Sunday morning, Nashville
Max Bransford couldn’t remember the last time the entire Murder Squad of the Metro Nashville Police Department had been assembled in one room at one time. The fourteen investigators were a mix of male and female; black, white, and Hispanic. On the surface they appeared diverse, almost a chaotic and random sampling of the population yanked in off the street and cast as homicide detectives in a cop movie.
Bransford knew, however, that each of his homicide investigators shared one common trait: the inability to fit in with any other part of the police department. Homicide detectives were mavericks, independent and contentious. More than a few of them were openly disrespectful of the police hierarchy, local politicians, and authority in general. Many were obsessive-compulsive to the point of burnout. Unable to let go of their work, they often had to be forced to take accumulated vacation time.
Gary Gilley, for instance, hadn’t been home in almost thirty hours. He was already beyond his shift end when the call came in on the two murdered girls at Exotica Tans. He could have passed the case along to another detective, but had chosen to stay on as the primary. He’d been at the crime scene most of the night, then at the lab waiting for the autopsy and the results from the dozen or so tests that had been performed on the victims. Now Bransford watched as Gilley wearily sat down in a folding chair, eyes swollen and red from lack of sleep, stale air, and cigarette smoke. Bransford knew that if Gilley’s stomach was anything like his, it was already burning from too much charred squad-room coffee and too little decent food. Bransford intended to order Gilley home to sleep as soon as the briefing was over.
Bransford stepped to a worn wooden podium in front of a dusty chalkboard and cleared his throat loudly.
“Let’s go, folks,” he announced. “Let’s take our seats and get rolling on this one.”
“This better be good, Lieutenant,” Maria Chavez-
Music City’s first Hispanic female homicide investigator-
announced. “You know how my mom hates me to miss Sunday dinner.”
“I know,” Bransford said, his voice guttural and strained.
“I hate to call you all in on a Sunday, but this one’s a no-brainer. Had to do it.”
To Bransford’s left, near the door, a well-dressed, neatly groomed man in a dark suit stood with an almost military bearing. Clasped in his hands was a leather-bound, three-ring portfolio bulging with papers. Seated in a folding chair next to the man was Howard Hinton, the homicide investigator from Chattanooga.
Bransford rapped his knuckles on the wooden podium and cleared his throat again.
“Okay, folks, listen up. As most of you know, we had a double murder last night down on Church Street near Baptist Hospital. Little place tucked away in an old strip mall called Exotica Tans.”
Two of the younger investigators in the back row whooped at the mention of the tanning salon.
“As you might have guessed, there was a lot more going on in those tanning booths than the simple nurturing of melanomas.”
More hoots followed as Bransford held up his hands, palms out, for silence.
“Yeah, real funny, you clowns, except for the fact that two coeds from MTSU were literally slaughtered and set out on display.”
Bransford looked down at his notes. “The first victim was a nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, one Sarah Denise Burnham. No sheet, no warrants, no record. The second was Allison May Matthews, twenty-two years old, also Caucasian female. No file on her, either.”
Bransford looked back up, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and forced his eyes to focus on the now silent faces in the squad room. “What we’ve got here are two young girls who we figure were picking up some extra cash to get through school. We’re trying to track down someone from the MTSU
registrar’s office to get their school records, but this being Sunday, we haven’t had much luck.
“Gary’s taking primary on this one, and he’ll be assigning chores after this briefing is over. The entire Murder Squad is on task force for this one. Even though these two girls were working their way through school at a hand-job joint, they still came from regular families, and believe me, folks, there are some mothers and fathers out there right now demanding to know when we’re going to catch the animal that did this. Even the mayor called the chief’s office on this one.
And you all know what that means.”
“Yeah,” a voice called out from the back of the room.
“Shit flows downhill.”
Amid the ensuing laughter, Bransford turned to his left, caught the eye of the man in the dark suit, then nodded to him.
“This is the real reason, though, that we’re putting all we got into this one,” Bransford announced loudly, “and it’s not the mayor’s phone call. It appears from the crime scene and the results of the lab investigation that we may have a celebrity at work. Seems that our tanning salon murderer may be a pro. We’ve got a gentleman in from Washington who’s going to tell us what we’re in for and who we’re looking for.
I’m going to turn this discussion over to him now, and after that, Detective Gilley will meet with you briefly.
“Then,” Bransford added, stepping away from the podium and moving to one of the folding chairs in the front row,
“he’s going to go home and go to bed if I have to throw him in the back of a squad car to get him there.”
“Oh, poor baby,” Jack Murray cooed. Murray was the new-est member of the Murder Squad, having just transferred in from Vice a little over six months ago.
“Yeah,” chimed in Maria Chavez. “You poor, delicate little rosebud.”
Gilley turned, grinning. “How’d you guys like to spend the rest of the day Dumpster diving in the snow?”
“If you kids don’t play nice,” Bransford intoned, “I’ll have to send you to your rooms without supper.”
The dark-suited man approached the podium, opened his leather case, and spread it out in front of him.
“Quiet everybody,” Bransford growled. “Listen up.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the man said. “Good morning.
I’m Special Agent Henry Powell of the FBI. I’m assigned to VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and within VICAP, I’m a supervisory agent with CASMIRC.”
Powell surveyed his audience and noticed several raised eyebrows.
“I know,” he said, smiling, “and I agree. Washington has terminal acronym disease. CASMIRC is the Child Abduc-tion and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center, which is the rapid response component of CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group. What this means in plain English is that when a crime is committed and the local authorities decide or suspect that this crime might be the work of someone who has done this before, then I get called. Last night, I was just finishing my dinner when Sergeant Hinton, your colleague down in Chattanooga, examined the crime scene on Church Street and called me at home. It took him about two sentences to convince me I needed to get down here fast.”
Maria Chavez raised her hand, and Powell nodded to her.
“How did Sergeant Hinton get called up here from Chattanooga?”
Bransford turned in his seat and faced the group. “Hint and I go back a long way. The Metro crime lab was consulted several years ago when a similar murder occurred in Hamilton County. I called him after Gary called me to the crime scene. Then he called Agent Powell.”
“So we leapfrogged from one to the next,” Powell continued, “and, as you’ll see, for good reason.”
Powell stepped out from behind the podium and leaned against it, his right elbow cocked at an angle. “Now without giving you my complete semester-long FBI Academy course called Intro to the Psychopathology of Serial Killers 101, let me just start by telling you that the two victims of last night’s murder were, we believe, murdered by the guy whom we’ve dubbed in-house the ‘Alphabet Man.’ Any of you ever heard of him?”
Powell’s eyes wandered left and right, searching for a response.
“Good,” he said, his easygoing smile returning. “That means, for once, we’re doing our jobs. We’ve emphasized with this particular perp more than any other case in my experience the absolute necessity of keeping this guy’s signature just between ourselves. For once, the news media hasn’t put this together. If they ever do, we’re screwed.”
Powell paused, and as he did, a hand rose in the back of the room.
“Yes?”
Jack Murray leaned back in his folding chair and cradled his hands behind his head. “The guy leaves a signature?”
“Yes, practically speaking. I’ve investigated over two hundred cases in which the homicide was considered the likely work of a serial killer. In those two hundred-plus cases, I’ve seen the work of about two dozen perps and have interviewed fourteen of them after capture. In the case of each one, there was some aspect to the crime that was so unique and repeated so much that it became a signature aspect to the crimes. It was, so to speak, the guy’s calling card.”
“So what’s our guy’s calling card?” Murray asked.
Powell stepped away from the podium and over to the wall. “Detective Gilley,” he said, flipping the switch to turn off the overhead lights. “Why don’t we just show them our guy’s signature?”
Gilley nodded, then stood and walked to the small table holding a slide projector at the back of the room. As he turned on the projector-the fan clattering as its ancient motor sputtered to life-Powell slowly lowered the screen from its holder on the wall above the podium. Gilley pressed the control button, and the first slide came into view on the dingy gray screen.
Low moans erupted as the slide came into focus. In the first view, the massage table that served as a butcher’s block revealed the bloody corpse of Allison Matthews, her arms and legs still bound, her straining facial muscles still frozen as testament to the nature of her death.
“What we have here,” Powell explained, “is the work of what we believe to be a primarily organized killer with some random elements of disorganized behavior.”
Powell paused as Gilley moved to the next slide. This was another view of the murder scene, this time from the opposite side of the room, focusing over the young girl’s body to the large block M painted in her blood on the opposite wall.
“You’ll notice,” Powell said, “that even with all the blood and carnage of this scene, everything is relatively neat.”
“Relatively …” a voice whispered in the dark.
He pointed to one side of the slide. “For instance, you’ll notice on this table that none of the bottles of massage oil are knocked over or even out of place. The large battery-operated vibrator in the corner here is still standing up. If our killer bumped the table and knocked it over, he was fussy enough to pick it back up and put it in its place.”
Powell stepped into the light and pointed to the middle of the victim’s torso. “You can’t really tell from this slide because of all the blood, but in autopsy it was discovered that a series of shallow cutting wounds were made throughout the chest, torso, and abdomen of the victim, Allison May Matthews. These wounds were superficial and parallel to the lines of cleavage, which meant the sides of the incisions remained together, in some cases almost closing. The incisions were within a quarter-inch of being uniformly spaced apart all the way down the anterior side of the ventral cavity and were within a half-inch of being the same length.”
Powell turned to face the room and stepped out of the light. “What this means is that our killer is anatomically savvy and very precise. He might even have some kind of medical training.”
A hand went up in back, from just ahead of the projector.
“What’s a line of cleavage?” a voice asked from the darkness.
“The ME could explain it better than I can, but essentially muscle tissue in the body runs in groups that continue in certain directions. These directions are called ‘lines of cleavage.’ If you cut along, or parallel to these lines, then the wounds tend to remain closed, depending on the depth of the incision, of course. If you cut across these lines of cleavage, then the incised wound will be gaping or open and generally much nastier.”
“So our boy wasn’t trying to chop these girls up?” Bransford asked.
“Quite the opposite,” Powell said, turning again to the slide and pointing. “Try to look past the gore. What we’ve got here is a situation where Allison was tied up and then patiently, carefully-and extremely painfully-bled to death.
She also experienced violent sex as well, with both moderate to severe anal and vaginal tearing. However, I’ll have more on that aspect of the scene later.”
“Was she raped?” Maria Chavez asked.
“There was no evidence of semen found on either body during crime-scene examination and the autopsy,” Gilley offered.
Maria turned, faced Gilley. “Kind of a quick determination, isn’t it?”
“We took swabs, ran acid phosphatase and microscope examination. We’re waiting on the P30,” Gilley said, referring to the test for a specific glycoprotein found only in seminal fluid.
“In the past murders, we haven’t found semen, either. So we’re going to take for granted at this point,” Powell said,
“that the sexual violations were with foreign objects or by a condom-wrapped penis.”
“So the guy goes into what’s essentially a massage parlor,” Maria Chavez spoke up again, “pays his money, goes to a back room with the girl, where, say, the guy offers her an extra fifty or hundred to let him tie her up. Once she’s tied up, the guy takes his time on her.”
“Let’s hold judgment on that for the time being,” Powell said. “For now, just examine the scene. Notice one thing, up here on the wall opposite the table-”
“The letter M,” Jack Murray said. “The guy’s signature!”
“Yes,” Powell answered, “but look at this next set of slides.” He motioned for the next slide.
Soft, low moans erupted again as the slide of the second victim flashed on the screen. Exponentially more brutal than the first slide, and more brutal than anything most of the investigators had ever seen, the second slide depicted a victim who must have died in unimaginable agony and terror. Sarah Denise Burnham’s last moments of consciousness had to have been as close to hell as any living human could get and still be drawing-even if only for a few moments more-breath.
Behind him, from off his left shoulder, Powell heard retching disguised as coughing. He’d heard this sort of reaction before from even the most hardened veteran homicide investigators. No one could remain unaffected by a scene like this one.
“As you can see,” Powell said, “our boy was considerably more thorough with this victim. The ME estimates that he must have spent at least two hours in this room. What you’re seeing is essentially the beginning of an autopsy performed on a live human being.”
Maria Chavez let loose a sound that was a cross between a gasp and a squeak. “Surely,” she croaked, “the poor girl wasn’t conscious!”
Powell turned. “Your ME estimates that it’s possible the victim could have retained some level of consciousness perhaps even up the point where the thoraco-abdominal incision was complete.”
“The what?” a voice asked from the back.
“The Y incision, which in the female begins roughly in the area of the navel and extends upward through the anterior ventral cavity, between the breasts, and then branching out to the shoulders.”
Powell turned back to the slide. “However, it’s extremely likely that the victim was in a state of severe shock by then and was hopefully rendered insensate. Let’s hope so, anyway, for Sarah’s sake.”
“Mi Dios,” Maria Chavez whispered, her voice choked.
“If you examine this photograph closely, you’ll see that following the completion of the thoraco-abdominal incision and the removal of the breastplate, our killer then manipulated the internal organs of the victim. According to the ME, the muscle tissues of the heart were constricted and bruised in a manner consistent with a kind of strangulation maneuver. This is another signature aspect of the Alphabet Man’s murders. In all instances up to the first victim you saw here this morning in the previous set of slides, the killer has performed the beginnings of a surgical-quality autopsy and literally stopped a beating heart with his own hands.
Then he has removed and manipulated various interior organs before replacing them back in the body cavity.
“Keep in mind that this is not your typical postmortem evisceration and savage mutilation consistent with the psy-chotic, disorganized work of a delusional, out-of-control madman. What we have here is the very careful and precise work of an organized, psychopathic sexual sadist. And while I know you’re all quite sick of this much detail, there is one other signature aspect of these homicides.”
“God,” Jack Murray moaned from the back, “we’re afraid to ask.”
“But you need to know,” Powell said calmly. “Before beginning the thoraco-abdominal incision, the Alphabet Man removes the nipples of his victims and forces the victim to consume them.”
Maria Chavez, still seated in her chair, bent over at the waist, gagging and retching, then stood up and bolted for the door. Two other male investigators, hands held to mouth, ran after her.
Powell looked down at Bransford. “Don’t be too hard on them,” he said. “That’s not the first time that’s happened.”
A hand from the back corner went up. “Yes?” Powell asked.
“Do we have any indication of the type of weapon used?”
“Good question,” Powell said. “Unfortunately, it’s one that we don’t have a complete answer for. You’re looking for a small, thin-bladed weapon that’s surgically sharp. It could be a straight razor, a scalpel, probably not a box opener. Perhaps an X-Acto knife. And our guy knows how to use it.”
“Which means what?” Gilley asked. “Is he a doctor or something?”
“Probably not, but he may have some kind of medical training, perhaps a biology background.”
“He sure as hell has some dissecting skills,” Bransford added.
“Maybe he’s a butcher,” another voice from the shadows behind the projector suggested.
“Don’t think so,” Powell noted. “I’ve reviewed our case files on every murder committed by a butcher going back about thirty years, and in not one have we seen this degree of precision and care. So I’m not ruling it out, but it’s not probable.”
To Powell’s left, the door opened and a shaken Maria Chavez stepped into the room, still swabbing a wet, dark brown paper towel across her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said weakly.
“Please, Detective, don’t be,” Powell offered soothingly.
“You’re by no means the first.”
Chavez forced a smile. “Murray’s still in the men’s room.
I could hear him through the door.”
“Why don’t we kill the slide projector and bring the lights up,” Powell said. “We’ve seen enough of this for now.”
As Gilley stowed the projector and Hank Powell switched the lights back on, the other two ill detectives filed back into the room looking distinctly hangdog and took their chairs.
Powell stepped back to the podium and looked briefly at his notes, then up to the group.
“I’ve got a classified set of photos from the other crime scenes we’ve investigated that will be available for you to examine until I go back to Washington, which won’t be for another day or so. I also have a map of the eleven other cities, all different and apparently random, where the other murders were committed. I recommend that each of you spend extra time examining the Nashville crime-scene photos as well. What you’ll find is that there are a couple of things about this particular crime scene that are unique and different from the Alphabet Man’s normal routine.”
Powell stepped out from behind the podium, once again in the manner of a professor nearing the end of a lecture.
“First of all, this is the Alphabet Man’s first double homicide. He’s never done a twofer before, and if you examine closely the nature of the two murders, you see some obvious and profound differences. In the first set of slides, the one with the M painted on the wall in the victim’s blood, we see a degree of savagery that is in the great scheme of things quite subdued, at least by our guy’s standards.”
Powell walked over to the table by the far wall and picked up a poster-size blowup of a line drawing of the crime scene and held it out to his side.
“What does this mean?” he asked. “Here’s what we think happened. The Alphabet Man enters the business via this door and finds one of the girls …” Powell paused and looked down at his notes.
“… Allison Matthews at the reception desk. We know business is slow on Church Street, even on a Friday night, because of the intense cold. Practically nobody’s out, which is a tailor-made evening for our boy. Perhaps he was hoping to find just one girl there, or maybe for whatever reason, this time he didn’t care. His MO in the past has been to find women alone in places of business late at night. The D victim, for instance, was working alone in a convenience market. He went in there, subdued the victim, then closed the business and locked up. They found her the next morning in the walk-in cooler.”
Max Bransford turned in his seat and faced the detectives.
“We interviewed the manager, and he told us Allison had just started at the tanning parlor the week before. He also said that she was just the receptionist. She didn’t work in the back.”
“Did she know the second girl-” Maria Chavez spoke up, then looked down at her notes. “Sarah Burnham?”
“They were roommates and, apparently, best friends,”
Bransford answered. “Sarah got Allison the job.”
“The job that got her killed,” a voice from the back of the room whispered.
Bransford nodded, then turned back in his seat to face the front of the room. “Allison May Matthews was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Powell turned back to the diagram and pointed. “In any case, our guy somehow gets Allison to go back to this room, which is the first one you come to.”
“To coin a phrase …” a voice in the back spoke up.
Powell cleared his throat. “Yes, to coin a phrase. So he ties her up, gags her-”
Powell ran his finger down the hallway toward the second room, where the L girl was found.
“Then he scouts out the place and finds Sarah Burnham, the second girl. Maybe he walks in on her, startles her.
Maybe he offers her, as we’ve already speculated, a bond-age bonus, and maybe Sarah figures it’s been a slow night and she can use the extra, but then decides no, she’s not into that. Anyway, it takes a bit more to get Sarah down. It looks like she may have fought him some, but our boy’s an expert.
She goes down without too much trouble. So he ties her up as well. He checks the place out, figures it’s late. The restaurant next door is closed, the block is deserted. So just for grins, he decides not to gag her. And he takes his time.”
Powell turns, sets the poster down, and faces his audience grimly. “Meanwhile, Allison in the first room has to listen as her friend is slowly tortured to death. She hears the screaming, the shrieks of agony and fear, the begging and pleading, the crying for momma, and then this awful, terrible, deadly silence …”
“And then footsteps coming down the hall for her,” Bransford interjects.
“Exactly,” Powell said. “And by the time he gets to Allison-the M girl-who will be his thirteenth victim, he’s tired and he’s spent. So there’s just the slow, exquisite mental game of torturing someone to death. It’s not the death of a thousand cuts, but it’s damn close.”
Powell stood there for a few moments in his own terrible, deadly silence. His form seemed to droop as he finished his analysis and suppositions about what had happened sometime early Saturday morning at Exotica Tans on the coldest February night in Nashville, Tennessee, that anyone could remember in a long time.
Sergeant Frank Woessner, the Homicide Squad’s senior African-American investigator, a man who’d successfully attended a half-dozen summer courses at the FBI Academy, spoke up from the back row. It was the first time he’d spoken during the meeting. His voice was low and smooth, but coldly serious.
“So,” he asked calmly. “How do we catch this mother-fucker?”
Powell straightened, reached back for his notebook, and held it out in front of him.
“With this,” he said. “With the information we already have on this guy. We already know more about what makes this guy tick than his own momma.”
Powell turned, walked back behind the podium, and opened the notebook. “In the past twenty years or so, since the Psychological Profiling Program became a part of what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, we’ve carried psychological profiling a long way. I can’t give you this guy’s name and address, but I can give you a very accurate estimate of the type of individual that commits this type of crime. This is a tool for you to use, but it’s only one tool. You have to use every other tool and investigative technique in your arsenal to solve this crime. And if you do, you hit the jackpot, guys. You get the grand slam.”
“So who the fuck we dealing with?” Gilley asked.
“I’ve got complete, detailed handouts for all of you, but to quickly summarize, the Alphabet Man is a classic, organized, psychopathic sexual sadist. This means that he is not-I repeat, not-a raving maniac who’s going to go nuts in the middle of traffic and start slashing people during rush hour. A psychopathic sexual sadist is, above all else, a person who is completely amoral and asocial. He has no capacity for remorse, guilt, or shame. He’s a sociopath, without a moral compass or any sense of ethics or responsibility.
He’s a charming person; if you met him at a party you’d like him, even gravitate to him, especially if you’re female. He’s intelligent, well-read, perhaps well-educated, although he’s more likely to have lots of excuses as to why he’s not well-educated.
“The Alphabet Man thinks entirely too much of himself.
His particular disorder is what the shrinks call paraphilia; sexual deviations that are marked or characterized by per-sistent sexual arousal patterns in which unusual or deviant sexual situations are required for the perp’s arousal. His fantasies revolve around completely dominating and objectify-ing his victims. While he’s torturing, having sex with, and then slowly killing his victims, he’s experiencing a kind of euphoria.”
Powell paused, his eyes roaming the room as some of the investigators frantically took notes while others sat staring, almost in awe, at the description of the man they were now hunting. Powell had seen all these reactions in hundreds of faces in his career, and yet it never ceased to fascinate him.
“On a more specific note, ladies and gentlemen, get your pencils out. First of all, he’s male and he’s Caucasian. He’s around thirty-two, give or take a year or two, and he’s good-looking, maybe even GQ quality. Somewhere around five-eleven, one-seventy-five, maybe one-eighty, with a body that he works hard to keep in shape. He might be married or have a serious girlfriend; in any case, he’s sexually competent and may frequently enjoy what we would consider normal het-erosexual relationships with a variety of partners. In fact, women may chase him, and those that he doesn’t torture, rape, and kill probably have a good time. He’s intelligent, maybe extremely intelligent. As I said, he may be well-educated, but-and this is probably an important key-he may have in his academic background a history of disciplinary problems. He was a firstborn child and probably an only child. His mother adored him and his father was present when he wasn’t working at his good, stable job. However, if he got any discipline at home as a child, it was inconsistent.
He wet the bed until about the age of twelve and probably was torturing cats and puppies before he graduated to college coeds and night-shift clerks. He’s spoiled, wants what he wants when he wants it, and he’s a thrill seeker. He aspires to fame and glamour and attention. He’s probably interested in cops and criminology as well. In fact, if you get any leads or communication about these two murders, I’d take a good look at where the tips are coming from.”
Maria Chavez piped up, her voice strained: “How do you guys know this?”
Powell smiled. “Years of interviews, hundreds of hours of conversations, piles of statistics, and great big computers.
But keep in mind, this is a profile. Statistically, this is what he should be like, but there may be some variations.”
“Amazing,” Gary Gilley mumbled.
“We’re just getting started,” Powell said. “He makes good money. If he drinks Scotch-and we think he does-then he drinks the best Scotch whisky. And he drinks when he kills, but never enough to lose control. He’s highly mobile. Either his job allows him to travel a lot or for whatever reason he doesn’t have to worry about money. Maybe he’s rich; maybe he married well. He plans his crimes well, but handles unexpected circumstances-like finding an extra victim-with some style. He drives a nice car, but probably doesn’t drive it when he’s on a kill. Maybe a rental, or he’s got a kill car stashed away somewhere. He almost certainly has assembled a ‘murder kit,’ and you should search very hard for it if you find him. If he’s ever caught, he’ll feign innocence so effectively you’ll be tempted to believe him. When he’s finally nailed, he’ll express remorse, but always remember: He’s not sorry for what he did; he’s only sorry he got caught.”
Woessner’s hand shot up again. “Speaking of catching him, what are the chances that he’s still around so we can nail his sorry ass?”
“Virtually nil,” Powell admitted. “He’s already on the move, long gone. But what’s left behind is his detritus. He didn’t kill those two girls, then take a cab to the airport. As organized and planned as these murders were, they were also damn bloody and messy. He’s never left fingerprints, so somewhere in the vicinity of that strip mall are a pair of bloody latex gloves. Probably coveralls and other articles of clothing as well, not to mention a weapon of some kind and perhaps a discarded small bag full of duct tape and rope and perhaps a pair of handcuffs. Find it. Find his garbage.
And use it to track his sorry ass down.”
Powell stopped, closed his notebook. “And on a personal note, I happen to ascribe to that branch of psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, theology, whatever, which factors in the component of human evil. The murders committed by this person transcend our ability to understand them or in any way rationalize them. This man is not an animal; animals don’t rape, torture, sodomize, and kill. He doesn’t kill for food or survival. He kills because he’s a predator. Remember that, above all else. He kills for one reason and one reason alone.”
Powell paused once again, this time plainly and openly for dramatic affect.
“He likes it.”