by Ann Benson
“I slit his throat, finally, and thereafter he died. But in order to keep the blood from spurting all over me, I held his tunic against his neck. I could not see what I was doing, and I cut too deeply. His head was close to coming off—I had not killed before and I did not know my own strength at the time, or I had unnatural strength for some reason, perhaps the excitement of it all. It hung pathetically, and as I began to drag his corpus away for hiding, it bumped along behind the rest of him. I could not bear to think that it might fall off, so I removed it purposefully. I buried him and his head in a cairn by the side of the stream, for there were many loose rocks available, and the spot I chose was behind a large bush, not easily seen except from very close at hand. I tied my own sash around his neck, so it would seem attached still, for I could not bear to look at what I had done to him. I tried to wash the blood off myself in the stream, but it was not possible to remove it all from my clothing. I took the dagger and made a small cut in my arm as a means of justifying it. When all was as complete as I could make it, I ran back to the castle, waving at the lookout as I came into view. I began to scream and blubber that Michel had been dragged off by a boar—you know this, Mère, you were there in the courtyard as the riders went out.
“The light was fading, and soon darkness ruled. The riders were forced to come back, perhaps an hour after the sun set, and did not go out again until the following morning. I know in my heart that they must have been only a few feet away from where Michel lay, not that they would have found him—he was too well-concealed, at least then he was. I will never understand why your Etienne did not stumble upon him in his forays out into the woods; he once told me how extensively he had searched. I think perhaps he ranged too far—thinking he was looking for a corpse that a boar or some other animal had dragged off. It was not until a good while later that I went back out again to see if the site was undisturbed. Some of the rocks appeared to have been moved, perhaps by an animal. The head was partly exposed, so I uncovered it. There was Michel’s sweet face, at long last smiling at me. I could not bear to leave it there, so I took it with me.”
Madame Catherine Karle and her son had come upon Michel before Milord had taken his head away. Jean de Craon’s sudden appearance kept them from coming forward with what they knew, as they feared he would reveal some dark secret of Madame’s past. I dare not imagine what secret was precious enough to keep her from speaking of something so despicable. Her son would not tell me, and the lady herself was dead, so I would never know.
But here in front of me was the man who had taken the life of my beloved child, simply because he wanted it. Simply because it came into his imagination to have it, because it was there to be done, and he was there to do it.
I was reeling; I had to get hold of myself. I sat down in the same ornate and beautiful chair that had held my cloak on my previous visit here. I tucked the ivory pot that had brought this confession out of Gilles de Rais back into my sleeve again and felt the near-forgotten dagger that I had brought along with me.
My fingers gripped the hilt and found strength beyond all my imagining. The pot fell noiselessly to the very bottom of the sleeve pocket as I imagined drawing the knife upward toward the light.
Was this how Milord felt with the braquemard in his grip and the neck of a child, or the white belly, exposed to him? He must have felt strong and mighty over these weak little ones, who could not defend themselves against him or his equally depraved cronies. He must have felt like God Himself—almighty, all-powerful, the ruler of all things who could not be denied any pleasure that he dreamed of or saw. With hard and sure strokes, Milord had taken the life out of uncountable small boys and perhaps a dozen young girls who had the inconvenient audacity to be present when he wanted their brothers.
Now I would make one hard and sure stroke and send this evil to the depths of hell for all time.
Milord stood there with his eyes closed, as if savoring his memories. I moved slowly, guarding the rustle of my robe so as not to draw his notice. Just before I pulled out the knife, I prayed with all the sincerity my heart held.
Dear God, forgive me for what I am about to do. And when my judgment comes, remember that I am Your instrument in this moment, that this is Your hand that raises up the dagger, that this is Your will driving it. Let me be the hand of justice, that finds its mark in the throat of this evil one, who offends You and all Your creatures. . . .
Suddenly Gilles’s eyes were open and upon me. His mouth tightened into a circle of terror, and he began to shrink back. He brought his hands up as if to guard his face.
But I had not yet raised the dagger.
“Barron,” he whispered, his voice barely audible. “Oh, Lord Barron, why have you come now, when all hope is lost?”
What was this sudden madness? “Milord Gilles, I am not Barron—”
“You lie, Demon. You lie, as they have always said you do! Oh, how could I have been such a fool as to think that you would show yourself truly to me, for here you are, in the guise of one I have always trusted, but you are he who I sought with Franc¸ois. . . .”
The knife felt cold and foreign in my grasp; it was no longer the comfort it had been only moments ago when I had planned to use it in the name of God. It seemed an unholy thing all of a sudden. Still, I could not bring myself to let it go.
He saw me as the demon he had sought for so long without success. It had been the mother in me who had wanted to spare him, and now it was the mother in me who would slay him for his sins. If he saw me as the devil, could I not see the same in him?
I looked and saw Satan. But was he lunatic, and therefore inculpable? Was he merely playing at insanity, to invoke my sympathy?
I no longer cared. I pulled the knife out of my sleeve and raised my arm up high in the air. It felt like the staff of Moses in my hand, the sword of God, with power beyond imagining. Milord Gilles did not move but simply stood where he was, welcoming the cut. In his vacant eyes there was no emotion; he did not seem to care if I killed him. He cared about nothing, least of all me.
All my strength rushed to my forearms, and I plunged downward. But before the knife found its home in the heart of Gilles de Rais, I was grasped at the waist and whirled around. I had not heard anyone approach; Milord had not called for the guards, and I had done nothing to attract their notice. It was as if I were dancing in the air. While I was restrained, Milord turned and escaped into his rooms.
And then I was down on the floor in a tangle of black cloth. The dagger fell free and landed on the carpet, straight up with its point in the deep pile, where it stood, shuddering. I broke free of my abductor’s grasp and whirled around to face him, and found myself staring into the eyes of Jean de Malestroit.
He took up the quivering knife and pulled me into the outer passageway. There he placed me against one wall for balance. There were no guards nearby; he must have sent them farther back into the passageway, for surely he would not have dismissed them.
“Guillemette!” he cried. “What has overtaken you?”
“I—I do not know . . .”
“How could you think to do such a thing as this—have you lost your mind?”
I stared at him for a moment. Then I looked back into the empty salon. “No, Eminence. I am just beginning to think perhaps I have found it.”
chapter 36
The whereabouts of thirteen children were still unknown. The parents of those boys had most of their hopes for a safe return dashed by the hard reality of what had happened to Earl Jackson and the near-miss that had happened to Jeff. Most of them turned their efforts toward forcing authorities into an all-out push to determine what had happened to the bodies.
Wilbur was about as uncooperative as a murderer could be, almost to the point of taunting. But we knew what he did to them—it was all recorded. He used each of the children he had taken as a forced “actor” in a horror amalgam comprising their filmed tortures and deaths. In the Angel Films studio, a member of the forensic team found a hidden safe
built into one of the walls, very cleverly disguised, in which were several reels of film stored separately from the others. I will always wonder why Wilbur never told Sheila of their existence and location. Maybe he had some insane notion that he would get out again and be able to use them.
Wilbur somehow got rid of his victims’ bodies, but for some unfathomable reason he kept their sneakers. And can you imagine, a number of film distributors quietly came forward to reveal that Wilbur did in fact discreetly shop this footage around, showing clips and potential scripts in an effort to get someone to pick it up. “It was basically violent child porn,” one of them told us, “hardly even disguised. Not my market at all. But the special effects were absolutely unbelievable, that everything looked completely real. I never saw anything like it,” he claimed.
It’s no wonder the effects were so real-looking. Thank God no one picked it up for promotion and distribution. “It was simply too much, too over the top, for ordinary channels,” one distributor said. “But, just watch, copies will sneak out. There’ll be a big black market for this stuff.”
He was right. The unnamed film eventually became a huge underground hit on Internet porn sites that specialized in slasher-type films and intense pedophilia. It was all part of Wilbur’s grand plan.
None of us could ever figure out why the sneakers meant so much to him. Maybe it was the one thing they all had in common, that he could hide in plain sight while he was in the midst of his quiet rampage. It must have satisfied him greatly that people went through that trove regularly without recognizing what they were fondling. Erkinnen had been right in maintaining all along that killers are likely to keep mementos from their victims; Jeffrey Dahmer had a refrigerator full of their heads and a freezer full of their body parts, for when he “wanted a snack.” Ed Gein, the real-life basis for The Silence of the Lamb’s Buffalo Bill, went so far as to remove and tan sections of skin from his victims. He was in the process of creating a bodysuit for himself from these treasures when he was caught. In the book Erkinnen lent me—it’s still at my bedside, if you can believe that—I read about the knight from the fifteenth century, the nobleman Gilles de Rais, who kept the heads of purportedly three hundred victims so he could contemplate which among them was the most beautiful.
Dear God.
The sneakers were there in an open box in his studio, in easy view the whole time. It was dangerous and ultimately foolhardy, but Wilbur counted on getting away with it. He did, for a good long time. In the end it was this desire to stay close to remnants of his crimes that did him in.
I can’t shake the sense that Wilbur understood the risk of being caught. He probably wanted to be caught, Doc told me in one of our post-nightmare conversations. It probably was not entirely unwelcome to him. Perhaps there was a part of Wilbur Durand that abhorred what he was doing, some small trace of sane decency that ruled just enough of his psyche to make him put himself in the path of discovery.
Maybe so, but that trace was nowhere to be found on the day detectives began to seriously press him for information on the whereabouts of his previous victims.
What previous victims? he asked them at the time. And Sheila chimed in, We do not acknowledge any previous victims.
It was posturing, and it infuriated Spence and Escobar, who were by then officially assigned to the case. The subject of a lesser charge in return for revealing the location of the bodies was raised tentatively with Sheila Carmichael, who listened carefully, then told the police once again that her client had nothing to do with those disappearances. But she offered a caveat, saying that as his attorney, she felt duty-bound to go to him with any offers the police and prosecutors might make, and for that reason she would raise the subject with him—not that it would do any good, since he had absolutely no knowledge of these other disappearances.
“And you know that he’s insane,” she added, “so he might say just about anything. I can’t predict or control that.”
Jim Johannsen met with the families of the victims to explain the discussions that had taken place between the parties. He was seeking the “permission” of the families to press this issue even more vigorously. He was asking delicately if he could have their permission to withdraw the threat of the death penalty as a means of bargaining for the whereabouts of the bodies.
I felt so terrible for all these people. The risk they faced, one they might have to cope with for many years to come, was that they would never know what had happened to their sons if they insisted that Wilbur Durand be prosecuted under the threat of the death penalty.
I don’t know if revenge could ever be so sweet that I would be willing to live with such an unknown forever. The secret of what had happened to these little boys would die with Wilbur, were he to die. There would be no closure for thirteen families, who went to bed each night imagining the worst, or hoping for the tolerable best, that the child might by some miracle still be alive, crawling through the cold darkness in a pained attempt to reach home, like a lost dog. It was pitiful, terrible, the worst thing that could happen to any family. Some of the families seemed to be ashamed to face me, ashamed that they would be willing to trade leniency for certainty. I understood what they wanted: closure and finality. My knowledge of what had happened to Jeff was one of life’s more bizarre gifts to me. My imagination couldn’t take it any further. Theirs could and probably would.
I made good on my promise to my reporter friend and never spoke to any other member of the press after that. It was tough, because they hounded me. But none of the families was bound by the same obligation—they could speak freely. Some of them did. I was really disgusted by one family who sold their story to a supermarket tabloid for an obscene amount of money. Selling this horror for cash was just repulsive to me. Inexcusable.
So many times during the discussions with Johannsen I wanted to speak out. You don’t understand, I wanted to say to the other families, this is what we know about this monster, and you want to barter with him? This guy wants all the attention he can get; he’s already getting love letters and proposals of marriage from every twisted bimbo out there. He’s got every rag sheet in the world beating a path to his jail cell, begging for a story. You’re feeding that fire.
But I couldn’t. Professional standards precluded me from revealing the details; it might have jeopardized the case if some part of it had gotten out. And in view of the fact that some of these people were selling their personal stories, I couldn’t risk having them sell secrets of the investigation.
Johannsen’s decision to go for the death penalty was announced in an elaborate press conference; Sheila Carmichael had few comments, but she did manage to use the prosecutor’s own words to her client’s advantage: “We are prepared to defend Wilbur Durand against any and all charges to the fullest extent that the law allows,” she said in a post-announcement interview. She did her best to pad the jury with the most quirky people available in the pool of potentials. She used all of her objections to remove grandmothers, teachers, parents, anyone with an obvious association with children. But the ideal jury for Wilbur Durand, a cookie-cutter group of childless males with questionable gender identity, an inborn sense of entitlement, and flexible social mores, could not be created even by the most fastidious jury consultant.
The twelve regulars and six alternates selected did not have “that acquittal look,” as Sheila was rumored to have commented. She did manage to place two people with personal objections to the death penalty in the group. “I knew it was going to have to be enough,” she said in a post-trial interview. “It’s funny how things turn out, though. Your strategies don’t always pan out the way you envision they will.”
In his opening comments to the jury, the presiding judge made a specific point of telling the jury that they should convict or acquit (he never said anything about innocence) based solely on the facts of the case and that the potential for extreme punishment should not in any way enter into their decision-making process. He was careful to point out that additional
evidence would be sought and considered in the sentencing phase of the trial, should they return a verdict of guilty, and that it was not a foregone conclusion that any defendant against whom the death penalty is sought, if convicted, would be sentenced to die. Additionally, he instructed them not to allow their religious or political opinions on the death penalty to enter into their decision-making process on the verdict, a warning that is always given and rarely if ever heeded.
I cried like a baby when they found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
thirty-seven
Jean de Malestroit gave me into the care of a guard, with the explanation that I was feeling ill and must not be allowed to move from there until he returned. And then he disappeared into Gilles’s suite of rooms, as if no evil lurked therein. When he emerged again a few minutes later, his face was grave and dark.
“He told me what transpired,” my bishop said. “That he had confessed Michel’s killing to you.”
I grasped on to him and clung desperately. “He taunted me with it, with every horrible detail. And I listened to him; it was as if I couldn’t keep myself from listening. Such blasphemies and horrors as I have never heard before . . .”
Jean de Malestroit crossed himself and placed a hand on my forehead. “Dear Father in heaven,” he prayed aloud, “take this woman into your special care and bring her comfort, in this her hour of deepest darkness.”
He led me through the passageway to the stairs. “I went to your chambre to find you. But Jean told me that you had gone and that he suspected you were going to see Gilles. I was surprised, but he told me that you had gone there before. Guillemette—is this true?”
I affirmed it with a small nod.
“But . . . why?”
“Because there were questions only he could answer. But I wish Jean had not told you. It would not have harmed you to be innocent of these visits.”
