by R. G. Belsky
He was right, of course.
It didn’t make sense.
Eleven years ago, this madman David Galvin—who called himself Felix the Cat—had gone on a terrifying murder spree. Then he was caught and sent to jail for the rest of his life.
We all thought it was over. We put the nightmare behind us. We got on with our lives.
And, according to Galvin, the rest of the Great Pretenders did too.
They graduated from college. They got good jobs. They became pillars of society. And now, eleven years later, they’d all come a long way from the secret society of bored, rich kids who got their kicks by playing a deadly game of make-believe.
That’s what Galvin had told me in those last desperate hours as he tried to make his peace with God.
I didn’t do it alone, Galvin said. There were three other killers. Three people who got away with murder.
And they were out there now.
Or at least someone was.
Starting it up all over again.
Still pretending after all these years.
Chapter 13
The campus of New York University is located downtown at the end of Fifth Avenue, all around Washington Square Park.
It’s very unique—the kind of college campus you’d find only in New York City. There’s the famous arch at the north entrance. The park itself with its eclectic mix of students, street people, and ageless hippies still reliving the ’60s. Walk a block west and you’re in the center of Greenwich Village, with all its character, energy, and zaniness. The university’s classrooms and offices are dotted all around the area.
I found the administration building, walked up the steps and into the lobby. There was a receptionist sitting at a desk. She was young—probably still a teenager—and I figured she was a coed at the school working a part-time job. I told her what I was doing there. She was very impressed. Probably never met a big-time reporter before. I wondered if she’d run right home afterward to tell all the other kids in the dormitory. She said the person I needed to talk to was Dean Gerald Hynes.
Hynes was the dean of student affairs. He looked maybe ten years older than me, with surprisingly long light brown hair that hung down over his ears. He was wearing a button-down dress shirt, open at the collar, and faded blue denim jeans. I pegged him as a guy waging a valiant battle to look hip, but losing the war.
He didn’t seem nearly as impressed to see me as the receptionist.
“I’m looking for information on some students,” I told him.
“Current students?”
“No, they would have been on campus about eleven years ago.”
“What are their names?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, do you know anything at all about them?”
“They’re all from nice, affluent family backgrounds. They’ve probably since gone on to successful—maybe even high-profile—jobs in their chosen professions. Oh, and they murdered a lot of people while they were students at this institute of higher learning. I don’t think that last thing would be in their record files.”
Dean Hynes looked at me as if I’d just dropped in from the planet Neptune.
“I’m telling this very badly,” I said.
So I went through the entire story for him. He knew about Galvin. Everyone there knew the story of David Galvin, he said, who—he pointed out—was not exactly an example of the kind of future leaders the school turned out. But he said that was all before his time. He’d been dean of student affairs there for six years.
“Now what do you want from me?” he asked.
“I’d like you to let me see the records of all of the former students who would have been on campus at the same time Galvin was here.”
“That’s a big job.”
“I know.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. Something that jumps out at me. Some clue. Some connection to Galvin that everyone else has missed all these years. I’m hoping I’ll know the clue when I find it.”
I knew he wasn’t going to go for my idea. It would have meant making a decision, putting himself on the line, doing something he really didn’t have to do. Dean Hynes didn’t seem to me like a person who did that very often. He wasn’t a put-yourself-on-the-line kind of guy.
“Why don’t you just try the library,” he said impatiently. “They have old yearbooks there. You can go through them.”
“That’s not good enough. Not everybody’s picture is in a yearbook. Maybe they didn’t graduate or they were sick on photo op day or they were just camera shy. Maybe some of the yearbooks are missing. I need to have access to your entire student personnel file.”
“I’m not opening up those records to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have to,” he said smugly.
“Look, I’m trying to catch a murderer here.”
“You’re not the police. You’re just a newspaper reporter. If the police ask to go through my records, I’ll let them. But not you.”
He stood up behind his desk.
“Good day, Mr. Dougherty. Our business is finished.”
I walked back outside into Washington Square Park. It was midmorning, and there were lots of people around. I started talking to some of them, asking if they were here when David Galvin was a student. Did they know anyone who was? Did they ever hear about him having any friends? I showed people a picture of Galvin from the Banner’s old files the way he would have looked eleven years ago.
Everybody knew who David Galvin was.
Nobody revealed anything new to me about him.
Nobody gave me any clues.
Nobody confessed to me that they were a secret member of the Great Pretenders.
I walked over to the NYU library and asked the woman behind the reference desk where I could find school yearbooks from the mid ’80s. She said the old yearbooks were kept in storage in a different building. If I wanted to see them, she said, I’d need to get approval from someone in the university’s administration office. I asked her for a name to contact. She suggested Dean Hynes. Terrific.
I had another idea. I asked her to show me any information they had about fantasy role-playing games. The kind of games David Galvin said he and his friends used to play.
I’d heard of the fantasy role-playing phenomenon before, but I thought it was just another game like Mario Brothers or Space Invaders or Pac-Man. I never realized it was such serious business.
I spent the rest of the morning reading newspaper and magazine articles—from places like the Washington Post, Newsweek, and USA Today—about how it became an obsession to some people.
The most popular of the games, Dungeons and Dragons, had been invented in the 1970s. Now an estimated four million Americans—primarily high school and college students, most of them extremely intelligent—played it and similar role-playing games.
There were stories about young people who played as much as forty hours a week. Some of them totally lost touch with reality, taking on the personality of their imaginary game character in real life.
At least fifty deaths—some of them teenage suicides, others senseless thrill killings—had already been linked to these fantasy games, according to critics.
The game itself was incredibly complicated—which was why it attracted mostly bright, gifted young people with vivid imaginations. There was no game board, no real rules, and the games themselves could go on indefinitely, spinning out more and more elaborate fantasies. Players assume the identity of sorcerers and gods and demons—and then must use incredible violence and treachery to reach their goals. Characters are killed, resurrected, and reincarnated.
“This is a very intense, very violent game,” according to one critic. “It’s full of human sacrifice, eating babies, drinking blood, rape, murder of every variety and curses of insanity. It’s extremely fascinating—
just talk to people that have played it. But when you have fun with murder, that’s dangerous. The game causes young people to kill themselves and others. Kids start living in the fantasy . . . and they can’t find their way out of the dungeon.”
I made notes as I went through some of the horror stories I found in the news clippings.
News item: A 16-year-old boy—taking his high school finals in Montpelier, Vt.—wrote on the test sheet, “This is the last paper I will ever write, GOODBYE.”
That night, he went home and shot himself in the chest with his father’s pistol.
His parents say they are convinced his suicide resulted from a “curse” put on him in school earlier that day while he was playing the fantasy game of Dungeons and Dragons. He was so distraught over the curse, they say, that he killed himself.
News item: A family of four was brutally murdered in Bellevue, Wash. by two teenagers obsessed with playing fantasy games. Prosecutors said their only motive was the “sheer thrill of killing.”
The teens are said to have played fantasy games so zealously that they were kicked out of one game by the other participants for overdoing it.
“You just can’t make sense out of it,” the mayor of the city said after the pair was arrested for the slayings. “Something like this where you lose touch with reality and say, ‘I’ve got to kill somebody just for the hell of it . . .’”
News item: The family of a 16-year-old boy in Castle Rock, Colo. say they knew something was wrong when he took down his Sports Illustrated swimsuit model posters and replaced them with pictures of demons.
A short time later, he killed himself with carbon monoxide from his parents’ car.
Family members blamed the suicide on his obsession with fantasy role-playing games.
“He opened a door to the occult,” his sister said.
News item: The bodies of two little second-grade boys were found brutally stabbed to death and hidden under a pile of leaves in a wooded area near Virginia Beach, Va.
When a clean-cut, gentle-looking 16-year-old was arrested for the murder, everyone wondered why he did it. They soon found the horrifying answer: His obsession with the fantasy role-playing game had become pathological.
The headline on the article in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot said:
FANTASY TURNS TO NIGHTMARE
FOR ACCUSED TEEN, LIFE, GAMES, MERGED
There were a lot more articles like this, but the pattern was always the same. A bright, imaginative young person. A clean-cut, wholesome, All-American kid from a nice respectable family. Looking for some excitement in life. Who instead plunges into a bizarre world of make-believe—and then can’t get out again.
I read one of the quotes I’d written down from a psychologist who counseled teenagers with behavioral problems.
“Games like this give these kids something they don’t have in their normal lives,” the psychologist explained. “Control. Total control.”
“Players get to command vast armies, make life-and-death decisions on people, obliterate all their enemies. They cannot possibly ever experience this as a real-life situation. So they turn to these fantasy role-playing games and escape into a pretend world.
“For kids who feel they have no power over their own lives, these games can be like handing them a pack of matches. The players become so wrapped up in the seductive fantasies of their make-believe world that they lose touch with reality.”
Is that what happened to David Galvin?
And the rest of the Great Pretenders too?
At lunch time, I walked back to the administration building and took a seat on a park bench across the street. I bought a hot dog and a soda from a street vendor—and waited until Dean Hynes came out and headed away in the opposite direction. On his way to a well-deserved lunch break, no doubt. Then I went inside and talked to the receptionist again.
“Does Dean Hynes have them ready yet?” I asked her.
She looked confused. “Have what ready?”
“The personnel records. The ones of all the students from when David Galvin was here. He promised me you would print them out for me.”
“I’m sorry, but he never told me anything about it.”
“Can you do it now then? I’ll wait.”
“I-I don’t know. Dean Hynes just went to lunch. Maybe I should ask him when . . .”
“I’m on deadline,” I smiled. “I really need them in a hurry.”
“Well, I suppose if Dean Hynes said it was all right . . .”
It took awhile for her to make all the printouts. There were thousands of students who had passed through the campus during the nearly four years that Galvin was a student here. It was a race against time whether she’d finish before Hynes came back from lunch. I was betting that he was the kind of guy who took a long lunch. I won the bet.
That night I stayed up late in my hotel room going over the printouts. I was looking for any name that I recognized. Any possible connection to David Galvin. Anything that looked like it might mean something to me.
I didn’t get very far. Dean Hynes was right about that. It was a lot of work.
But I did find one name that I recognized.
Lisa Montero.
The daughter of Wall Street tycoon John Montero—the same woman who was also the leading suspect in the most recent of the murders on Galvin’s list—had gone to NYU. She’d majored in business administration, arriving as a freshman coed during Galvin’s junior year on campus. After that, she’d moved on to Harvard, earned an MBA, and now was a vice president in her father’s business.
Not that it proved anything, of course. I mean thousands of people went to NYU, and the odds were pretty good that a lot of people I’d heard of would turn up on the lists.
But it was—at the very least—an intriguing coincidence.
And she did fit the pattern. The one Galvin had told me about. He said the Great Pretenders all came from affluent, upwardly mobile families, just like he did. And, he said, while he languished in jail, the others had gone on to become big successes and prominent names.
I was very proud of myself. I’d found a clue. A goddamned clue. Of course, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my clue. Or if it even meant anything at all.
But I sure as hell had one.
Lisa Montero.
Cool.
Chapter 14
Someone once said that the acorn never falls very far from the tree. They meant that parents generally produce offspring a lot like themselves. Or like father, like son. I wasn’t sure if this was true or not. But I wanted to find out what kind of tree had produced David Galvin.
Galvin’s parents lived in Tenafly, N.J., a quiet suburb about fifteen miles north of New York City. The house was a large Tudor located on a quiet cul-de-sac a few miles from the main shopping area. It had two cars in the driveway, a dog sleeping on the front porch, and a basketball hoop hanging from the garage.
There was no skull and crossbones on the door.
No image of Satan burned into the lawn.
No sign in front that warned: “Beware—Birthplace of Felix the Cat.”
Just the house of an affluent family on an affluent street in an affluent American suburb.
Norman Galvin, the father, was in his fifties with short, almost crew-cut graying hair. His wife, Barbara, was tiny, blonde and thin. There were framed pictures of their two other children on the walls inside. A girl in a high school cheerleader’s outfit—then later all grown up as a young mother posing happily with her two tiny children. Another girl in a high school graduation cap and gown. There were no pictures of David on any of the walls.
“I understand you were one of the last people to see David,” Norman Galvin said as we sat in their spacious living room. A copy of the Banner—with my article about their son and the new revelations on the front page—was on the coffee table beside us. “Thank you. I’m sure that meant something to him.”
“I wasn’t doing him any favors,” I said. “I was doing my job.�
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“Well, I’m just glad that he wasn’t completely alone at the end.”
The dog had come inside and fallen asleep on my foot. It was a collie mix of some sort, not too old and very friendly. I reached down and scratched it behind the ear. The dog’s tail thumped on the floor. I remembered how David Galvin had once said he took the name Felix the Cat because he admired cats more than dogs. I looked around to see if there was a cat in the house too. But then I remembered that had all been a long time ago. If there had been a real-life Felix the Cat, the animal was probably long dead by now. And this dog wasn’t even born when Galvin went to jail.
“You didn’t visit him much in prison?” I asked his parents.
“No,” Norman Galvin said. “Neither of us had seen or talked to David in more than ten years.”
“Why not?”
“It was just too painful.”
He looked over at his wife, who seemed to be getting very uncomfortable by the whole conversation.
“Barbara and I could have gone at the end, I suppose, when we knew he was sick and dying,” he said. “But we didn’t. We didn’t think it was the thing to do. It would have been . . . well, hypocritical.”
Mrs. Galvin spoke now for the first time.
“Look around this house, Mr. Dougherty. You won’t see any evidence that David was ever a part of this family. After . . . after what happened eleven years ago—when we found out what he did—we decided that David had to be cut out of our family like a cancer. Otherwise it would kill us all. We had to do that to survive—me, my husband, our two other children.
“You see, I created that monster that once was my son. I brought him into this world. He grew in my body and I nursed him and I watched him grow up and once—a long, long time ago—I loved him. Do you have any idea what that feels like now? Well, that’s what I had to get over.”
I nodded. I understood why she was so upset. She had spent more than a decade trying to forget David Galvin was her son. Now this was all happening to them all over again. Like a horrible nightmare they could never wake up from.