by Gil Reavill
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Photo credits for chapter opening pages:
Chapter 1: AP Photo/Eric Draper
Chapter 2: Courtesy of Mercedes USA
Chapter 3: Courtesy of author
Chapter 4: © iStockphoto.com/Ismael Montero Verdu
Chapter 5: Courtesy of author
Chapter 6: © iStockphoto.com/Joe Gough
Chapter 7: © Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc.
Interlude 1: © iStockphoto.com/Maciej Noskowski
Chapter 8: Courtesy of author
Chapter 9: © 1989 Inside Detective Magazine
Interlude 2: © iStockphoto.com/Roger Cotton
Chapter 10: Robert Voets/CBS © 2004 CBS Broadcasting Inc./Alliance Atlantis
Chapter 11: Police photos—public domain
Chapter 12: Courtesy of author
Epilogue: © Eyal Ofer/Yaldor Photography
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gill Reavill has written extensively on true crime and disaster for Maxim and other publications. A screenwriter (Dirty, a police drama staring Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and collaborator on numerous books, including the New York Times bestseller Beyond All Reason: My Life with Susan Smith, he has appeared on many television shows, including Today. He lives in New York’s Westchester County.
* Using census figures and government vocational statistics, I eventually figured out a more exact estimate. Employing a very rough, nonstatistician’s algorithm (law enforcement officers + “death care” workers + health professionals - chiropractors + chicken slaughterers, etc.), I determined that the sector of the populace who’ve become acquainted with the night was actually 8.5 percent, 25,262,190 people in the U.S. The percentages seemed to hold true internationally, at least in the West, with 5,043,522 working similar fields in the UK. The number employed by the hazardous-waste disposal industry in the U.S. was a tiny sliver of the whole, 8,580, or 0.002 percent of the general population.
* We later discovered that my wife got the quote wrong, and what Stein really said was, “Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.” I like the first way better.
* Actually, TOD is itself a convenient fiction, an inexact concept useful in crime investigation, say, or to satisfy the human predilection for absolutes. There is no such thing as the moment of death, a precise instant of expiration, a clear-cut demarcation between being and nothingness. Like most biological occurrences, mortality is a process. Even so-called instant death, from explosion or massive trauma, takes a period of time, however brief. Death is not a flipped switch. It is always a journey.
* Only two of these murders yielded criminal convictions.
* Not to be confused with the company’s insidiously memorable hot-dog jingle, advertising “the dog kids love to bite!”
*Gross used in this sense is not a value judgment, but invokes “total” as in the phrase gross income. Although the lab was gross (“vulgar, obscene, coarse”) also.
* Meth cooks sometimes filter by-product gases from their labs through kitty litter.
*Forensic Files represents a documentary approach to the same type of material, as does such A & E and Court TV shows as Cold Case Files, The First 48, and Trace Evidence. Other police procedurals and forensic dramas figure prominently in the prime-time network lineup: Law & Order (with two spin-offs , Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent), Cold Case, Bones, Crossing Jordan, Criminal Minds, Numb3rs, Navy NCIS, and Without a Trace. Alongside popular American imports such as NYPD Blue and CSI: Las Vegas, homegrown British crime show productions have always been popular in the UK, from the ground-breaking The Sweeney through Taggart and up to Prime Suspect and Life on Mars. In Canada, Da Vinci’s Inquest features Nicholas Campbell as a coroner in the lead role.
* Ed Gein’s farmhouse, destroyed by fire. John Wayne Gacy’s house in Des Plaines, bulldozed flat, as was O. J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate. Jeffrey Dahmer’s Oxford Apartments building, with its infamous Apartment 213, demolished. These sites were, in the language of real estate experts, “stigmatized” properties. You know you have transgressed in some basic, elemental manner when authorities raze your house and sow your fields with salt.
* Historical rates have been estimated as generally higher: 23 per 100,000 of population in thirteenth-century England, 45 per 100,000 in fifteenth-century Sweden, and 47 per 100,000 in fifteenth-century Amsterdam.