by JN Lenz
The great rock of granite that which served as the headstone for one of the greatest of men sat alone in the open away from the cover of the trees, sitting forever defiant against the prevailing winds of the Atlantic Ocean. There would be one tube left between the two of us packed away in one of my side bags, we always packed a couple of smaller tubes stuffed with cash anytime we planned a long motor bike journey together. Over the years our rides had resulted in us burying tubes in, Saskatchewan, Vancouver Island, the North West Territories, Newfoundland and Quebec. The first tube from this trip had been hidden in New Brunswick and we looked at each other but dismissed the idea right away, we had no right to associate with this man in any way and we buried that tube instead into a crevice out on the Citadel in Halifax.
From the purchase of the Hedrick Funeral Home forward we would begin to generate sufficient yearly revenue from our operations to add additional Funeral Homes at a rate of no less than one a year. There would be several times over a thirty year stretch that Clyde and I purchased two or more businesses within a single year, ten years after purchasing the Hedrick Funeral Home we would also own and operate our first Nursing Home. By the end of the following decade that number sat at eight Nursing Homes with over ninety per cent of the residents having made pre arrangement for their funerals at Homes under our control.
By the end of that first year following the purchase of the Hedrick Funeral Home, Clyde’s murder toll sat at fourteen. This included the murder of Vito, but not the subsequent mob killings which in reality were the direct result of Clyde shooting Vito. Clyde made no claim in adding those six additional deaths and the services we performed as a result of those murdered in the wake of Vito’s assassination.
By the end of that year nineteen ninety one, we performed over sixteen hundred funeral services that year. There had been a steady increase at all three of the Funeral Homes, plus the late year addition of a small town establishment north of the city which handled a couple hundred services a year. The owners had agreed to stay on for a full five years at a reasonable salary, plus they had no issue with a two hundred and fifty thousand cash deposit. The reduced selling price on the purchase contract would save the couple thousands in taxes. The offer of cash would always be presented to any family run funeral businesses we wanted to purchase, in all those years I was never turned down once.
The hours had ticked by as I continued to read on through the detailed files, each one chronicling in vivid detail the murders that Clyde had committed. I could not remove myself from the desk and these files that matched Clyde’s murders to the events that shaped all of our lives. I began to summarize in my mind the total murders per year that Clyde had committed, that first year in nineteen eighty six when six had been planned which turned to seven. The seven would in reality become eight before the end of the year as Bruck’s fatal car crash would give the rookie murderer a total of eight murders in that first year.
This man that the world needed to be scared of was my closest ally, here I was in the funeral business unable to handle the sight of blood, but seemingly I had no problem with murder. In all these years I still had never been present for a complete embalming of a cadaver, never had the stomach for it. I stayed on the money side of the business, turns out guess I was helping to make murder pay.
As I continued to read through the files, each year Clyde was adding to his head count of those who he had murdered. After his rookie year there would be another six murders, after that sophomore year he added three more. Then there was nothing for two full years, until nineteen ninety one when Clyde murdered number eighteen to twenty two. It was the year America had won their first war against Iraq over Kuwait when Clyde would add another four murders to his growing list of victims. The homeless victims who Clyde had supplied me with their identities would make up two of the four murder victims for that calendar year.
His secret in alluding capture appears to have been his transition from how he began to murder in the subsequent years following those initial murders. Knowing he could no longer depend on an incompetent Coroner like he had back in Largo, Clyde addressed the entire murder issue. By the time we had purchased the Avery Funeral Home with its in house crematorium, he had by most accounts stopped leaving the dead bodies of his victims for discovery. Instead he would utilize the Sodium Pentobarbital or the sodium thiopental that he would steal from remote veterinary clinics; he found them in every small town across the province. Breaking into these clinics late at night, there was rarely if ever any security or alarm systems, or they were basic at best. Often he would use these drugs to murder his victims before removing the body from the scene of the crime, only to dispose of it in the crematorium.
A missing persons report carries substantially less attention and concern in Police Stations and in the media than that of murder. Clyde could not count on the lack of due diligence and ignorance of the local coroner once his murders moved beyond the borders of Largo. Dozens of them, their existence literally up in smoke.
To this day no one but Clyde and now me, would ever know what had happened to them.
Somehow, all this horror and murder was not sickening me the way it really should, me with the weak stomached and all, instead there was an undeniable urge to continue on reading. There was so much about my closest friend and business partner that until now, I would have thought impossible, only his own written words could have made me believe the extent of his passion for killing.
The detail of each murder had me transfixed on page after page, the matter of fact transcripts, chronicling methodically, one killing after another, year in and year out. The same man, who at this very moment was on the side of a mountain with my only son, somehow through all of this, I had managed to push that thought out of my mind, but it could not help but continue to creep back into my consciousness.
I knew there was no way Clyde would ever harm Sid, this much I knew for certain. Sid and Clyde had a very special bond, if anything I know in my heart Clyde would protect my son with his life. After all these years as a mentor, would he pass the torch of murder along to my impressionable son? The boy hung on Clyde’s every word; Sid had Clyde on such a pedestal he absorbed every word with conviction. That was the fear haunting me much more than the fear of my son’s murder at Clyde’s hands.
I would read on, hoping to dispel the thoughts from my mind. The pair would not be home for days, I had to keep my mind from slipping into the darkness. I buried myself back into the next file, it was murder twenty three. The choice for the death by shooting of his twenty third victim, was about to truly shock me.
What some would disregard as a typical commuting angst as they traveled the multiple lane highways into the city, Clyde elevated his anger into murder. Seemingly without hesitation Clyde had targeted an erratic driver who often terrorized his daily commute into the city.
After that first year in Toronto living in the small apartment which was close to the Avery Funeral Home, Clyde had taken a chunk of his new found wealth and placed a deposit and mortgage on a three hundred acre farm an hour’s drive from the city. Half of the farms three hundred acres were set within a series of hills and sharp valley’s and remained fully forested with mature Maple and Ash trees. Over the next thirty years, Clyde would plants hundreds of trees on the remaining one hundred and fifty acres that had been used years prior for crops.
Along the way he would build dozens of trails leading through adjacent pieces of property which he would purchase over the years. File number twenty three would be the only file which listed no name of the deceased, referred to only through the file by Clyde as
“The fuck head driver”.
It appeared the name of the victim was not of concern to Clyde; his mission in exterminating this person’s life was solely to remove him as a burden to the commuting public as a whole he would write. Surely Clyde could have checked the papers following the murder in search of a name for the man he would end up killing, if he had searched for the name or if he knew who the
man was, Clyde was to make no mention of it in the file.
The first notes of the file listed a series of dates and actions witnessed by Clyde on the driver of a late model Chevy Impala, the guy had a long CB antenna and blacked out hubs, like he always wanted to be a cop. The prick would tail gate, never use a blinker, he was always cutting off drivers, only to slow to a crawl once the Impala had worked its way in front of a lead car. On one occasion, the erratic driver forced a motor cyclist off into the ditch after cutting the rider off. There was no direct mention of why this particular road menace angered Clyde to the point of murder; instead he just chronicled the almost daily occurrence of road rage by the no name driver. After weeks of witnessing the mad Impala terrorize the highway, Clyde began to time all his commute to and from the city to coincide with the mad Impala’s drive into the city.
Evenings when the highways began to fill with the rush of workers on the way home, that same Impala would use the far left lane on the multi-lane highway to drive slow enough to back the cars up behind him for miles. Clyde listed over two pages of the vehicle insanity from mad Impala, a record of recklessness spanning every conceivable infraction. Following cars within inches of their rear bumper, cutting cars off, dodging in and out of lanes, slamming his brakes on unexpectedly.
Within a three week period Clyde would follow the car down the side roads after it had long left the multi-lane highways behind, he tried to remain far enough back not to be seen. The mad Impala would eventually lead him back down a gravel road to a shoddy old mobile home that was perched on the only dry piece of land within a long swamp. By the second time Clyde had followed the mad Impala into the swamp the driver must have noticed him following back in the distance, mad Impala would be standing near the end of his laneway starring directly at Clyde by the time he drove by.
Like that piece of shit could intimidate Clyde, I thought as I read the file. He still returned the mad Impala’s island in the swamp several times after that stare down, except now he would show up late at night. Clyde would roll the car to a stop a mile or so down the dusty dirt road, leaving the car on the side of the road Clyde would sneak up to the trailer and observe the place for an hour or so. On each occasion the man appeared to be living alone, as only the mad Impala could be seen walking between the dirty windows of the trailer in the swamp.
Once Clyde had grown bored of observing mad Impala he followed the driver back to his trailer in the country one evening and put a pair of bullets into his head. Renting a full sized pickup truck earlier in the day by using the identity of one of the homeless Clyde had turned to ash in the Avery Funeral Home’s crematorium. The murdered bum had let his original license he earned as a teenager long ago expire but Clyde used the man’s birth certificate to complete the driving tests and acquire a new license under that name.
Deciding to make no secrets that he was following the mad Impala that evening, Clyde followed the car closely with his large rented pickup truck all the way to the trailer in the swamp. Turning into the laneway behind mad Impala as he entered the driveway of his home, the enraged driver jumped out of the car and stormed towards the rented pickup truck, Clyde had stopped the vehicle back near the end and to the edge of the mad Impala’s laneway.
Clyde calmly opened the driver’s door of the pickup truck as the rushing man approached, stepping down onto the ground while his left hand remained hidden behind the truck door. Once completely down from the truck and on a firm footing, Clyde stepped slightly out from behind the open truck door. Raising the pistol from waist level Clyde leveled the pistol at the head of mad Impala and pumped two bullets straight off into his head. The first shot hitting him in the center of his forehead; the force of the bullet through mad Impala’s entire body violently back. This would cause the second shot to enter his face through the middle of his chin, spitting the bullet back out the top of his head.
Mad Impala dropped within a few feet of the open pickup door. Clyde wrote how his first action after mad Impala dropped to the ground was to bend down and pick up the two shell casings from the ground. I could envision the whole scene in my head, how calm and methodical he would have been at times such as this. Removing the body bag from the back of the truck, zipping mad max into the pouch along with the several shovels of blood soaked dirt, Clyde would drag it to the back of the truck box and pull the heavy bag up into the box. His last entry in the short file of mad max Impala would be his comment on how enjoyable the drive was back into the city to dispose of the black bag in the Funeral Homes body furnace.
The last file in that box would be numbered twenty six, after pulling the file from the box I scanned the first page details of an abusive mother. Clyde had begun to follow her story in the National newspapers; several articles had detailed how she had been arrested for beating and burning her two young children with among other things her lit cigarette ends.
The abusive women’s trial had been thrown out of the courts due to mistakes by the prosecution and the Investigating officers on the city’s Police force. The night following the abusive mothers release following the mistrial, Clyde made a visit to the woman’s apartment where he would strangle her to death. The short file included Clyde’s thoughts in ensuring the abusive mother suffered the same fear and pain that she had inflicted upon her children countless times in their young lives.
“Above all to prevent her from ever gaining custody of those kids again”.
Clyde stated simply, for obvious reasons of his own he had no tolerance for violence against children. The mere mention of child abuse by burning in any way would incense Clyde to the point of rage. Over the years there had been several times when he had come across this kind of news and you could sense the boiling blood rise from within him. I knew better than to comment or bring the topic up period, and I certainly never shared any news story or gossip about potential allegations of abuse against children.
Clyde wrote how the abusive mother had begged him for her life that night in the small dank basement apartment, a small two bedroom hole in the ground. Wine bottles and filth covered the floors of the basement apartment; Clyde had discovered the child beating mother sitting on the living room couch well on her way to being drunk when he entered the apartment. The woman sat slouched over the open bottle of wine with a cigarette hanging from her mouth as he surprised her as he stood at the entrance to the small living room area.
This was like shooting chickens in a coupe for Clyde; he simply walked over to her after he had climbed in through the unlocked bathroom window. Looking up from the floor where the abusive mother had been starring, the slumping mother suddenly cocked her head straight back
“Who da Fuck are uwe, do uwe got liquor?” the inebriated bitch groaned as her head fluctuated back and forth like some grotesque bouncy head doll.
“No but I did bring you a gift from your kid who is still in a hospital bed, and the ones that are having a nightmare right now” Clyde replied revealing the hidden left hand holding the fine leather belt.
“Wats da Fuck is uwe talking bout?”
“This is what I’m talking about Bitch”
Throwing himself on the drunkards back while she was still conjuring up some semblance of a response, Clyde pulled hard against each side of the belt as he pulled it over her head and around the spindly neck of the drunken bitch. Pushing his knees deep into the spine of the drunk as he pulled back hard on the thin leather belt, she released her grip on the half empty bottle of red wine as it crashed to the floor. Releasing the strap ever so slightly a faint
“Pleece noo”
These would be the last words to come from the bitch’s mouth before Clyde plunged the leather strap deep into her throat one final time.
There would be the brief sound of gurgling from inside the woman’s cheat as her bloodshot eyes now shot open and her arms began to flail weakly against the face and shoulders of Clyde as he drove his hands towards the back of the arm rest on each side of the abusive woman’s neck.
The li
quor and her body began to transpire against her as the sounds of her stomach rejecting the half a gallon of cheap wine made its best attempt to escape her stomach, the bitch would be suffocated from both ends Clyde would write. The only regret Clyde would write is how he had wished she had been sober so more fear could have been administered in her death, judging by the empty bottles that would have been impossibility. No doubt her body was sedated by the alcohol not only on the day she died, but on most before that.
The non-descript white van that Clyde had rented was parked close to the apartments side entrance; the plates had been changed to one of the bogus sets he used for such occasions. Removing the gurney from inside the van, Clyde calmly pushed it into the woman’s apartment before bagging and strapping her to the cart. In a manner no different than he had done hundreds of times before during funeral home retrievals, he rolled the murdered woman out to the van, loaded her into the back and returned her to the funeral home for her repatriation with the earth.
There was a section at the bottom of the file listing a series of six dates, each with a corresponding dollar amount. The monies totaling over one hundred thousand and thirty six thousand dollars that Clyde had donated anonymously to the Children’s Aid Society to be held in trust for the daughter and son of the murdered abusive mother. To be paid to the girl and boy when they are the age of eighteen, each would receive their full amount of the accumulated funds for use in a post-secondary education.
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Chapter 12