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When verbal persuasion failed, I grabbed Jarrod by the arm and yanked him up from his seat. He started yelling at me to leave him alone. People stared. I noticed that even the weird man seemed embarrassed by the argument. Jarrod finally gave in and left with me. He was so mad at me that he refused to talk to me for several days afterward. I realized then how much these killers were getting to me. Whereas previously I’d been getting enough out of the protracted dialogues with Ramirez, Gacy, Manson, and others to want them to continue indefinitely, now I felt an urgency to push things toward some sort of conclusion. If I didn’t bring things to a close soon, there wouldn’t be much of my mind left.

Although Ramirez had been putting pressure on me, I decided to give it right back to him; I was tired of being coy. In my next letter to him, I asked what it was like to be in prison. I wondered how he dealt with all the everyday strains. I wanted the reassurance that no matter how much I was suffering, he had it far worse.

“It’s frustrating in here, for sure,” Ramirez answered. “But even though I’m here, Evil lives in the world. As it should.”

Then he signed the brief note, “Alive in the grave, R.”

From this point on, Ramirez and I continued to write back and forth. In each letter I focused on a few questions I was curious about, all under the guise of being a devoted, concerned protégé who wanted to understand his world. Inevitably, he’d comply with my request for information, but always in brief, enigmatic answers that had the word “evil” embedded in the message somewhere.

Like any good behavioral psychologist, I rewarded him, each time he cooperated, by sending more photos of models who he believed were in my cult. He must have thought I’d discovered Lucifer’s little black book, so numerous and gorgeous were the women I’d managed to conscript.

Of all the letters I received from Ramirez, the one I found most fascinating was written on his own letterhead. On the top of the page it proclaimed: “From the domain of the Night Stalker.” In the body of the letter, he apologized for not having written in a while: “They took away all my stuff for 10 days. They accuse me of some bullshit. Thanks for the great pictures. She’s lovely. You are lucky. Morals, scruples and all that other shit are just words to make people feel better about themselves. Enclosed is a flyer from a Satanic group in Florida. . . . Say hi to Jodie for me.” (Jodie was supposedly one of the girls in my cult, the most beautiful model of all from the photographs I had available. I told Ramirez she was completely in love with him and hoped to one day meet him in person.)

The rest of this letter was taken up with diligent answers to each of the questions I’d asked him—he really was being most cooperative. I first asked him about the type of power he felt when he was taking the life of an innocent woman with his bare hands. To my surprise, he answered very directly: “The power is indescribable. But it’s there. As for now, I can only fantasize. That’s why this lifestyle sux. But out there, you can feel the draining of their energy, the total ecstasy. Get your mind into it. Savor it.”

He included many graphic drawings in his letters to me. Sometimes the pictures were satanic symbols, or images of dismembered women. In one case he sent me a self-portrait in which he appeared as a manifestation of the devil. One hand is raised in defiance, middle finger extended, the numbers “666” etched on the palm. In another drawing he called “Trophy Collection” there was a mantel with a female torso on top. The body was severed in half, with both arms amputated as well. Blood dripped from the body, onto the mantel, and then into space.

Another drawing he did for me was titled “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” Across the top and side of the page are the words to a song, “I got pieces of April . . . over here . . . over there,” followed by musical notes surrounding the words. In the center