by Evans, Jon
The Bull is real, I am The Bull.
It was such a relief to be certain.
But now that I was certain, what exactly was I supposed to do?
Chapter 9 Sniffing The Packets
I still didn't have any hard evidence. An overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence, sure, but no smoking gun. And even if I did, what was I supposed to do, go to the FBI? The State Department? Get them to issue a vague travel advisory telling Americans to be careful out there?
There was Interpol. Whatever they were. I would try to find out.
The media? The San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times or maybe even Larry King Live? That might work. I had enough for a pretty good story. I even had pictures, although no paper in the world was going to run a shot of a dead man with knives in his eyes. I wished I'd taken a picture at the ACAP office, of Stanley Goebel's original handwriting, for a before-and-after shot. Maybe they could get in touch with his next of kin and get a sample.
And yet. What good would that do? A story would run in a newspaper one day, and maybe a snippet on CNN. A bunch of people would read it and ooh and aah. And it would be a warning so vague that it was useless. "Be careful if you go backpacking in the Third World because it looks like there's a serial killer somewhere on the planet." Yeah, that would save lives, that would have The Bull shaking in his hooves.
However. It occurred to me that if BC088269 was in fact The Bull, then I knew one more thing about him. I knew that he was out there on the Net. And the Net was something I knew a great deal about. More than most people. More than most techies even. In fact I was an expert.
Maybe, just maybe, if he had been careless, I could find him.
* * *
I put off the most promising lead, partly so I wouldn't lose hope quickly and partly because I'd need to do some social engineering in order to follow it, and spent the rest of the day searching through that vast maelstrom of disordered information called the Internet.
You probably think there's a lot of stuff out there. You have no idea. There's the static Web, company web sites and online health databases and government reference materials and a zillion vanity pages and all the other stuff you already know about. Search engines such as Google and AltaVista track these pages reasonably well… if they know about them. Every search engine runs an automated "spider", which goes to every page in its database, and then every page that those pages link to, and so on and so forth — but even so there's a huge amount of "dark matter" out there, which have no links to them and consequently go unnoticed by the search engines.
Then there's the dynamic Web, sites which display different information with every passing day, or for every user, or depending on some kind of context. Newspapers are the most obvious example. The Thorn Tree is another. Spiders have a lot of trouble with the dynamic Web and capture only a small minority of what's available. Consider snapshots of Times Square, taken every ten minutes; they'd tell you everything about the billboards, but very little about what happened on the video screens. Spiders are like that. The huge Lexis-Nexis database stores every article from every Western periodical, but misses out on countless zines, pamphlets, and minor foreign papers, and charges a small fortune for access. Fortunately we had an account at work.
And that's just the Web. Most people think the Internet is what appears in their web browser. Us techies know better. Think of the Net as a 65,000-lane highway. The whole World Wide Web runs on but two lanes. Most of the lanes are nearly empty, or used only to keep the whole network running, but some of them are as busy as the Web; e-mail, obviously, but also Usenet, instant messaging like AIM and ICQ, IRC, MUDs, Napster, File Transfer Protocol, and even older protocols such as Gopher and Telnet, the dead languages of the Net, its Latin and Greek. There were even a few ancient BBS systems still out there, to which you actually had to dial directly.
Much of the data out there, probably most, simply cannot be searched, is effectively invisible except maybe to the FBI or National Security Agency. Most of that which can be searched is readily available through two or three sites, say Google and MetaCrawler and Lexis-Nexis. But there is a small fringe of information that is available only if you look very hard and very carefully, using exactly the right words, on one or two of the lesser-known search sites.
I did not intend to leave any stone unturned. I searched NorthernLight and Mamma and HotBot and AltaVista and Inktomi and GoTo and Ask and About and DejaNews. I searched Reuters and the Associated Press and Dow Jones and AfricaNews. I searched conspiracy sites and hacker sites and travel sites and serial-killer-fan-club sites and travel advisories and international-security companies. I searched for various combinations of: "The Bull" and "serial killer" and "traveler" and "backpacker" and "Laura Mason" and "Stanley Goebel" and "Lonely Planet" and "murder" and "eye mutilation" and "knives" and "Swiss Army knives" and "BC088269" and "Malawi" and "Cameroon" and "South Africa" and "Nepal".
And in the end I didn't come up with much. More than nothing, but not much. Articles in British papers about Laura's death, telling me nothing I didn't know already. A reference to my own Thorn Tree article. And a massive pile of useless and irrelevant information. There were, however, two palpable hits, and one maybe.
First of all was an article from the South Africa Mail & Guardian:
Is there a spectre haunting the Baz Bus?
You've seen them everywhere since the end of apartheid: American and European backpackers lured here by the promise of beaches and safaris and cheap ganja. But lately the talk in the Baz Bus and the beachfront hostels has a taken a decidedly grim turn. A rumour, documented in the new edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook most use as their bible, suggests that a serial killer is preying on their ilk.
On May 22, Daniel Gendrault, 25, French, was found murdered in Cape Town. On May 31, the body of Michelle McLaughlin, 31, Scottish, was discovered in Kruger Park. On June 13, the remains of Oliver Jeremies, 19, German, were found in the ocean near Beira, Mozambique. On the night of June 14, Kristin Jones, 25, English, was killed in rural Malawi. While the Lonely Planet guidebook suggests that the quick succession of the last two dates meant that they could not be the work of one man, the Mail & Guardian has found that Oliver Jeremies was most likely killed several days before he was discovered.
The most salaciously grotesque element in the rumour is that the killer, invariably called "The Bull" though no one knows why, carves out his victim's eyeballs and keeps them as a souvenir. The police have confirmed that the eyes of the Cape Town and Kruger Park victims were mutilated but will not provide details. The authorities in Mozambique and Malawi cannot provide any details on the murders there other than those found in the sketchy official reports.
There have been no more deaths in the six months since, but the rumour continues to spread, and even though it seems that "The Bull" has left the region — if he ever existed — his mention in the Lonely Planet guide will certainly keep it alive for years until the next edition appears.
South Africa's hoped-for luxury tourist boom has never materialized, but since the end of apartheid we have at least managed to lure intrepid twentysomething backpackers by the thousand. They may not splash out dollars like the middle-aged Americans our tourist office seeks to attract, but a whole industry has grown up around them, and the reports they take back to Europe have a real effect on our overseas image. The crime crisis has already put a dent in their numbers during the last two years, and if the rumours of The Bull are taken seriously, we could soon see the Baz Bus running half-empty.
Still more intriguing was an old Usenet conversation from the DejaNews archive:
Date: 13 September 1995, 13:08:16 EDT
Newsgroups: alt.serial-killers, alt.perfect-crime
Subject: Killer on the road
From: [email protected] (Anonymous Remailer Service)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Two questions for you armchair psychos out there:
1. How would you commit the perfect murder?
<
br /> It wouldn't have to be anyone you knew. The goal here is just to commit a murder of any random human being. The victim has to be healthy and strong, to keep it challenging. But it doesn't have to be anyone in particular. How would you do it so that the risks are eliminated or minimized?
2. How would you commit the perfect group of murders?
Note that this is very different from the first question. Here you have to kill an arbitrary number of people. Say 10-12 of them. Otherwise the same rules as above apply. But obviously you can't just keeping pushing people off the same cliff or someone's gonna get suspicious. You can be either a mass murderer or a serial killer. What do you do? I guess my Subject: line makes my opinion obvious, but I'd like to know what the rest of you think.
Taurus
—
Date: 13 September 1995, 23:01:08
Newsgroups: alt.serial-killers, alt.perfect-crime
Subject: Re: Killer on the road
From: [email protected] (George Plaine)
Reply-To: [email protected]
[email protected] (Anonymous Remailer Service) wrote:
>1. How would you commit the perfect murder?
It's a pretty good question but I think mystery novelists have beaten it to death over the years. There's basically 2 ways to commit the perfect murder:
- make sure nobody thinks its a murder (generally an accident)
- make sure somebody else takes the fall (generally by dressing things
up as a murder-suicide, but there's tons o' variations out there.)
>2. How would you commit the perfect group of murders?
This is way more interesting… A big accident like a collapsed building or a bomb attributed to someone else sounds good. Serial killer, that sounds like a hard gig. Even if you're driving around picking people up and disappearing them, every crime and disappearance goes on record, and every little mistake you might make catches up with you. I think one big bang is the way to go.
—
Date: 14 September 1995, 14:51:56
Newsgroups: alt.serial-killers, alt.perfect-crime
Subject: Re: Killer on the road
From: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
[email protected] (George Plaine) wrote:
>[email protected] (Anonymous Remailer Service) wrote:
>>2. How would you commit the perfect group of murders?
>
> [… ]Serial killer, that sounds like a hard gig.
> [… ] I think one big bang is the way to go.
People used to have a lot of success (if you can call it that) by hitching or by picking up hitchers, but that's a lot harder these days. Cell phones, car locators, cameras on highways and every ATM machine, DNA testing - it's not easy being a psychopath any more.
I think it's probably easier to kill a single random person in a rural setting, eg bumping them off a cliff, but easier to be a serial killer in a dense urban place like New York or LA or Chicago.
But what do I know, I haven't killed anyone yet.
—
Date: 14 September 1995, 13:08:16 EDT
Newsgroups: alt.serial-killers, alt.perfect-crime
Subject: Re: Killer on the road
From: [email protected] (Anonymous Remailer Service)
Reply-To: [email protected]
[email protected] wrote:
>[email protected] (George Plaine) wrote:
>>[email protected] (Anonymous Remailer Service) wrote:
>>>2. How would you commit the perfect group of murders?
>>
>> [… ]Serial killer, that sounds like a hard gig.
>
> Cell phones, car locators, cameras on highways and every ATM
> machine, DNA testing - it's not easy being a psychopath any more.
You're making the assumption that the killings take place in a First World country with a well-funded police force. Why think that? You could go off to Asia or Africa or pick some random tribesmen there and they'd fit the criteria. Or, better yet, go on a road trip through Central America or someplace like that, kill someone in every country, and just make each one look like one of those death-squad things. You could even pick off fellow travelers. I think it would all be miles easier in the Third World.
Also it has occurred to me that there's never been a documented truly random serial killer. I'm talking Leopold & Loeb-style, picking people truly at random rather than because they fit some fucked-up need or psychological profile. Maybe this is because there's never been one. Or maybe it's because only the nonrandom killers get caught.
Taurus
Taurus. Which of course means: The Bull.
And finally there was one very cryptic IRC log fragment, which apparently had been automatically saved to file when the IRC session had crashed, and by chance the old Unix box that had hosted the session had its log files open to the Web and to directory browsing, and HotBot's spider happened to have stumbled across it in passing:
NumberThree: Frankly I'm kind of bored with the term _serial killer_. Maybe I should lobby for a new one. _Sequential homicide artist_ or something.
NumberTwo: Artist? That's a pretty fancy-shmancy name to pin on The Bull's tail…
NumberThree: If Kafka could have a hunger-artist… Maybe all of The Bull's stuff should go up for an exhibition somewhere. You know, a real-world place, an installation.
NumberTwo: And everybody who comes in to see it gets killed?
NumberThree: Hey, everybody knows that you have to suffer for Art. Seriously, what I think is th
##
NO CARRIER
All very interesting of course. The Mail & Guardian confirmed that the four African deaths could have been one person's work — but it seemed very unlikely, if the M&G's dates were correct, that they could have gotten up to Cameroon for June 15. But there was no reason to think the dates were correct. It was Africa; all information should be considered wrong until definitively proven correct.
The Usenet conversation was highly suspicious but inconclusive and not terribly helpful except that it confirmed that someone who called himself Taurus had been thinking pretty hard about this as long ago as 1995. He'd used the Finnish anonymous remailer service, since taken down by that country's authorities, and didn't seem to have any language idiosyncrasies, so there was probably no way to track him.
And the IRC fragment… that was just weird. But then the Net is a weird place. It was entirely possible that this was a discussion of some MUD role-playing game, or strange California art commune, or (judging from the names) a Prisoner fan-club, or something even less comprehensible and completely irrelevant. But it still gave me the chills. Sequential homicide artist.
All very interesting, but not particularly useful with respect to the goal of finding who and where The Bull was. It was time to move on to the prime lead. That post to the Thorn Tree. It could have been made from any web browser on the planet, and the Thorn Tree allowed you to take any name you liked, so long as it wasn't already used by someone else, without verifying it in any way. Apparent anonymity. But I knew that the Web's anonymity was a myth if you weren't careful; and with a little help and a little luck, that Thorn Tree message could be traced a long way towards its sender.
Chapter 10 Connection Established
First of all I went to lonelyplanet.com and dug out their list of offices and phone numbers. It was a pleasant surprise that their web site was hosted and run from Oakland, just across the San Francisco Bay from me. But it made sense. The Bay Area was the center of all the world's web traffic. I'd heard estimates that forty per cent of the data on the Internet was routed through the region.
I needed Lonely Planet's help, so I called their Oakland office and asked for their web editor. I told her secretary that I was investigating a story. I wish I could say that when she answered I felt some frisson of significance, a feeling in the pit of my stomach, but the truth is I just felt sexist surprise that their web editor was a woman.
"Talena Radovich," she said, brisk but friendly. "What can I do for you?"
"Hi. My name is Balthazar Wood," I said. I had come to realize over the years that a twenty-dollar name subconsciously impresses people in official situations. I knew it was going to be tough to convince them and every arrow in my quiver would help. "I'm working on what you might call a complicated investigation and I'm calling to ask for your help."
"And who do you work for?"
"I'm not really working for anyone," I admitted.
"Julia said you were a journalist… ?"
"In a sense. A story of some kind will probably come out of this. But there's a lot more to it than that."
There was a pause and then she said, with a hint of suspicion, "Maybe you should tell me what you're talking about."
"Yeah," I said. "But I warn you, it's pretty complicated and probably pretty hard to believe. Do you have some time right now, or do you want to talk later?"
"I have some time right now."
"All right," I said. "Here goes. Here's the nutshell version. When I'm finished with it you're probably going to think I'm completely crazy, but please bear with me and let me fill in the blanks, okay?"
"Okay," she said. She sounded curious. That was good.
"All right. Two weeks ago I was in Nepal, on the Annapurna Circuit, and I found the body of a dead man. Not just dead, but murdered."