Something Terrible

by Wrath James White

  “The nurse will be with you shortly,” he said. I undressed and waited on the bed.

  The same woman at the receptionist desk walked in. No nurse uniform. Nothing. She picked my pants and underwear off the floor without a word and left. It wasn’t until she locked the door that I realized where I was. ABC Women’s Help Center. I knew the name sounded odd. I read an article about places like this once. They’re fake abortion clinics run by pro-life fanatics. They build their centers around actual abortion clinics in hopes that women accidentally stumble into the wrong building. They usually name their center with a beginning letter of the alphabet so they are in the front of all the phone books. It’s all a ploy so that when the unsuspecting women walk in, they can bombard them with their religious propaganda, false scientific studies, and “slut-shaming” schemes.

  I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat, looking for something to cover my naked lower body with. Before I could find anything, more people entered the small room. They were all people I knew, or at least recognized from the church I attended. I was scared.

  Do you want to know what happened next?

  Yes. (He leaned forward in his seat.)

  They all fucking harassed me. They forced me to watch a hideous video of dead babies, aborted fetuses, some late-term abortions with the babies still moving after they were aborted. It was disgusting. And they were shouting at me the whole time.

  “Whore!”

  “Slut!”

  “You’ll go to hell for this!”

  “You’re a traitor!”

  “Sinner!”

  “Skank!”

  “How could you murder your own child? You evil woman!”

  Okay. I get it. (He takes back his pocket tissues, wipes the spit from his face, and then leans back into his seat.)

  Sorry about that. I just got a little emotional.

  No worries. I completely understand. Please, continue. What happened next?

  Okay. Let me think. Oh, yes. The woman who took my pants, she wouldn’t give them back. Instead, she thrust a clipboard into my face with an agreement on it. They wanted me to agree to carry out my pregnancy until the end. They wanted to legally bind me to birthing my child. And they wouldn’t give me my pants back until I signed it. At that point, I wasn’t sure whether to agree with them or not. I knew I wanted to have my child, if not to save my husband then at least to spite him. But after what they did to me, these people, who just a few months prior took me back into their church, into the religion with open arms, how they could treat me with such cruelness. Why would I ever want to bend to their will after that?

  I slapped the clipboard from her arms, pushed her aside, and ran through the group. I kicked open the door and ran half-nude and crying down the hallway. When I made it outside, I was actually relieved to see my husband. I covered my private parts with my hands as best I could and tiptoed across the sidewalk barefoot. I climbed into the car and wrapped my arms around Victor. But he shrugged me off. I was still crying, but he didn’t wipe my tears away. He didn’t seem to care that I was scared, confused. He didn’t even seem to care that other men saw me naked.

  “What?” he said.

  “Baby, it was horrible. That’s a fake abortion clinic!”

  “I know.” His face bore no emotion. “I wanted you to feel the pain of your mistake.”

  I froze. I had no words. I just stared at the man who called himself my husband.

  “I know you’ve been sneaking off to church every Sunday morning. Those are the people you call your friends. They are ridiculous. Evil.”

  He put the car in drive, drove a block to the real abortion clinic, and then parked right in front. He took the keys out of the ignition and folded his arms over his chest. “Get out.”

  ***

  Testing, one, two, three. This is the first interview with Scott McNeil, the warden at Bush Correctional Institution. The date is July 16th, 2014. At 11:55am.

  There’s a lot of debate as to what we should do about Adam. What should be his punishment? Scientists want him alive for tests. The public wants him dead. What do you think?

  When I first saw him, I thought he was just some punk, some Ivy League yuppie prick. In person, he didn’t look like that at all. Not how I originally pictured from reading the news reports, you know? He was harder somehow. I expected my boys would teach him a lesson, knock him off his pedestal a bit. I heard what he thought of himself, that he was the most evolutionary advanced being on the planet, the goddamn alpha male. He definitely didn’t look it, at first. In here, the real tough guys are big bastards, like body builders. He was lean. Had like a swimmer’s body, you know? And he’s got those movie star looks and that real proper speaking voice. He looks like he’d be a mark. But there’s something hard about this guy. You could feel it right away. He was like the mafia dudes we get in here. The hired killers who’ve seen so much violence the shit don’t affect them no more. Nothing affects them. Fucking sociopaths. He was like that. Calm, cool, like he could slit your throat and his pulse wouldn’t raise a tick, you know? We get guys like that in here all the time. They don’t care about themselves, so they damn sure don’t care about you. Those are the really dangerous ones. Those are the guys you have to watch.

  He went through the booking process without saying nothing. Which is kind of fucking weird for a new guy. Usually the guys who’ve never been to prison are kind of nervous, talkative, trying to make friends with the guards, or just asking a bunch of questions about what it’s like in here. They usually want to know about the stories they hear about prison rape. They want to know what to do to keep from getting raped, and I just tell them to be a man. Act like a man and you won’t get raped. Then, when we start to do the cavity search, that’s when guys show their true colors. We typically see two reactions. You get the tough guys who won’t cooperate with the guards, throws an attitude, and fight back every chance they get, and then you get the guys who break down, start sweating, their eyes tear up, butt-hole clenches up. See, they start realizing they ain’t in Kansas anymore. That reality hits ’em and they freak out.

  Not this guy.

  It was eerie in a way. The way he never reacted to anything. The way he answered questions concisely, without stuttering, like he already knew what my nurses were going to ask. He acted like he’d been in and out of prison his whole life, like he’d been institutionalized, you know? Not like a guy doing his first stint. The booking process went smoothly, it finished earlier than usual. By the time we finished, the prisoners were still in the yard. After we got him situated in his cell, he walks out into the yard. That’s where the real fun began. With most new prisoners, I usually book them and then go back to my office to finish paperwork. But this time I figured I’d stick around and watch how he interacted with the other inmates. I was up on the wall with the snipers, watching Horrowitz walk out.

  He walked right to the center of the yard and just stood there, watching everyone. He’d stare at someone for a while, then seem to lose interest and focus on the next guy. And he was only looking at the meanest bastards. The real tough guys. But how the hell would he know who they were? It ain’t like these assholes wear signs. He was just sizing them up. It was freaking everyone out. But rather than getting pissed off and going up to him and challenging him, you know, “What the fuck you lookin’ at? You got a fucking problem?” that sort of thing, these guys are doing all they can to get out of his line of sight. I swear to you. They acted like he was aiming a gun at them.

  I’d heard about what he did, everyone had, but this was the Special Isolation Wing, and everybody in there is bat-shit crazy. Special Isolation is where we put the child molesters, serial killers, mass murderers, and homosexuals, along with some of our more high-profile convicts, domestic terrorists and that sort of thing. Then there’s some guys in there that are just out of their fucking minds and should be in a mental institution, but the crimes they committed were so heinous the public wants to see them punished, not talking about their feeli
ngs and sucking down drugs at some mental facility. We keep them out of general population where they might be targeted and killed by the other inmates. What I’m saying is these ain’t your normal inmates. It’s a whole ward full of fags and lunatics, and this guy is just watching them all. Guys walk past him and don’t even look at him. I swear, they were walking around him. Nobody challenged him, nobody tried to talk to him. Nothing. They stayed as far away from him as they could. And I know, you think I’m exaggerating. Maybe this is normal or I was imagining it. And I’m telling you, I’ve seen hundreds of guys walk through these doors and some are immediately embraced, some are immediately challenged, and some the other cons approach cautiously, try to feel him out, you know? Try to get a read on who he is. Nobody gets ignored. Nobody. People want to know who they’re living with. But this guy would look at someone and the other guy would look away. I’m talking serial killers and mass murderers trying to avoid making eye contact like some kind of nervous school girl blushing over a handsome quarterback.

  I’ll tell you something else weird, the COs act weird around him too.

  COs?

  Corrections officers. The guys who work for me—they’re good guys, but they’re human, and by that I mean some of them can get a little mean, a little overzealous. A con pushes one too far and he’s going to get his head cracked. You know? It’s going to happen no matter how much you council them to use restraint, and frankly, in my opinion, it should happen. There’s more of them then there are of us. Fear is the only thing that keeps them at bay. You crack a couple skulls, and that helps keep everyone else in line. But they were all scared of Horrowitz.

  Give me an example. How did you know they were afraid of him?

  Well, we’ve got one CO, Martin Hightower, big bull of a man. Black dude, about six foot six and nearly three hundred pounds with a temper just as big. He’s put a few inmates in the hospital. An inmate threw a handful of feces on him once, and Hightower nearly killed the guy. He beat the guy so bad he was in the hospital for a month. Now he has severe brain damage, memory loss, slurred speech. Hightower did a number on this guy. Fucked him up for life. I hated to do it, but I had to suspend him for two weeks. He almost got fired over it, but come on, what would you do if someone threw human shit at you?

  Anyway, we were doing a random cell check and Hightower and a couple of SORT team guys—SORT stands for special operations response teams; I figured you wouldn’t know? Anyway, they’re searching Horrowitz’s cell, you know, for drugs, weapons, that sort of thing, tearing it apart. Hightower finds a bunch of letters from Horrowitz’s dad, and he starts going through them. Then he starts reading one. Horrowitz snatches them out of Hightower’s hands and smacks Hightower right in the mouth. Smacks him hard, and then turns his back on him and sets his letters back on the shelf where they were. The SORT team guys could’ve taken Horrowitz down, but Hightower just walked away. Now Hightower is twice this guy’s size. He could have killed him. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything. He just walked away. Just like that, he walked away. The SORT team guys were so confused they left him alone too. I’m telling you, there’s something different about that guy.

  ***

  July 18, 2014. 6:30p.m. Office of Dr. Kristophe Tompkins, court-appointed psychologist for Adam Horrowitz.

  Good evening, Dr. Tompkins.

  H-hello. Who are you with again?

  No one. No publication, that is. I’m a freelance writer writing Adam Horrowitz’s authorized biography.

  Authorized? You’ve interviewed him then?

  Yes.

  What did you think?

  I’m more interested in your professional opinion.

  But what did you think of him? How did he strike you?

  He’s scary. If I was a religious man, I’d say he was evil. But I’m not. So, to me, he’s just one deeply disturbed individual.

  What if I said you were right the first time? That Adam Horrowitz is evil, pure evil.

  That’s your professional opinion?

  My professional opinion is that he suffers from an antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. He’s a sadist with delusions of grandeur; he’s manipulative, deceitful, mistrustful, arrogant, and callous. But aren’t I really just saying the same thing in fancier words? Isn’t what I’m really saying is that he’s evil? There is no cure for him. I am not talking about a disease of the mind. I am talking about the character of the man. He doesn’t suffer from these disorders. We suffer from them. The public. Those babies he murdered suffered from his disorders, all those people he murdered.

  And that’s why you refused to treat him?

  Because it would do no good. He’s not Jeffery Dahmer. He doesn’t want to stop doing what he’s doing. He didn’t want to get caught. He just didn’t care if he got caught. He was single-minded. Like a . . . a suicide bomber. His life wasn’t as important as destroying the lives of those children.

  Why?

  If you’ve interviewed him, then you know why.

  But why do you think he did it?

  I think he did it for the exact reason he has repeatedly stated. He was making room for his genetic offspring, eliminating competition. The same reason he killed those men at the fertility clinic—and something else you may not know, that the police haven’t released to the press. Those five men he murdered, they weren’t the only ones. There were at least twenty sperm banks that he visited under different aliases in twenty different cities. By now, there may be hundreds of unsuspecting women carrying his children. They’re keeping it quiet because they don’t want to cause a panic. Imagine if you were to discover that the baby inside you wasn’t conceived with your husband’s frozen sperm or the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed PhD student you picked out of a profile but with the sperm of a notorious serial killer? That would fuck up your day, wouldn’t it? It would cause a panic. Of course they can’t let that information out. And that nursery wasn’t the first one he visited either. He’s killed dozens of babies. Smothered them. In hospital nurseries all over the country. It’s going to take a long time to sort out all the murders he’s committed.

  And you know this . . .

  Because he told me.

  Let’s go back to your diagnosis of Adam Horrowitz. You said he suffers from antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. So he’s a sociopath?

  As I said, Adam Horrowitz doesn’t suffer from anything. He wouldn’t know the slightest thing about suffering. He is incapable of experiencing many of what we would consider to be normal human emotions. Things like sympathy, compassion, even fear to a large degree are foreign to him. Do you know there was a study done that theorized you can tell how violent a kid is going to grow up to be by testing his pulse rate when he is a toddler? See, getting your pulse taken by a doctor when you’re a baby is a strange, unfamiliar, and frightening experience for most babies. It’s stressful. Their pulse rates shoot up. But some babies show low resting heart rates when tested. Heart rates in the forties and fifties. Those are the kids, the study suggested, that grow up to be violent. They lack the normal fear response.

  That fear is what keeps many of our more aggressive tendencies in check. Eliminate that fear and what’s to stop you from taking a swing at, a shot at, or a slice out of anyone who pisses you off? Adam’s pulse rate was forty-two when he was examined following his arrest. Forty-two. A normal heart rate, under those circumstances, would be in the nineties at least, even the low to mid hundreds.

  What else did you discover during your examination of Adam Horrowitz?

  There’s a dimensional system of general personality structure developed by psychologists called the Five-Factor Model of personality, or FFM, that we now apply to personality disorders. The FFM is comprised of five bipolar domains of personality functioning: labeled surgency, or extraversion versus introversion; agreeableness versus antagonism; conscientiousness versus disinhibition; neuroticism versus emotional stability; and intellect or openness ve
rsus closedness to experience. I was curious to see where Adam was on this FFM. He rated highly in the domain of extraversion. Adam is assertive, active, and thrill-seeking, although also extremely low in the extraversion facet of warmth and compassion. Adam scores extremely low on all facets of neuroticism, with the exception of anger and hostility. In other words, he doesn’t experience normal negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and self-consciousness, but he has great difficulty controlling his anger. Despite his anger-control issues, Adam scored high ratings on the domain of conscientiousness, which is in direct contrast with the impulsive, under-controlled behavior that one would typically expect from an antisocial criminal. It is in direct contrast to what one would expect from the type of criminal who would walk into a hospital nursery and start murdering newborns, but, you have to remember, he’d gotten away with it at least twice before. Smothered twenty babies in a hospital in Las Vegas and then just walked right out the door unmolested. He did the same in Ohio. On the FFM of general personality, Adam is considered competent, orderly, achievement-oriented, and deliberate. Perhaps it was his characteristic style of careful planning and deliberate execution that enabled him to get away with these killings so many times before.

  Exactly how many people has he killed?

  I doubt even he knows.

  ***

  Check. Check. Check. This is the first interview with Samantha McCarthy. We are at her private residence. July 19, 2014.

  I understand you are the mother of one of the victims, one of the few people alive who witnessed his act. Do you mind telling me what you saw?

  I mind. But I’ve already explained it once in court. I guess I can tell you. It can’t make it any worse, I guess. It’s just kinda hard. You know? It’s still so hard. I still can’t believe what that man did. Who does something like that? What kind of man kills babies? Beautiful little babies. I saw it all. It was terrible. It was sick, what that man did. I hope he fries for this. I hope he suffers.