done? We’ll lose the rent money if we evict him and we probably won’t be able to find someone else to take the room.” Even though Tony was not exactly fond of Walt, the pain of losing the income was now apparently worse than putting up with his strange behavior.
I struggled to explain. “I think there’s something wrong with him. I don’t think it’s wise to have him around.”
Tony grunted. “I think you’re exaggerating things.” He turned over and went to sleep.
Maybe he was right. I wasn’t a psychologist. I wasn’t trained to diagnose mental disorders. Walt hadn’t done anything or said anything that was threatening or scary. I probably had overstated his eccentricities. I would attempt to see the positive side of him and not judge him so harshly.
THE NEXT FEW days went by without incident and I was feeling better. Okay, nothing to worry about after all.
On Thursday night, Walt came downstairs and handed me a sheaf of papers, stapled together at the corner.
“My new short story,” he said proudly. “I’m going to try to get it published. Maybe you can tell me where to send it.” I was a published author, if just once, having been paid one hundred dollars for my submission to Humor magazine, a short-lived publication.
I looked down at the single-spaced typewritten material. At the top of the first page was the title, “My Silent Enemy,” and unde
rneath it, “by Walt Williams.”
Walt retreated to his room and I sat down on the couch and started reading. His composition quickly made my skin crawl. The story was about a man with two personalities. One was an avenger stalking “filth and vermin” in the local park—“his slayground.” The second was a frightened man walking through the dark in the same park, hearing footsteps coming behind him. When he turns quickly to see who is following him, he sees no one. Then he wrote, “Death wore my face. Death used my name. I was my silent enemy.”
All my thoughts about something being wrong with Walt rushed back to me with a vengeance as I read his work. I never did discuss it with him. I kept the story and one copy of it eventually ended up in police evidence. I didn’t realize then that this tale was to be a harbinger of the events to come just a few days later.
Walt had now been living in my house for nearly three weeks. On Saturday, the day Kim planned to have her talk with him, I took the kids to Virginia to spend the day and night with a friend of mine who had children of the same age. When I got back the next day, I planned to call Kim to see how her talk with Walt went.
Then, on Sunday morning, I got the phone call about the homicide.
THE NEWS OF the murder still ringing in my head, I stared at Walt standing in front of me.
“Hey! Hey!” He grinned. “I’m going off hiking with the church.”
I looked at his clothing. He wasn’t wearing his usual daytime outfit of shorts and a summer shirt. Instead, he was in blue jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt, which seemed overdressed for the hot June day. Maybe he was protecting himself from thorns and branches, I reasoned.
I looked him in the eye. “Say, did you hear about the murder on the bike path that happened last night?”
“Yeah, I heard about it.”
“Isn’t that dreadful? The poor girl!”
Walt made no comment.
“Were you on the path yesterday?” I tried to make it sound like I was kidding him a bit.
Walt looked away, crossed his arms, and then looked back at me with a cold stare. “Yeah, but I cut across the stream behind the bowling alley on Kenilworth Avenue and got my feet wet.”
Then he turned abruptly and left the room.
I tried to process what I had just heard. Did he admit he was on the path yesterday? Did he actually claim he left the path and waded through the water to cut over to a road that would take him out of his way and make his walk longer? Did he really say he was in the same stream where the body was found? Did he really seem to have no reaction to the grisly murder, show no compassion for the victim, or even be spooked about the fact that she was murdered on a path he walked daily? Wasn’t he worried he could become a suspect or could have been another victim? Yet he didn’t seem to be fazed by the event or his proximity to it.
It was a long day of stewing and gnawing doubts. Could it be?
Nah, come on, it couldn’t be. Okay, he is weird, very weird, and he has issues. This doesn’t make him a killer. Of course, there was that story about the “slayground.” Could he have been hunting “filth and vermin,” “sluts and bitches,” acting out his Avenger character? No, you are overreaching. Stop it.
IN THE EVENING, Walt returned to the house and went up to his room. An hour later, Kim called.
“Can you go check on Walt for me?” she asked.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
She gave me a quick rundown of her talk with him during his visit to her home on Saturday afternoon. “I told him I wasn’t ready for a committed relationship and would prefer to be friends. I tried to give him back the ring and he got very upset. He huffed out of the house.”
I held my breath and then asked what time he had left.
“Early evening, about seven p.m.”
I felt a moment of relief that he hadn’t left later, closer to nightfall. Good, if he walked directly back to the house he would have already been home before the murder went down. Then the unfortunate thought came to me that maybe he didn’t come directly back. Maybe he stopped at a store, or hung around near Kim’s house awhile, thinking about going back and trying to talk her into giving him another chance.
“Anyway,” Kim went on, “I thought I should call him to be nice and make sure he was all right, but when I was talking to him just now, he sounded really disturbed. I asked him if he was all right and he didn’t answer. I thought he might be suicidal because he told me he tried to commit suicide before. I asked if he was going to do anything bad and he said, ‘You don’t know what I’ve already done.’”
I felt the room reel just a little. The early feelings of unease returned with the force of a hammer. Oh, please, do not let this be true.
“Can you check on him?”
I made myself sound calm. “Sure.”
I knocked on the door and called to Walt. “Hey, everything all right up there? Kim is a little worried about you.”
He answered in a chipper voice. “Sure, I’m fine.”
I went back to Kim. “He’s fine.” I felt I sounded a bit sarcastic, as my attitude toward Walt was definitely going downhill.
Kim breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. I would hate to think I pushed him over the edge. Okay, thanks, I’ll catch you later.”
I couldn’t tell her my thoughts. I didn’t want to burden her right then. And I didn’t want to sound nuts. I didn’t know what the heck I was really thinking, or what I should do. What if Walt really was a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer? I wanted to believe I was wrong, and I told myself I was.
I put the children to bed and went to lie down myself. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the innocent girl lying in the water, naked and still. I felt ill and I felt guilty. I should do something. What if she were my child? How would I react if I thought a citizen was hanging on to information about who might have killed her? For God’s sake, I would scream, “Go to the police!” I thought about my safety and my children’s safety. I wondered what would happen if he knew I suspected him. Would he come after us, kill us all? I wondered what others would do. Would they decide they didn’t really know anything and convince themselves not to contact the police?
“Tony!”
I slugged my husband in the left arm. “Wake up!”
He rolled over.
“What is it?”
“I think Walt may have killed that girl.”
Tony groaned. “Oh, come on. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, I mean it. You don’t like him, you said yourself he’s weird. Well, you were right. He is,” I insisted. “Kim broke up with him on Saturday and he took the path home from her house.”
“So?”
“Tony? Don’t you think it just might be him?”
“Lots of people are on that path. I run on that path. Yeah, Walt is a little bizarre and I don’t like him, but I can’t believe the guy is a murderer.” He rolled back over, away from me. “Go to sleep,” he muttered.
Great. Thanks. Easy for you to do.
Somebody killed that girl. Maybe I was out in left field with my suspicions about Walt, but on the other hand, if I was right, wouldn’t it be better to be safe than sorry? I would rather be a little embarrassed that the killer turned out to be someone else than feel guilty that I let a murderer walk away without even bringing him to the attention of law enforcement. If he was the perpetrator and he killed again, how would I live with myself?
I spent the rest of the night trying to decide how to handle the situation. Do I just go to the police and tell them Walt is some kind of mental case? Do I try to learn more before I do that? Do I search for evidence? This wasn’t a Hollywood movie and no scriptwriter was handing me a sheet with directions for the next scene. I had to go with my gut, and I decided that while Walt was at work, I would review all I knew. Maybe I could get more information on the psychology and behavior of serial killers and see if he even fit the description. Then I could search his room for proof of my theory, for true physical evidence, and see if any existed.
If by the end of the day I felt fairly convinced I was right, I would go to the police.
The next morning, Monday, Walt rose at his usual time and left the house. He walked past his car with the expired tags and vanished around the corner. I wondered if he was going back to walk along the path where the murder had taken place and show up unannounced at Kim’s. Yes, this sounded like something he would do, and Kim would probably go ahead and let him ride to work with her.
As the day dragged on, I watched the news and learned the name of the murdered woman: Anne Kelley. She was an intern chosen for her smarts, a graduate at the top of her class who came east for a job opportunity many others wished they had gotten. She was extremely bright, enthusiastic, and friendly, and naturally, everyone loved her. She was twenty-two years old, petite, and the short, wispy hair framing her face gave her a look of childish innocence. I almost wish I hadn’t seen her picture because now she became a real person to me. Each time I shut my eyes, her face would appear before me. When she was attacked, I wondered, how many seconds did it take her to realize that everything she dreamed of was never going to come true? That this was already the end?
And who ended it for her? Who could do such a thing to this sweet girl? I thought about Walt’s recent behavior and went over and over it in my head. Was he a killer?
By afternoon, I needed solid answers. I piled the kids into the car and went off to the library. Those were the days when most people did not have access to the Internet and I was one of them. I had to do my research the old-fashioned way—by going through card files and finding books on the subjects I wanted to know more about: rapists and serial killers.
During the next two hours, my children enjoyed their books of imaginative stories and humorous animal misadventures while I read about women being hacked into pieces and other sorts of terrible and unimaginable crimes. I learned that almost all men who commit sexual violence against others are psychopaths, people with no empathy for others and no remorse for the heinous crimes they commit. And while not all psychopaths are serial killers, all serial killers are psychopaths. In my readings, I came across Robert Hare’s psychopathy checklist, a quick way to evaluate someone’s likelihood of possessing this destructive personality disorder. It came with a warning not to analyze anyone yourself, that such an evaluation should be done only by a professional. I felt Hare was tossing out that piece of advice much the way every exercise book tells you to see a doctor before beginning their regimen, so I ignored it.
