In some interview somewhere I said that when I want to read horror I read history, as the real monsters are human beings. I was thinking, of course, of Pol Pot and the Killing Fields where hundreds of children were swung by the ankles, one after the next, and had their brains bashed out on tree trunks; of the Inquisition; of the Holocaust; of Lt. Calley; and of people like John Wayne Gacy; and of the MORON COPS who through STUPIDITY BEYOND BELIEF gave that bloody kid back to Jeffrey Dahmer after the kid had escaped from him, and people like Dahmer and...

Where I grew up in Salem, Oregon, we had a guy who cut people up and made them into furniture and made gloves from their skin and kept parts of their bodies on ice. This was before Dahmer. This guy is now in the State Prison in Salem -- which sells key holders out of its gift shop made by this guy. Keyholders made out of cowhide. A friend of mine has one and it's a cherished possession. On the keyholder it says, "Made by Jerome Brudos at the Salem State Penitentiary". In other words, made by a locally famous serial killer. They're exploiting this guy's notoriety to make money for him and the prison.

There are fan groups for serial killers. People who think serial killers are cool make me vaguely ill. See, I think serial killers are assholes. They're the best argument for the death penalty.

And they are the real world. And following is a true story.

A couple of years ago, when I lived in in El Sobrante (East Bay San Francisco area), I was walking my dog when I noticed, a block and a half away, a stand-out sort of house. It had big fences around its side and back yards and atop the fences were actual coils of razor wire. The yards had literally been turned into a scrap yard, with piled up cars and parts of cars and other metallic junk. There were three, count 'em, three, pit bulls who were snarling through the fence cracks and trying to dig under it (and not far from succeeding) to get at me and kill me and my dog. These pit bulls had clearly been trained to attack.

In the front yard were half disassembled cars, and a half disassembled engine, black with grease, hanging on a blackened chain over an oil-stained driveway. The mailbox was painted with dragster flames (this I liked) and over the front door was a life-sized yellow plastic bull's head. I confess, I stared. A woman came out of the house and confronted me. She was a Saturn-shaped woman of maybe 45 with tattoos on her arms and legs, not more than five foot two; she had hennaed hair and Coke-bottle, glasses and a froggish face. She wore pedal pushers and had one hand around behind her back. "Can I help you?" she said. (Actually she said "Kin I he'p yew?" And it wasn't friendly.) "Hmmm...?" "You're staring at my house."

I was on the street, where I can look at whatever I like, so I thought: So? But aloud I said, "Uhhh...I was looking at that really cool bull's head over your door. It's...something."

She dropped the hand behind her back, relaxed and chatted about finding the bull's head at a garage sale. Then she went back in, as I moved on. Looking back I saw a .38 pistol sticking out of the back of her waist band. I saw something else too: a girl, maybe in her twenties, with some resemblance to the older woman, looking at me rather pitifully from an upstairs window.

I went home. I thought about the paranoid fence, the dogs, the woman: Must be a speed-lab or something, for all that paranoia.

A week later I walked the dog by the house again and again couldn't resist looking at it. An old tow truck, the back modified to be a crude pick-up trailer, came rattling down the hill; the truck bed was filled with bottles and cans they'd been gathering around the neighborhood -- "they" being two skinny, nearly identical guys, black with grime, in the truck's cab. And I mean black with grime. And I mean skinny. The driver stopped the truck in front of me; it shook with its age, was as grimy as its driver, and was pitted with rust. "Kin I he'p yew?" It wasn't a friendly question.

"No thanks," I said.

"Y'all er starin' at muh house."

"Don't need any help with that. I can do it on my own." (By now I was getting annoyed with these paranoids).

He stared at me, not believing I'd said that. I added, "I'm walking my dog, man!" I picked up my dog and held it up for him to see. He turned and said something to the guy with him. Then he repeated it, yelling, the guy was evidently half deaf. "Sez he's walkin his DAWG."

Then they backed the truck up the hill and I thought Paranoid fuckin' speedfreaks! Christ!

A week later the two guys in the truck were arrested for murder. An anonymous tipster (I suspect the girl I'd seen in the window) called the San Pablo cops, who found the bodies of two female prostitutes nearby. One was in a shallow grave in a field, the other "buried" under old tires and leaves and trash in a ravine, both within five hundred yards of the house. I'd taken my son for walks in that field.

It was those two all right. Apparently one confessed, said the girls were picked up a couple of weeks apart in San Francisco. A girl was taken to the house, did her business; when she asked for the money, they murdered her. I don't know how, precisely, they killed her.

Other prostitutes disappeared in San Francisco last year. No one knows if they were killed by the same gentlemen. The police are still investigating.

Their mother, interviewed by reporters, would only say, "Them boys have disabilities. One, he's got a heart disease, the other one, he cain't hear fer shit."

"What about the murders?" "Them boys got disabilities." That's all she'd say.

I went by the house recently. The girl still looks out the window. She looks scared. The truck is gone. There are yellow ribbons festooning the front yard.

Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree...

-- A version of this essay was first published in Wetbones #2, Fall 1998

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