MONDAY, AUGUST 17
I read through what I wrote last night and think it’s pretty accurate. I knew it would take a long time to tell some of my background and such, so I guess I’ll just put it down where I find it appropriate.
I reached Palm Springs about ten o’clock last night and found a motel along highway 18 leading into the main drag of the city. I checked in and paid cash. I signed in as Herb Stevens and used his Oregon driver’s license and gave them a fake make, model, and license number of the car I was driving. Then I parked the car right by my unit, locked the door, stripped down to my underwear and crawled into bed. I was beat.
I figured no alarm would be raised about it till tomorrow at the earliest, but I may get lucky and get a forty-eight hour lead-time. Police usually don’t consider an adult missing till they been gone that long, which I think is a plumb retarded idea. If I was expecting somebody to be home at a certain time and they failed to come home within a few hours of that, I’d call them missing. Wouldn’t you?
(I sent Herb home a few weeks ago. He was a truck driver who picked me up north of San Francisco and when I found out he was both born-again and couldn’t wait to go to heaven, I helped him along a bit. I followed him into the men’s room of a truck stop we went to, and when I was sure we was alone I first locked the door to the bathroom, then I killed him by coming up behind him in the stall where he was pissing and slit his throat with a knife I took from his glove compartment. I left him propped on the toilet bowl and positioned him so the blood dripped down the front of his shirt into the bowl. The way it looked to somebody coming in the bathroom, Herb was just squatting on the john taking a dump. Herb looked a lot like me in many ways, but in the picture he has a mustache and beard, and I’m clean-shaven)
Woke up around nine-thirty. I took a nice, long shower, and took my time getting ready. I had my plan in motion and I acted on it. After checking out, I drove the car out of the lot and headed toward the east part of town, away from the more trendy tourist spots (I been to Palm Springs once last year–killed a revival preacher named Chuck Smith there who invited me to his nice big home near the tourist section). I drove the car to a run-down neighborhood, parked the car and left it there. I still had Brenda’s car keys and I took those. I’d ditch them later in town, throw ‘em in a public wastebasket or something.
Which I did. Don’t need ‘em any more, no reason to hold onto ‘em.
I had a little over three hundred dollars in my pocket, about three quarters of that Brenda’s money. It was already getting hot, and all I was wearing was the clothes on my back–a pair of faded blue jeans, and a blue T-shirt with a pelican on it, and a pair of white Nike tennis shoes and white gym socks. I used to have a backpack with clothes in it, but I lost that in a fire I started when I burned a house down helping the Christian occupants go home. I walked down to the corner where there was a bus stop and waited for a bus to come along. When one came I got on, found out I could hit the greyhound terminal from this run, paid the fare, and got on for the ride.
Once at the greyhound terminal I bought a one way ticket to Salt Lake City, Utah. It was the one leaving the quickest. Cost me ninety-five dollars and fifty cents. I paid in cash, then hurried to board cause they was boarding.
And wouldn’t you know it? They only had one major stopover on that particular bus and that stop was Las Vegas, Nevada.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21.
I’m writing this now in the home of James and Melissa Van Buren’s home in Salt Lake City. James and Melissa have gone up to meet Jesus, but their bodies are in the bedroom. Their eight children–three of them are their own, the other five are adopted from women they talked out of having abortions at abortion mill rescues–are at an all day Bible retreat. They aren’t due to be back till later tonight, and it’s only two-thirty now so I still got six hours or so. I had planned on waiting for them to get back and send the kids home as well, but not all of them are still keen on the Lord. The oldest kid is sixteen and rebelling, going through what I went through when I was his age. The Lord will work on him; it’ll just take some time. He’s been influencing his three brothers and sisters, so they’re sorta rebellin’ too. But the three other kids claim to know the Lord. Even the little two-year-old says he wants to be with Jesus. They told me this yesterday at supper when I asked them. I thought about sending the four youngest off, but they’re not at the age yet where they understand the wickedness of the world. Once they get to that age they’ll know whether or not they have the strength to resist sin. Then they can make their decision at that time.
It was a tough decision to make. Since their parents was already so adamant about leaving this “wicked earth” (as they put it), I knew I was gonna do them this favor. But I’m a firm believer in pro-family values, and children need to have a home with a momma and daddy in it. Wouldn’t do them no good if their momma and daddy went home to Jesus now and left them children behind, so I had to see if they wanted the same things their parents wanted and if they were eager to go too. And like I said, four of them was, four of them wasn’t, and because of the ages of the four that wanted to go to Jesus (two to nine years old), I figured it would be best to let them all wait. The Lord will provide new foster parents to these children, that I am sure.
I got me a bigger notebook to write all this down in. Before, I was writing in one of them pocket notebooks and had filled half of it already. But now I got this big legal sized notepad and I can write lots on it.
I heard about the Van Buren’s from a man I met in Vegas. We had a two-hour stopover and I was walking around the strip, just taking in the sights. I’d never been to Las Vegas and it was a sight to behold. Big cheesy hotels with lots of lights, even in the daytime, flashing and flashing. One of the hotels looked like a pyramid, and another looked like a castle like you see in the fairy tales, and yet another one was a tower that had a roller coaster way at the top! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And everywhere there was big expensive cars driving up and down the strip. It was all an experience, let me tell you. Anyway, I met this man passing out tracts in the parking lot of one of the big casino’s (he was passing out them Jack Chick tracts, you know, the ones with the funny cartoons on ‘em) and I introduced myself as Jack Webb and told him I was a Christian too, and would appreciate some brotherly company for an hour or so while I waited for my bus to go. So we sat for a spell in a coffee shop and talked.
When he learned that I was going to Utah, he told me about the Van Buren’s and that they were mighty good Christian people. He said they needed some support in the Lord, what with them living in a city populated by one of Satan’s cults (the Mormons). He gave me their address and said that they would be glad to take me in for a spell. I thanked him, then we talked some more. And...well, to make a long story short, he got down to business and explained why he was passing out them Chick tracts. He felt he had to work that much harder in such a city of sin and death as Las Vegas if he wanted to win souls over for the Lord.
I asked him if he hated being here, that if he had the chance to go up to Heaven to be with the Holy Father in His Heavenly Kingdom right now, would he go?
I think you know the answer to that question.
I saw by my watch that I had thirty minutes before my bus left. I asked if I could help him hand out tracts. He brightened up and said that would be great, but we would have to go to his van for some more. This is what I was hoping for. I followed him out to his van, which was at the far end of the parking lot. His van was old, with dirty curtains pulled over the windows in back. He opened the back and as he reached in to pull a box of tracts out, I checked to make sure nobody was watching, then I climbed in and pinned him to the floor of the truck on his stomach. He grunted in surprise, but I knocked the wind out of him, which made it easier for me to strangle him.
When he was unconscious I broke his neck just to make sure. It sounded loud, the way kindling will sound when you break it over your knee.
I rolled his body over, then tu
rned his pockets out to take whatever cash he had. His wallet had seventy-five dollars in it. I took it, then left the wallet laying on one of the rear seats of the van. Then I closed the doors of the van and walked away.
The rest of the bus ride to Utah was just shy of eighteen hours. We stopped a few other times, this time not as long as our stay in Vegas. I slept most of the trip up. Sending another one off home made me feel relaxed and serene.
The bus hit Salt Lake City Tuesday evening, and I stayed in another motel that night, registering again as Herb Stevens. The man at the counter didn’t even ask to see an ID (most Motel 6’s never do, but if they do I got Herb Stevens ID I can fall back on). Then I went to bed and slept straight through till morning.
After I checked out the following day, I set off to find the Van Buren’s. I had their address, and after calling a taxi I gave the driver the address and he took me. It was on the north side of town, near the mountains.
Melissa was the one that answered the door. She was a kinda plain-looking woman. When I told her who I was and who had recommended me, her eyes lit up and she let me in. The younger kids was all on the floor with schoolbooks open before them (she explained that she home schools her kids because she don’t trust the pagan school system to teach her children by the Bible). She called her husband at his job, and I spent the rest of the day helping her home school the kids till her husband came home.
We had a mighty good fellowship that evening. I told the Van Buren’s that I was traveling the country preaching the gospel and they said amen to that. James told me that his home was home to any good Bible-believing Christian that was also a soldier for Him, and I thanked him and told him I appreciate that, but that I didn’t want to put an unnecessary burden on them. I told them I was tired from traveling and preaching and could just use a few days rest. They gave me their blessing, and that was that.
I relaxed for two days. I also watched the news. I like to check to see if the authorities are after me or not. Despite the fact that I only follow God’s law, man has his own law, and as long as I’m on this earth I gotta watch out and make sure I don’t alert the authorities. When I sent momma and Frank home, they was after me the minute they found their bodies, but I haven’t heard anything about the investigation since then. For one, I haven’t gone back to that part of Alabama. For another, I’ve changed my appearance some, and change it every so often to avoid detection (sometimes I let my beard and mustache and hair grow real long, or sometimes I shave my head, or sometimes I eat a lot to put on some pounds, and other times I change my clothing style. It works every time). I also use different methods to send people home: sometimes I stab them, sometimes I strangle them, sometimes I shoot them, sometimes I make it look like suicides. Either way, I try not to make them suffer. And lastly, I haven’t spent the last five years doing nothing but sending Christian folk home. When a place looks right, I settle down in a particular town or city and get a place to live and a job. It don’t matter what kinda job, just anything to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head. Usually it’s fixing cars, but sometimes it’s doing other things too; being a janitor, or working in a warehouse, or sometimes pulling stints as a short-order cook. I’ll settle down for a spell, usually eight months is the longest, and then I get tired of being where I’m at and start feeling the itch to spread God’s love and then I hit the road again to do what the Lord called me to do.
I don’t right remember how many people I’ve sent home in the last five years. I stopped counting after fifteen, but I suppose it’s been over sixty or so. Maybe more like a hundred. I really don’t know. Either way, there haven’t really been big investigations, which I attribute to sending them home different ways (usually the police is looking for serial killers who kill folks one way over and over again, but I don’t do that ‘cause I ain’t no serial killer). But there was an investigation going on in Los Angeles regarding Brenda Thomason according to the news I watched on the Van Buren’s television. Her body had been found Monday evening, just like I thought. And there was a composite sketch of the man last seen with her.
That man was me.
And wouldn’t you know it, they were blaming the same suspect–me–on the death of a man in Las Vegas found in his van.
I knew it was time to grow the beard out some, and change the appearance with my hair. Maybe shave it off again. Shaving my head was the only way I could drastically change my appearance right now. Anyway, I figured it was best to do that right away and then skip town.
I laid low at the house the next few days, helping Melissa during the day, and talking Bible stuff and the like with the adults at night. One night a friend of the Van Buren’s came by and he was a brother in the Lord too. Was a member of Operation Rescue, the group formed by Randall Terry that rescues babies from abortion mills. The Van Buren’s were dedicated to the cause, but were on the non-violent side to the approach. “We ain’t like those Army of God folks that bomb abortion clinics,” James said. “The Lord doesn’t call us to commit violence.”
I thought about this. If the Lord doesn’t call on them to commit violence, why does He call others to it? This is a question that is most often asked with a sneer by atheists, as if saying that God don’t exist because He wouldn’t be so contradictory, what with him supposed to be all knowing and all powerful and loving. The answer is simple: He calls on some to commit violence for His cause because He knows they are capable of it and wouldn’t object, and He calls on others to work on other methods. With me, He calls on me to send those of His flock who want to come home, home, because He doesn’t want His followers to be subjected to the wickedness of this world for as long as they have to.
There have been plenty of Christians I haven’t killed. I would say I don’t kill most Christians. A lot of the Christians I meet, when I ask them what they think about the world they live in and such, they say that the world can be a bad place, and that while they know they’re going to heaven, are even looking forward to it, they think the world can be a beautiful place as well and want to live out their life here first. I appreciate that a lot. I think it takes a strong person to admit that while the world has wickedness and evil in it, there is also good and beauty in the world, and that as long as you are here it is up to you to find that good and make the best of it. The Christians I send home are really the weak ones, and I am doing them a favor and doing the Lord’s work when I send them home. After all, Christ himself said that the Lord will not call on us to do that which we are too weak to do; if living in the world was too much of a burden for them, then they were to be relieved of it.
Today, Friday, when I decided it was time to leave, the kids went off to their Bible retreat. They were to be dropped off at the house by nine tonight. Before James came home from his early shift at the factory, I went into the master bedroom where Melissa was in the master bathroom taking a shower. When she got out of the shower I surprised her and strangled her with one of the bath towels. She struggled some (for one, she didn’t see who I was cause I surprised her by covering her face with the towel), and I had to hit her in the solar plexus to gain control over her. But I finally strangled her and she twitched some, then shit all over the place (that’s about the only ugly thing about strangling people, they lose control of them bowels). I lowered her into the tub, then went into the bedroom where I knew James kept his gun collection. He had shown it off to me the night before, and he was especially proud of the silencer-equipped 9 mm Python with the twelve round magazine.
I took the Python and turned out the lights in the living room and waited for James to get home.
He entered through the garage door. I placed him in my sights and took him down with one shot, the bullet entering his throat at the Adam’s apple (in Alabama I grew up around guns and could empty six rounds from fifty yards into Dr. Pepper can and leave a hole in it the size of a dime). He fell back into the garage and bled like a stuck pig. And that was all it took. Now the Van Buren’s are home where they belong.
TUES
DAY, AUGUST 25.
They’re after me in Salt Lake City now.
They’re looking for the man that fits the description of the person that killed Brenda Thomason in California, and Bill Wolf in Las Vegas (that was his name, but I didn’t put it down before because I forgot) but they won’t find him here in Yuma, Colorado, which is where I am holed up in a Motel 6 off the Interstate. The man sitting in this room writing this down is not only in the beginning stages of growing a beard, he is completely bald-headed.
He also has his left ear pierced.
I’ve had both my ears pierced for two years now, but only wear earrings when the mood strikes to change my appearance. Only this time, I hadn’t worn them in six months and the holes had filled in. I had to pierce my left ear myself with a pin that I sterilized with a match and my own earring, which I bought at the bus depot jewelry counter. It hurt some, but I cleaned it up with rubbing alcohol I bought at a drugstore, and it should be fine soon.
After I left the Van Buren’s house I caught a cab to the Greyhound terminal and bought a bus ticket for as far as I could go as quickly as possible. There was a bus leaving in fifteen minutes bound for Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I bought it and was heading away from Salt Lake City thirty minutes later with a new set of clothes on me, and fresh ones in a nice overnight bag I found at the Van Burens. I also had some more cash, along with some toiletries I picked up at the bus depot.
When the Darkness Falls Page 16