The Last Victim_ A True-Life Journey Into the Mind of the Serial Killer - Jason Moss [94]
Lucas was particularly interesting. Years before, he’d been arrested for illegal possession of a firearm, and while in custody confessed to over three hundred murders. Beginning at age fourteen, when he raped and killed a girl his own age, and extending until he was twenty-three, when he killed his own mother, he took lives indiscriminately. He was imprisoned for murdering his mom, but was subsequently paroled. Free again, he killed many others, most of them anonymous hitchhikers.
I knew that Lucas, like Gacy, fancied himself an artist, so I approached him by posing as an art dealer who might be interested in selling his work. Though he wrote me several times, most of his letters centered around his desperate need for money. I never seemed to get beyond business with him, so eventually I let the relationship wither away.
Elmer Wayne Henley was only seventeen when he joined a gang of serial killers who abducted twenty-seven young boys, raped them repeatedly, tortured them, and then killed them. Some of the victims were as young as nine years old. I read that they’d even preyed on two brothers, which I found especially disturbing.
Given Henley’s youth and naiveté, I thought a direct approach might work. Certainly, if it succeeded, it would be easier on me than trying to play several different characters at once. I just told him about myself, and said I wanted to be his friend. I sent along a photo and an open invitation to respond. I almost forgot about him because nearly two months elapsed before I received a return letter.
He was most apologetic, even pitifully so, for not having written earlier. He talked about wanting to write me on a regular basis, but there was something about the intimacy he imagined with me that frightened him.
“[I have] a tendency to withdraw,” he wrote. “For a good proportion of my time I was in contact only with my family and no others.”
He explained that he’d taught himself to do time in prison by isolating himself as much as possible. “I’m good at that,” he said. There was something about my letter to him, though, that he couldn’t ignore—something that drew him out of his shell.
I was skeptical that he’d follow through on his promise to write on a regular basis. After I wrote him again and received a very superficial response, I abandoned the relationship.
• • •
Since Gacy continued to make efforts to contact me, I decided that rather than confront him directly and suffer whatever wrath he might be capable of, I would ease gently out of the relationship. After the prison visit, I no longer underestimated him. I’d concluded he was capable of reaching out from prison and, while maybe not physically harming me, certainly making trouble.
So in a letter I wrote to him, I dropped hints that my father’s behavior was increasingly violent and erratic. I said my dad was enraged by all the collect calls I’d accepted, hundreds of dollars each month. I told Gacy that my father had spent the reimbursement checks on booze, so when it came time to pay the bills, there was no money left. What I was trying to do was send the message that, very shortly, access to me was going to be denied.
Since Gacy might very likely drag out the heavy artillery to get me to fix the situation, no matter what remedy was called for, or, alternatively, fire off a few smear salvos out of sheer vengeance, I decided it was time to confess all to my parents. As much as I dreaded owning up to my bad judgment, I needed to protect myself in case Gacy deployed his weapons, as illusory as some of them were.
“Well,” I began hesitantly, addressing my family in the living room. “Uh . . .” When I stammered like this, they knew I was going to hit them with something big, either one of my crazy ideas or a mea culpa of impressive magnitude.
Dad nodded his head in encouragement. Mom shook her head, as if to say, Oh God, what now!
I revealed everything