The judge decided, however, it was time. Kyle Hulbert was eighteen. And Kyle, as it were, was not going to argue with being given a free pass on life.
“Kyle Hulbert,” a law enforcement source later analyzed, “has been, since he was six years old, in and out of mental institutions. Kyle’s world includes a number of darker characters . . . demons or presences . . . that live in his head.”
And now this “man” was free to roam the world and do what he wished. Thus, on September 4, 2001, Kyle found himself on the street, walking, with literally nowhere to go.
No home.
No friends.
No family.
There was a certain “high,” Kyle recalled, about being freed from the structured, routine life inside an institution. It felt good. It felt right. It felt redemptive.
“I was happy that I was free! No more leashes. No more having to worry about institutions. I was . . . free. Those are the only three words that I can say describe how I was feeling.”
Kyle had been told to have a plan. And he did. Kyle said his “plan” on this day, as he walked down the street in front of the courthouse toward the bus stop, was to go and find a girl he could “fuck senseless.”
After that, well, whatever came his way, he would roll with it.
CHAPTER 2
Kyle had what he called “half-baked” plans as he broke from those ward-of-the-state chains holding him down. Just out and free to do what he wanted, Kyle thought about going to college, taking up study, maybe a career of some sort. That thought came and went rather quickly, however, as Kyle realized he had to find some money to live off of first. Moreover, a lifelong dream of his to become a published writer would have to take a backseat to surviving on his own.
“My main concern was filling out the Social Security paperwork and getting that going,” he said. “I had already been approved for it.”
Odd, the government had approved him for mental disability and there were funds set up and headed his way, come December. Yet he was deemed “sane” enough to leave the institution and fend for himself on his own.
It didn’t make sense.
Kyle said he was told by the state: “Because of your mental health, you are going to have a hard time holding down a job.”
It was the reason why they approved him for financial aid.
“They had already seen how I handled jobs in the past,” Kyle explained. “I got fired from each job I ever had.”
There was not a doctor or therapist who spoke to Kyle over the years who did not know that demons whispered to this young man, that he saw things “others couldn’t or wouldn’t,” and that the world spinning out of control inside Kyle Hulbert’s head was not a place where happily-ever-after resided. Kyle had talked about having “dreams or visions of the apocalypse.” Those “voices” inside his head would eventually (in totality) go by the name of “the 6.” A lot of this, Kyle realized, sounded foolish. Imaginary. Something from a person who should be locked up. Most would respond by saying he was crazy. This sort of make-believe world he lived in as a five-year-old kid became an everyday part of his life as Kyle grew into his teens. He believed it was as real as the pet dragon he saw regularly and explained was as real as “one of my cats.”
“I cannot identify the first [memory],” he said many years later, talking about that moment in childhood when these different visions and thoughts inside his head began, “and you must understand that one of the aspects of psychosis is an inability to distinguish ‘reality’ from ‘fantasy.’ ”
To him, that chaos going on inside his adolescent mind—the dreams, hallucinations, and voices—were his absolute reality. It all seemed “perfectly natural . . . even if they weren’t.”
It did not take long for Kyle to become aware that he thought differently than the other kids around him and “there was something wrong” inside him. He knew that if he approached the other kids, talked to them about what he saw and heard, he would be shunned and ostracized, bullied, and likely beaten up, definitely laughed at. So he kept most of these things to himself, at least at first.
The voices and visions did not scare him, he said later. Some kids might be frightened by what he saw; but to him, it was a world he embraced. A secret he came to love.
There was one day—Kyle was six years old—when he had what he recalled was his first “hallucination.” It is a term Kyle needed to put in quotes, he said later, because hallucination was not the best way to describe what he saw. Hallucination was merely “the quickest and most efficient way” of explaining what happened. People could comprehend what a hallucination is—yet he considered what happened to him to be real—even to this day.
Another way to describe it, he reconciled, was to use the word “magic.”
Inside his head, Kyle lived within a world of his own, literally. This was his world. He didn’t create it, he claimed. Or ask for it to appear before him. It wasn’t like that at all. It just happened. One day it wasn’t there and then the next, well, it was—and the most important part of this for Kyle as he talked through it years later was that to him it wasn’t a fantasy, or some type of dream. It wasn’t something that came and went: The bogeyman underneath the bed. The monster in the closet. The imaginary friend you sit with and share tea with as a child.
This was his life. His world.
There was one major issue—of the many that would begin to accumulate—for Kyle as he sat years later and looked back on everything that had happened.
“The biggest problem I have encountered—and one we will have to address—is that I have a great deal of memory that conflicts with things I know to be true. . . . Consider everything I tell you to be as ‘true’ as I ‘know’ it all to be, and any inconsistencies are entirely unintended.”
This statement, so incredibly honest and sincere, would come back to haunt Kyle Hulbert as he grew into an adult, and some of what he “saw” and “heard” would indeed become reality, however interspersed with brutal violence, blood, murder, and carnage it would soon be.
CHAPTER 3
In October 2001, after a month of not doing much of anything, with the exception, he explained, “of spending a lot of time alone with my girlfriend,” Kyle Hulbert got an invitation to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Accepting this invitation would change his life.
The Maryland version of what is a nationwide celebration, generally called the Renaissance Faire, runs every August through October. It is an event set up to re-create a 16th-century English village with crafts, food, live performances . . . a jousting arena and lots of games, according to a website dedicated to the festival. It’s billed as a “fun family event” and held at a location about thirty miles outside of Washington, DC. The festival attracts people from all over the world, all walks of life. For sixteenth-century history buffs, it’s the ideal occasion. Families can go and have a blast. The same things that the Civil War reenactment events do for Civil War enthusiasts, the Renaissance festivals do for fans of sixteenth-century knights in shining armor, maidens and belly dancers, fire eaters, acrobats, and musicians. The allure for Kyle was that it fit with the chosen era of fantasy and the role-playing games (RPGs) he had fallen into and embraced while growing up. Here was a chance to dress up, wear a costume, and be somebody else—live out some of those more elaborate and epic fantasies Kyle had had all his life.
Kyle wore a latex cat mask that covered the top half of his face, which he had painted completely black underneath. He wore black clothes.
As he walked around the festival, Kyle noticed he was getting lots of looks from the girls.
“I liked that,” he said.
What eighteen-year-old boy, cooped up all his life inside one institution after the other, moving from one foster home to the next when not institutionalized, wouldn’t enjoy all the attention? Kyle had a girlfriend (he did not bring her to the festival). But being noticed by others, it felt good. It fed his ego—his enormous sense of self. For Kyle, he had to be somebody all the tim
e. Mostly, it was because he was so uncomfortable in his own skin or, more important, his own mind. Being someone else, or something else, allowed him to develop and satisfy his fantasies. It allowed Kyle the opportunity to express those strange feelings he had—not to mention the visions and hallucinations—and live them out in the physical world around him. At the festival, the type of people Kyle met and hung around stayed in character throughout most of the day. He understood this and exemplified it.
Something caught Kyle’s attention as he walked around. There were dozens of various types of booths spread throughout the festival. Vendors were selling food, clothing, weapons, and props—all sorts of items connected to the Renaissance that might be appealing to festivalgoers. So Kyle walked up to one particular tent. There was a girl behind the booth. A pretty girl. Young. Nice figure. She smiled at him.
“Brandy,” the girl said after he asked her name.
“Nice name,” Kyle responded.
They chatted. Small talk, mostly. She seemed interested. They had things in common. They seemed to like each other.
“Can I get your number?” Kyle asked.
Brandy didn’t hesitate, Kyle said later. She got a piece of paper and wrote it down.
“Call me soon,” Brandy said. They’d hang now, but she was working.
From there, Kyle found his way into the weapons tent on the grounds of the festival. If there was one subject within the era that Kyle was infatuated with the most, it had to be weapons. He collected knives and swords. He fashioned himself an expert knife and sword handler. He knew all there was to know about medieval weapons, especially knives and swords. And wherever Kyle Hulbert landed, he rarely went there without his trusty twenty-seven-inch ninja-style sword he liked to keep as sharp as a razor blade.
About the Authors
Crime writer, serial-killer expert, and investigative journalist M. William Phelps is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-six nonfiction books. Winner of the 2008 New England Book Festival Award for I’ll Be Watching You, Phelps has appeared on nearly one hundred television shows, including CBS’s Early Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, The Today Show, The View, TLC, BIO Channel, and History Channel. Phelps also created, produces, and stars in the hit Investigation Discovery series Dark Minds, now heading into its fourth season; and he is one of the stars of ID’s Deadly Women. Radio America calls him “the nation’s leading authority on the mind of the female murderer.”
Profiled in such noted publications as Writer’s Digest, Connecticut Magazine, NY Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Suspense Magazine, and The Hartford Courant, Phelps has also consulted for the Showtime cable television series Dexter and written for Connecticut Magazine. Touched by tragedy himself, due to the unsolved murder of his sister-in-law, Phelps is able to enter the hearts and minds of his subjects like no one else. He lives in a small Connecticut farming community and can be reached at his author website, www.mwilliamphelps.com.
Jane Carson-Sandler was 30 years old when she was raped in her own home with her three-year-old son at her side. Her attacker, known as the East Area Rapist (EAR), raped 50 women and murdered 10 people in California. He was never caught. Today, Jane is active with church activities, traveling, and speaking engagements. She lives in South Carolina with her husband, 2 cats and a dog. Her favorite activity is beach walking with her friends and their dogs, followed by dinner at a restaurant where the animals are treated like guests.
Jane is a strong supporter of Hope Haven Children’s Advocacy and Rape Crisis Center in Beaufort, South Carolina, an organization devoted to helping victims of violence to recover their health and reclaim their lives. To honor Jane’s courage in telling her story in this book, Kensington Publishing Corp. has made a donation to Hope Haven. To find out more about Hope Haven, or to make a donation of your own, please visit http://www.hopehavenlc.org. For immediate help, call the Hope Haven hotline at 800-637-7273.
Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.
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Copyright © 2015 by M. William Phelps
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3457-4
First Kensington Electronic Edition: February 2015
She Survived: Jane Page 10