I grew up reading books about murderers. Every copy I could get my hands on.

My mother believed when Christ was in your heart, murderous thoughts could gain no purchase. She belonged to the Nourishing Waters Fellowship, a humorless sect of vaguely apostolic Christians, who were, as one would expect, socially repressive and scientifically regressive. Mother wrote articles for the Church’s magazine, Awash in His Holy Dew!, and I had no doubt that she could have crafted a doctrinally sound argument to link the absence of the former (Jesus), to the presence of the latter (murder). Had I not hidden my own obsessive interests so well, she would have considered them a perilous agent threatening to douse that divine spark so necessary within the heart of a moody boy.

At which point it would be short work for the devil to grab hold of me.

Such was a familiar refrain I heard growing up.

If I did something bad, the devil had got hold of me.

The same had happened to my father, she whispered with grave intonations when she wanted my attention. The devil got hold of him. Pulled him away from us.

My dim recollections of my father was of a patient, benign man. Quiet and beaten down. I suspect, one day, he simply had his fill of sanctimony. Never came back.

I proved more resilient. Youth provides that. Additionally, I suppose I was the product of the the culture in which I had grown up. I don’t mean the Church, which I saw mainly as a sort of social club my mother belonged to, filled with dull and cautious folks who never celebrated their birthdays, wore bright colored clothing, or enjoyed anything stronger than ginger ale. No. The culture I’m talking about is the household I grew up in. Once my father slipped free, it was just my mother, me, and mother’s flock of parakeets named Oliver. There were at least five at any given time. Sometimes more. They had names like Oliver Hardy, Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Oliver North, and so on. She loved those birds. Doted on them, kissed them constantly. Me? Not at all—the Olivers received the totality of her daily allotment of compassion and affection. At least I suffered no violence. No physical abuse. A good deal of grim prayers, stern speeches, and, often, months-long periods when she made it a point not to speak to me. I think those periods of silence were supposed to be a form of life lessons.

My sanctuary was my library. I stole every one of those books. Probably I could have afforded to buy most of them. I did have the standard jobs for children. Newspaper route, babysitter, mowing lawns. But my cache of books was my secret world. I didn’t want anyone seeing me buying them, nor even borrowing them from the Denver Public Library. Besides, I enjoyed stealing. You could learn a lot about people stealing from them. I highly recommend it.

I made shelves for my books and kept them in the attic. The stairs up were rickety and steep, and my mother couldn’t manage the climb. So that was my refuge up there.

Jack the Ripper. The Zodiac Killer. Ted Bundy. Luis Garavito. Jeffrey Dammer. H. H. Holmes. Richard Speck. Oh, there were so many. Members of the lesser canon, too. Not so well known, but just as fascinating.

You might think I’d most prefer the autobiographies and confessions of killers. Not really. Many of them struck me as rather dull-witted individuals. What I really enjoyed were the books written by the men and women who ultimately caught the killers. They worked tirelessly to unlock intricate and baffling puzzles. The best, of course, were the cases never solved, allowing me to fantasize about the continuing lives of those faceless and brilliant murderers, free to wander the world and sample whatever experiences they might desire.

I would sit up there on a cushion in front of my books, burning candles in that sweet obsessive focus of adolescence, and reading every single volume, some more than once. My education.

Oliver Cromwell was my first victim (though, as he wasn’t human, I probably shouldn’t count him). My mother was my second. Yes, that sounds like quite an extreme escalation. I wasn’t even thinking of myself as a murderer at that point. I hardly knew it was an option. Growing up to become a murderer was akin to having a career as an astronaut or a lion tamer. I understood people made their way into those positions, but who was I? I was a nobody.

Oh, and before you start squirming, I released the other parakeets. For all I know, they’re still enjoying their freedom, flitting about above the streets of Denver.

Mother is in the backyard—no marker, of course. Eventually she was joined by many others. 

The official story as to what became of her was child abandonment. She had no friends in our neighborhood. Of course, once I had been “abandoned,” everyone’s hearts went out to me. I’d planned well, devising steamy love letters from a lusty lad by the name of Henry, or, as he often signed off, “your loving Hankie.” No last name. No return address. So when I called the police, weeping on the phone that I hadn’t seen my mother in three days (which was quite true), they, along with a caseworker from Child Protective Services, quickly discovered the stash of letters. I knew they would.

They had no trouble putting a narrative into place. Hyper-religious and sexually repressed abandoned single mother. Runs off with Hankie, a young free spirit.

My life played out as I had hoped. There had been a nagging fear I might be turned over to a foster family. But, no, I ended up with mother’s irresponsible sister, Aunt Eileen, whose drug of choice, alcohol, was often knocked into second-place depending on whatever substance was most favored by her current bedmate.

All things considered, Aunt Eileen made out quite well. A large and nice house (mine) to live in, and a quiet, self-reliant twelve year old child (me), who needed no supervision whatsoever—and what with my various jobs around the neighborhood, I never asked for money.

My teen years were perfect. Peaceful, calm, and I felt in firm control of my entire world.

It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I looked up, one afternoon, to all those books towering above me and realized that I, too, was one of those special people. I already had that most important milepost behind me. My first victim. My mother, that is. It had been as premeditated as any well-crafted plan; however, I had not carried out the actions as a murderer, but simply as a frustrated son, stifled by an overbearing parent. I decided that it was time to start building a proper legacy.

I didn’t want it to be anyone easily traced back to me. That was when I remembered that horrible man on my friend Larry’s paper route. I’d covered for Larry when he was recovering from a tonsillectomy. He had warned me about Old Man Wiley. He was housebound, lived alone, and, according to Larry, thoroughly unpleasant. I was instructed to place the paper behind the screen door and leave the porch immediately, before the old man could fling open the door and, as Larry said, “whack you with his cane—he might be stove-up and in a wheelchair, but he’s quick with that stick.”

True to Larry’s word, Mr. Wiley was waiting for me, hidden by shadows right inside the door. And he got me, just on the shoulder. He had an expression of satisfaction, mixed with slight surprise, no doubt because he would have been expecting Larry.

Probably he had forgotten all about me. It was over a year later when I returned, well past midnight, and let myself in the back door, which had fortuitously been left unlocked.

He had lost his voice to cancer, so used one of those electronic larynx’s to speak. Without his device held to his throat, the neighbors never heard his screams. But I could, just barely. Mostly the sound of air rushing from his mouth. He made more noise thrashing about on the bed. Dismembering his corpse in the bathtub was a fascinating process. Hard work, even with a hacksaw.

He was slight of build, yet it took me four trips on my bicycle with parts of him wrapped in plastic and duct tape in my backpack. With still an hour before sunrise, I had him transferred and neatly buried in the backyard.

I left Old Man Wiley’s place immaculate. Cleaner than when I arrived. Like a Boy Scout. 

Aunt Eileen was a sound sleeper and never suspected anything.

Not my burial of Mr. Wiley, not the Sutcliffe girl, not the drifter who lived in the bushes near the bus station, not even Gwendolyn Naughton, the principal of Palmer Elementary. She was a big one, and necessitated two large holes beyond the line of pyracantha bushes. She was my first victim whose disappearance resulted in media coverage. I was very excited. That must be how Broadway actors felt reading the reviews from opening night.

By the time I was nineteen, I had a stable job doing clerical work at an advertising firm. I no longer needed Aunt Eileen, but she had no intention of leaving. One night when she was passed out in a deeper stupor that usual, I carefully placed her in my car and drove her to a bench at a downtown bus stop. I made sure she had the entirety of her drug stash on her person. Marijuana, some hashish, a bottle of Dilaudid, and two fairly large bags of a white powder that, though I’m no expert on such matters, I assumed to be cocaine.

The police found her, and the drugs.

She had priors. As in convictions.

No one came to her aid.

She spent seven years in Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. When she got out, she left the state and I never knew what became of her.

With her out of the house, my life was free of chaos. I found I loved routines.

I advanced easily at my job. True, I was little more than a glorified secretary, but I was trusted and relied upon.

My true work continued. Every ten to fourteen months, I’d add another victim to my slow, methodic portfolio. It was so much about planning. I kept copious notes on my methodology. How I went about selecting those random individuals. Maintaining a diversity of age, gender, ethnicity. Different regions of the city. Nothing to connect them with me, nor with one another. How I experimented with a wide variety of dispatch. Meaning the murder itself. The disposal of the body. And clippings of any press I got. Well, not me, but you understand. Also, where the remains were buried. That was my one dogma, my single unwavering behavior. I wanted the remains eventually found and identified. They were deposited either in the backyard, or in a plot of land I inherited in the foothills at the edge of town.

I wanted all this discovered after I died. At that time, my attorney would send a letter to the newspaper with a key to a safety deposit box where my meticulous records were kept. My grand legacy.

And then, with no warning, I was arrested. This wasn’t some clever detective from the homicide department, but an IRS investigator.

All because I got greedy. Just once. I’d rather not get into the particulars. I don’t want to be thought of as a thief. Let’s just say one of my victims had a massive stockpile of cash, and I helped myself to it. I began to live a more lavish lifestyle. I mean, really, I got carried away.

And I got caught. By the Internal Revenue Service. Can you imagine?

No one ever suspected me of my real crimes.

The authorities didn’t even care where the money came from, only that I had not paid taxes on it.

There was nothing I could do.

I had to do my time.

I decided to think of it as a sabbatical from my, well, true profession. I knew that when I got out, I’d return to my yearly hunting excursions.

Then the unexpected happened.

Three years into a five year sentence, I received my diagnosis. Inoperable cancer. Late stage.

And my legacy?

The greatest regret was that I never got around to setting it all up. I didn’t even have an attorney—well, other than that court-appointed one, who was no use at all.

So, after the payment runs out on my safety deposit box, I can’t imagine that anyone will bother hacking the encrypted files of my laptop. They’ll toss it out. I was a nobody. A mundane, white collar criminal.

That has probably already happened. I died years ago.

But now, I had a second chance.

At what, I was not sure.

This world was so strange. There seemed to be no rules. I couldn’t even remember why I ever found the notion of murder appealing.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s an undeniable thrill subjecting someone to your will. And to extinguish a life takes that pretty much to the limit. But that other element, the transgression, where was it now?

A world where people come back from the dead, transported through space like in a science fiction film. And mind-reading.

A world with robots!

Being a murderer seemed so unremarkable.

It also meant I had the opportunity to learn about new boundaries I could push past. What social rules might there be in this new world that I could get a tight grip upon, bend, break? I was ready. I came back from the dead, leaving a diseased-riddled middle-aged body, and given youth again. When I looked in the mirror, back then with those game show people, I’d place myself in my thirties. Yes. I could work with that!

Now, I just needed to get my body back. My human body. Will that green ray wear off? Surely if there was technology which could turn me into this tentacled thing, there was technology to undo it.

I would wait. I knew how to wait. Besides, I had no other choice.