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By Root 328 0

the threads. Backus was the son of a perfectionist father—a decorated FBI agent, no less—and a mother he never knew. The father was reported to have been physically brutal to the boy, possibly blaming him for the mother’s abandonment of the family, and punished him severely for infractions that included bed-wetting and taunting of neighborhood pets. One report came from a seventh-grade classmate who reported that Robert Backus had once confided that when he was young his father punished him for bed-wetting by handcuffing him to a towel rack in the bathroom shower enclosure. Another former classmate reported that Backus once claimed that he slept each night with a pillow and a blanket in a bathtub because he feared the punishment that wetting the bed might bring. A childhood neighbor reported suspicions that it had been Backus who had killed a pet Dachshund by cutting the dog in half and leaving its parts in a vacant lot.

As an adult Backus exhibited obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He had fixations on cleanliness and order. Many testimonials in this regard came from fellow agents in Behavioral Sciences. Backus was well known in the unit for delaying scheduled meetings for many minutes while he was in the restroom washing his hands. No one ever saw him eat anything for lunch in the cafeteria at Quantico but a simple grilled cheese sandwich. Every day, a grilled cheese sandwich. He also compulsively chewed gum and would take great pains to make sure he was never out of the Juicy Fruit brand he liked. One agent described his chewing as measured, meaning he believed that Backus may have counted the number of times he chewed each stick of gum, and when a specific number was reached he would then remove the gum and start over with a fresh stick.

There was a report on an interview with a former fiancée. She told the reporting agent that Backus required her to shower often and extensively, particularly before and after they made love. She said that while house hunting before the nuptials he told her he would want to have his own bedroom and bathroom. She called off the marriage and ended the relationship when one time he called her a slob because she had kicked off her high heels in her own living room.

The reports were just glimpses of a damaged psyche. They weren’t really clues to anything. Whatever Backus’s strange habits were, they still didn’t fully explain why he began killing people. Thousands of people suffer from mild to severe forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They don’t add killing to their list of personal tics. Thousands were abused as children. They do not then all become abusers.

McCaleb had acquired far fewer reports on the reappearance four years later of the Poet—Backus—in Amsterdam. All that was in the file was a nine-page summary report in which the facts of the killings and the forensic findings were recounted. I had skimmed this report before but now read it closely and found aspects of it tying in with the theory I was formulating about the town of Clear.

In Amsterdam the five known victims were men who were tourists traveling alone. This put them in the same profile as the victims known to be buried in Zzyzx, with the exception of one man who was in Las Vegas with his wife but away from her when she spent the day in their hotel’s spa. In Amsterdam the men were last seen in the city’s Rosse Buurt zone, where legalized prostitution is carried out in small rooms behind the neon-framed windows where women in provocative clothing offer themselves to passersby. In two of the incidents the Dutch investigators located prostitutes who reported being with the victims the night before their bodies were found floating in the nearby Amstel River.

Though the bodies were found in different locations in the river, the reports indicated that the point of entry into the water for all five victims was believed to have been the area around the Six House. This location was a property owned by an important family in Amsterdam history. I found this of interest, partly because Six House and Zzyzx sounded a bit alike