I'll Be Watching You (3 page)

I

After that stretch in a New Jersey prison—nine years short of his sentence, mind you—he moved into a motel down the street from his childhood home for a few months, and then, in August 1999, he knocked on Mom and Dad’s door in Berlin, Connecticut, some ten miles south of the bar he hangs out at in Hartford.

He had grown up in Berlin. The suburbs. The sticks. It was strange and humiliating, he claims, being back in the same house where it all began forty-something years ago, living once again with
them.
How pathetic, he thought one night, tossing and turning, contemplating suicide. How disappointing.

No wife. No kids. Mooching off his elderly parents.

But what else can he do?

There is a bedroom available upstairs, but he opts for—some later say
insists
on—the room in the basement. “He
wants
to live in the basement,” says the prosecutor who soon goes after him. “He
wants
to live…in that little workshop—that little sexual fantasy den.”

It seems weird and, all at the same time, wonderful—that is, his choice to live in an unfinished, musty basement and sleep on an old ragged couch (simply because for ten years he got used to sleeping on an iron mattress in prison). Stranger still, considering there are four bars within a mile radius of his parents’ home, is that he frequents this particular bar in Hartford. Does he need a second DUI (to go with the one he got last year after hitting a parked car) on his rap sheet? What about his job? It depends on keeping an active driver’s license.

And yet, according to some, for him, the pros of trolling downtown Hartford far outweigh the cons. It’s something he
must
do. He cannot help himself. He has a few regular prostitutes he meets at the bar. He likes to treat himself once in a while. He likes to get rough with them, too, several later report. Put his hands around their necks and squeeze. Call them filthy names.

Bitch. Whore.

Maybe even make idle threats to their lives.

Some wonder if this is why he drives into Hartford on such a regular basis—to maintain that control over females? To make sure that no one in his hometown sees him. Or to simply frequent the seedier bars, trolling…searching for that perfect victim. He had once said the perfect woman, in his eyes, was a blonde, good-looking, big-breasted, laid out and posed, topless, dead, there for him to do as he wished. So this
must
be why he travels into Hartford. But then, it can’t be. Because within earshot of his home in Berlin are three strip joints and a few underground clubs with an “anything goes” policy if you can swing the cover charge. In fact, if you know where the clubs are, you can walk in and set the rules, tell the ladies what you want, and they’ll oblige.

Regardless, it’s Hartford he chooses: night after night after night.

And so Hartford it is.

II

He has no family or friends in Hartford. No work contacts. But here he is, bellied up to the bar at Kenney’s, on Capitol Avenue, mixing it up with the regulars, watching his favorite baseball team on the big screen, playing pool, eating his favorite meal (tuna salad with extra Russian dressing), and cracking jokes—not to mention talking to the prostitutes as if they are below him.

Imagine that: a convicted, admitted killer who looks
down
on hookers.

In the bar, he feels superior. Suddenly
he
is the more respected member of society. He’s cocky that way; there isn’t a law enforcement officer or former peer who later says different. Still, in a certain way, he’s an enigma. Because for every person that says he’s strange, weird, or even scary and dangerous, there’s someone out there who says he’s smart. Bright. Articulate. Borderline brilliant.

The Hartford prosecutor who will soon make him a priority, however, views him differently: “The embodiment of pure evil,” Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) David Zagaja says. “A persistent dangerous felony offender,” Zagaja’s boss, State’s Attorney (SA) James Thomas, adds.

Others put it more simply. More direct: “Scariest person I’ve ever met.”

“The Devil incarnate.”

“Even his cell mates thought he was weird,” a prison source says. “And these are guys who’ve murdered and maimed people.”

Nonetheless, to those around him inside Kenney’s on this night—especially her, the one he has his eye on—he comes across as the friendly salesman who looks like a cross between a high-school math teacher and a professional golfer. His kinky, dirty blond hair is cut Wall Street short, his eyes comforting and sad. He likes to wear ties. Nice sweaters. Mildly expensive shoes and slacks. In a way, he seems to fall in somewhere between the peculiar and the unconventionally charming. He appears gentle, laid-back.

Quiet. Unassuming.

Dare we say it…harmless.

III

The fact of the matter is, no one really knows him, or the compulsions bouncing off the dark walls of his soul. He harbors secrets. Sick thoughts, he himself later admits, that have penetrated, pervaded, and perverted his mind in waves, like motion picture slides, since the second and third grade. One secret he admitted while in prison was an innate—teetering on an uncontrollable jealous—fascination with sexually sadistic serial killers. He likes to cut out articles about them—Gacy and Dahmer and the “Green River”—from newspapers and magazines and store them in files in his basement bedroom. One of the most infamous serial killers of all time, however, is unquestionably his favorite. For the sake of argument, let’s call this killer his mentor.

Born in 1946, inside a home for unwed mothers in Vermont, Theodore Robert Cowell soon took his stepfather’s name, Bundy, and in 1968, while a student at the University of Washington, he was said to have been devastated after his first real girlfriend, a woman he fell deeply for, ended the relationship unexpectedly, shortly before graduation. This was said to have set Bundy on a path toward evil.

“He continually talks about Bundy,” David Zagaja says of the man who adores the famous serial killer. “He continually talks about Bundy’s prior experiences: what went right and what went wrong.” He criticizes Bundy. Critiques him. “That’s where you have the evolution of a killer—that’s where you have his true and sincere reflections of what he did in the past and how he will improve his conduct in the present.”

IV

Without a doubt, as he sits on that bar stool, staring at her, surely undressing her with his eyes, sipping from his favorite beer (Moosehead, which the bar, for his convenience alone, keeps a case on hand per his request), there is a violent monkey on his back that
no one
—especially this woman and the patrons passing by him night after night, or the bartender serving him those skunky beers—can see or feel: a sexually cruel past that includes one homicide, an aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder, and, well, another that is indisputably, undeniably, in the works.

I

It is the fall of 2001, the time of year when that refreshing air rushes down from Canada and pushes the summer humidity hovering in and around lower New England—Hartford, in particular—out to sea for another six months. Soon the leaves will turn. The trees will become skeletal. The air will have a bite to it. And the snows of November and December will bring in the icy freeze of winter and send people hibernating inside their homes.

Tonight, though, it is a relatively warm late-summer evening. As he sits inside Kenney’s and continues watching her, he is no doubt posing her in his mind: unconscious and naked from the waist up. You see, that’s his gig. His
fetish.
Strangle them until the white light approaches. Tear off their tops and bras. Expose their large breasts. Pose them. Then, of course, pleasure the sexual demons by doing whatever it is he
does.

If they awake, well, that’s their loss.

Out come the knives.

II

As she walks out the front door, he takes one final sip of his beer, grabs his car keys from the top of the bar, and follows, nodding to the bartender.

“See you tomorrow.”

“Take it easy,” the bartender says.

The one he’s been watching pushes the door open, steps onto Capitol Avenue, and hooks a sharp right, clutching her pocketbook closely to her side, while walking a few steps north. Her nephew and a guy they call “John the Security Guard” are outside the bar by the entrance.

She sees them. Stops. Chats.

Meanwhile, he walks out of the bar and turns left toward his car. It is late—and very dark. Although Hartford is at once a bustling city during the workweek’s daytime hours, being the birthplace of insurance, the creatures come out at night: dope dealers and addicts, urban crack-cocaine consumers and the suburban white middle-class junkies, carjackers and gangbangers. It is a virtual den of thieves and predators.

Tonight, of course, he is among them—but also
one
of them.

Those words he wrote years before, those words of confusion and regret for getting caught, they mean nothing to him right now. Instead, the need to quench that thirst supersedes any rational thinking on his part.

Satisfy Mr. Hyde.

It is the
only
way.

Satisfy Mr. Hyde.

I’ve ruined my life…,
he wrote,
[I need to] get help to change my thinking towards women.

III

In one of his letters from prison, he explains what is, essentially, a natural, even spiritual, connection he has with Bundy. The two of them share many attributes, he feels. He can state “with confidence,” he wrote, what Bundy was “feeling”—it is a “sexual thrill”—when he held the life of his victims in his hands and, staring coldly into their eyes (something he likes to do, too), took that life at the precise moment of his choosing. It is the last breath, that sudden rush—or, should we say, hush—of air from the lungs when the soul leaves the body.

It is the defining moment for the killer. Total control. It’s what most of them crave.

Our guy, the one following the woman from the bar, gets off on it. He’s stimulated by it. “He told me,” one of his cell mates later says, “that the moment before the woman dies, that is the moment he lives for—when he has the authority to allow her to live or die.”

Certainly there is a sexual thrill to it also.

“The erection he gets,” says that same inmate, “is so profound that he orgasms from it.”

Whatever you want to call it, though, don’t call it a power trip. Because it isn’t. It’s a way to sustain a craving, he admits in those same letters, that can
never
be completely satisfied. He relates to those feelings Bundy experienced, because when
he
kills women, it is that same burn that Bundy felt that tears through
his
body, too: the racing heart, the adrenaline rush, the sweaty palms, and, yes, the growing desire—always too much to take—to feed into the sexual fantasies that come along with it all. There they are: those thoughts of violent sex driving every move.

Every decision.

Every thought.

He can walk away from Kenney’s at this moment and find a hooker. He can offer her money. The same way he has in the past. He has money. He can give her a Ben Franklin and she’ll no doubt do whatever the heck he tells her.

But that has nothing to do with rewarding the demons. Feeding the beast.

It
has
to be this way. It has to be
her.
The one he saw in the bar. The one he knows. Follows.

The one he
chose.

A substitute won’t do.

IV

While in prison, he compulsively studied Bundy’s modus operandi (MO), Teddy Boy’s signature way of killing. In a sense, although he would never admit it, he looks up to the famous serial killer, learns from him, especially admiring his
choice
of prey: college students. For him, perhaps the most vitally important part of it all was (unlike Bundy) choosing the vulnerable. The forgotten. Those women in society he believes
won’t
be missed. (Prostitutes, of course, are a favorite among some of those serial killers he’s read about.)

Not only that, but Hartford has a serial killer lurking, skulking its streets, killing hookers. (It’s not him, by the way. Definitely not him. Don’t jump to that conclusion this early in our story. He’s much, much smarter than the other guy.) Almost two dozen so far. They call him the “Asylum Hill Killer.” He beats his women into an unrecognizable pulp of blood and tissue, masturbates on them, then leaves their bodies out in the open.

Naked. Bruised and dead.

Bundy would never have done that.

Our guy would never do that.

Still, he scolds himself:
Bundy’s way…,
he wrote,
is a textbook for what I
should have
done….
If he had just followed Bundy’s plan in the past, he says, it would have helped him to “avoid arrest.”
Bundy,
he wrote, planned
his crimes.
It would be a Friday night. Bundy would leave work and drive one hundred miles to
another town, where he would just settle in at a bar until he met a girl.
He views Bundy’s life of killing as a “hobby.” A way to pass the time and, all at once, satisfy what he himself, since childhood, has been trying to complete: the supreme craving. It is akin to the same itch an addict feels when he wakes in the morning and begins thinking about that first bag of dope. He knows feeding his addiction with one bag won’t cure it—but it will certainly sustain him until the next time.

Our guy is no different.

As he wrote those letters sitting in his prison cell during the mid-1990s, he got down on himself for the way he had gone about it in the 1980s—behavior, in fact, that had put him in prison to begin with. He realizes now that he has never allowed himself to “actually sit down and
plan
something” in the same methodical way Bundy had.

And that, well, that is the one mistake—a mistake he vows
never
to make again—that he believes put him away the first time.

But he’s out of prison now. Out and about and prowling the streets of Hartford. “I’m surprised he couldn’t plan the perfect murder,” someone close to him says. “He is so smart and intelligent. It’s shocking that he couldn’t do it.”

Comparing himself to Bundy, he is positively angered by the notion that he has not learned from Bundy’s few faults. He hates the fact that some damn prosecutor, the state’s attorney, David Zagaja, a name no one can pronounce
(Za-guy-a)
—it’s all his fault—will call him a Bundy “wannabe.” In truth, he
did
get away with that first killing, strangling, and stabbing her to death. It took cops four years to catch him. He left no fingerprints. No hairs. No fibers.

Nothing.

He was even questioned by the police shortly after the crime. He took a polygraph, one source says, and passed.

So, in the sense of a hunt, the cops never actually
caught
him.

Yet, that second woman, she lived to tell her story. He’d made one mistake—allowing her to live.

Damn her!

It was a crime, he wrote, he had totally “botched.”

Why? Because, he scolded himself,
she
didn’t
die.
If she had, he is convinced, his
name wouldn’t have even made the suspect list….

And he’s right. It wasn’t until they caught him for the second crime that he admitted to the first and copped himself the plea bargain deal of a lifetime: ten to twenty. So, in a way, he
has
fooled them. All of them. He gave them the first crime to avoid a longer sentence on the second.

Quid pro quo.

V

As he trolls through the streets of Hartford, however, he’s walking around with over a decade’s worth of thinking about what he did wrong—and, for that matter, what
Bundy
did wrong. He’s read every one of those books written about Bundy. He boasts about studying the movie starring Mark Harmon. He has notes: a student of murder—a pupil of Bundy’s predatory tactics.

And now, he believes, he is the
perfect murderer.
Surpassing even Bundy. He writes how in the end, Bundy was
stupid after the act. He kept maps, schedules & pamphlets of the hotels, beaches & ski resorts he visited….

Not him. He vows
never
to do that.

Not now. Not after all he has learned.

Bundy:
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Out of prison now, given this second chance, he is determined to prove himself worthy of the title he would never admit he so desperately wants.

Better than Bundy.

Yes. It’s perfect.

It has a ring to it.