Evil Guardian

by Scott Bonn

  Lundquist’s immediate family is close, and they see one another quite frequently. They celebrate holidays, anniversaries and birthdays together, and Charles showers his two young nieces with gifts every time he sees them.

  Lundquist has never been married or engaged. He occasionally goes out on dates, often blind dates with women introduced to him by friends, family or co-workers. Although he is very attracted to women, he does not enjoy the process of dating. He believes that the intimate communication required in dating is tedious and awkward. In fact, it makes him very uncomfortable. As a result, none of his relationships with women seem to last very long.

  Charles Lundquist has a doctor of philosophy degree in theology from Boston University School of Theology and a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Cornell University.

  He is the chaplain at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, located approximately forty-five miles northwest of New York City. He entered his position there a little more than five years ago with a sense of divine purpose and a spiritual connection to the female inmates. He was inspired to help them. Moreover, he believed that God had given him a mission to help the women at Bedford Hills.

  Many, if not all, of the inmates that Lundquist sees are deeply troubled and emotionally disturbed. The childhood backgrounds of these women generally involve poverty, lack of education, drug and/or alcohol abuse. The majority also have a long history of experiencing physical violence, and emotional and/or sexual abuse. Typically, their history of violence and abuse began at home when they were children. Those abusive patterns continued into their adult relationships. Many of them are battered women who have suffered through a never-ending cycle of abusive relationships.

  When he looks into the eyes of the prison inmates, Lindquist can see that most of them are broken and lost. Typically, they are estranged from their families. The vast majority of them have one or more children from defunct relationships that are now living with relatives or in foster care while they serve out their prison sentences.

  These troubled women automatically assume that anyone new they encounter will abuse or hurt them in some way, so they immediately and instinctively erect a defiant and defensive invisible shield to protect themselves. Their harsh and difficult lives have made them bitter, skeptical and cynical in demeanor. They lack faith and trust no one.

  Making a connection with such troubled women has been a very difficult task for Lundquist. Nevertheless, in the time that he has been the prison chaplain, he has done his best to ease the emotional and spiritual suffering of the inmates by serving as a witness to their pain, anger and frustration. He tries to help them to excise their demons by providing a compassionate and nonjudgmental ear to listen to their expressions of rage, resentment and despair.

  After several years at Bedford Hills, however, his difficult work there began to take a toll on Lundquist. He started to feel burned out, jaded and numb. Being only human and seeing very little positive return for his efforts, he began to wonder whether his work with the women was in vain. He started to think that most of them were doomed to a life of chronic institutionalization and despair, regardless of his efforts to save their mortal souls.

  Many evenings, he would drive home from the prison to his small studio apartment on Mercer Street in the East Village filled with a sense of emptiness and defeat. He wondered how long he would be able to continue his unsatisfying work without suffering some sort of breakdown himself. He felt that surely something had to change.

  Then, suddenly, a little more than one year ago, something did change for him. Just when he was coming to believe that all was lost, Lundquist experienced a ray of hope and sunshine at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. It came in the form of an intelligent, young, first-time prisoner named Stacey Sommers. A recovering heroin addict convicted of multiple felonies, Sommers is serving a five-year prison sentence.

  In the thirteen months since her arrival, Lundquist has become her spiritual adviser. Stacey is making great progress under his guidance. When Lindquist gazes into the bright green eyes of Stacey Sommers, he now sees hope. He also believes that she has a sincere desire to change her life for the better.

  Lundquist believes that if he can somehow save Stacey from a life of misery and chronic institutionalization, then his work at Bedford Hills is not in vain. He has made a pact with God to save Stacey’s soul, one day at a time. His work with Stacey has given him a renewed purpose in life.

  Chapter Four

  The guardian looks down at Melissa Stein’s lifeless body and he smiles. All that remains for him to do now is dispose of Melissa’s body, clothes and backpack. Just before abducting her on Riverside Drive, he made a decision to drop her corpse into the Hudson River that borders Manhattan on the west side of the city.

  This is not the first time the guardian has used the river to dispose of a dead body. He began doing this with his very first victim, and it has become a pattern for him. Prior to Melissa, the guardian abducted and killed two teenage girls on the upper east side of Manhattan and disposed of their bodies in the East River on the opposite side of Manhattan from the Hudson River.

  The guardian believes that a watery grave cleanses the body of all sins—almost like baptism—and symbolically prepares the girl for a glorious afterlife in heaven. From a more practical standpoint, he also believes that the river will wash away all traces of evidence, including DNA, from intimate contact with his victim.

  Prior to dumping a young victim into the river, he weighs her body down by tying a heavy iron cross around her neck. He ties the Christian cross, that weighs exactly five pounds, around her neck in order to help pull the corpse to the bottom of the river. The cross also serves a more psychological and symbolic purpose. It is the personal trademark of the guardian. FBI criminal profilers refer to such a trademark as the “signature” of a serial killer.

  Not all serial killers have a signature, as the guardian does. A signature is not required in order to commit serial murder. Rather, it serves the unique emotional or psychological needs of a serial killer like the guardian. The signature comes from within the psyche of the killer, and it reflects a deep fantasy need that he has about his victims. Fantasies develop slowly, increase over time and may begin with the torture of animals during childhood, as it did for the infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, for example.

  The essential core of the signature, when present, is that it is always the same because it emerges out of an offender’s fantasies that evolved long before killing his first victim. The signature may involve mutilation or dismemberment of the victim’s body. The signature of Jack the Ripper, for example, was the extensive hacking and mutilation of his victims’ bodies that characterized all of his murders.

  In the case of the guardian, he places a Christian cross around the neck of each girl to demonstrate to the world that his actions reflect the will of God. His need to send this message is rooted in his deeply held religious beliefs and extensive theological training that he received in graduate school. The use of the Christian cross also provides the guardian with a sense of symbolic closure following each murder. Most importantly, it fulfills his fantasy idea that he is a special messenger or archangel of God.

  It is important to understand that the guardian is not a fraud. On the contrary, he truly believes that God is speaking directly to him. Ironically, and incredibly, he thinks that God has given him a mission to protect teenage girls from the evils of the material world, and themselves, by killing them while they are still young and innocent. In his pathological mind, he steadfastly believes that his mission is altruistic and divinely inspired.

  Incredibly, the guardian suffers no guilt or remorse over his killings. Likewise, he sees no contradiction whatsoever in killing young girls whom he believes that God has sent him to protect. Although it may be very difficult to fathom, he truly believes that he is providing a great service to the girls he sends to the bottom of the river. He thinks that he is saving them from a
lifetime of interminable suffering on Earth. Similarly, he believes that the families of his victims should also be grateful to him for his homicidal behavior. Such thinking demonstrates that he is completely deaf and blind to the agony he brings to other people.

  The guardian is narcissistic and homicidal, but he is not mentally ill in either a clinical or a legal sense. Contrary to popular mythology, very few serial killers, including the guardian, suffer from a mental illness to such a debilitating extent that they are considered insane by the criminal justice system. To be classified as legally insane, an individual must not be able to comprehend that an action is against the law at the exact moment that the action is undertaken. In other words, a serial killer must be unaware that murder is legally wrong while committing the act in order to be deemed insane by the criminal justice system. This legal definition of insanity is so precise and narrow that it applies to very few serial killers.

  Most serial killers, including the likes of John Wayne Gacy (The Killer Clown) and Ted Bundy, are acutely aware of the illegality of murder when they are in the process of killing their victims. Their understanding of right and wrong, however, does nothing to impede their crimes because they have an overwhelming desire and compulsion to kill that causes them to ignore the criminal law with impunity. Therefore, once apprehended, serial killers are rarely determined to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, and their lawyers are rarely able to use the insanity defense on their behalf.

  Like most other serial killers, the guardian is outwardly rational and calculating, and he knows exactly what he is doing at all times. He is also well educated, articulate, and has a thorough understanding of the criminal law. However, his knowledge and understanding of the law cannot prevent him from committing murder. On the contrary, he is compelled to kill by powerful internal impulses that supersede any external rules or societal mores.

  In fact, the key to understanding the guardian’s criminal pathology lies in the fact that he has no regard whatsoever for the customs or laws of society. In the guardian’s mind, he is accountable only to God, and he believes that God sent him on his mission to kill. As far as the guardian is concerned, the laws of society simply do not apply to him.

  Clinically, the guardian is a psychopath, and psychopathy is not considered to be a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Instead, psychopathy is classified as an anti-social personality disorder that is exhibited by people who employ a combination of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and sometimes violence to control others, in order to satisfy their own selfish desires. Psychopaths are typically glib and charming, and they use these attributes to manipulate others into trusting and believing in them.

  Because of their strong interpersonal skills, most psychopaths, including the guardian, can present themselves quite favorably on a first impression, and many function successfully in society. However, a number of the attitudes and behaviors common to psychopaths are distinctly predatory in nature, and they tend to view others as either competitive predators or prey. When psychopaths view others as prey, their lack of feeling and bonding to others allows them to have unusual clarity in observing the behavior of their intended victims. They are simply not encumbered by the anxieties and emotions that normal people experience in interpersonal encounters or confrontations.

  The fact that psychopaths rarely stand out in a crowd can make them especially dangerous criminals and very difficult to apprehend. Indeed, many of the most infamous and prolific serial killers in all U.S. history, including John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader, Ed Kemper, Joel Rifkin, Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, have exhibited the key traits of psychopathy, and many of them have been diagnosed as psychopaths by forensic psychologists following their capture.

  A cool and unemotional demeanor combined with keen intellect and charming personality makes a psychopath like the guardian a very effective predator. A lack of interpersonal empathy and an inability to feel pity or remorse characterize psychopathic serial killers. They do not value human life and they do not care about the consequences of their crimes. They are callous, indifferent and extremely brutal in their interactions with victims.

  Due to his psychopathy, the guardian has no normal or genuine feelings at all for his victims, despite his powerful delusion that he is protecting them. Instead of having any compassion or sympathy for the girls he kills, he has only a powerful lust for their bodies and their blood. Indeed, the same terrible, internal cravings that compel him to kill innocent young girls also instill a voracious sexual appetite for them. His psychopathy is such that he cannot see the inherent contradiction in having uncontrollable lust for the young girls he believes that God has sent him to protect. On the contrary, he views his sexual desire for the girls as normal, understandable and acceptable.

  “I should enjoy my work. It is a gift from God. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of one’s labor,” the guardian tells himself.

  Because the guardian is unencumbered by normal human feelings and emotions, and diabolical and uncompromising internal forces he cannot fully comprehend control him, he will not allow anything or anyone to interfere with his mission. Moreover, now that he has successfully killed and raped three girls on separate occasions and basked in the rapture of those events, his hedonistic bloodlust is now an all-consuming obsession that has no cure.

  Chapter Five

  It is Monday, October 4th at 6:30 am. Stacey Sommers has just awoken to the sound of the general alarm in her tiny prison cell at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She brushes her teeth and washes her face in the small built-in sink. She sits and waits for the morning roll call to begin. As she waits, she thinks back about her life thus far.

  Stacey turned nineteen just a few weeks before she arrived at Bedford Hills. She was born and raised in central New York in the city of Ithaca, the home of Cornell University where, coincidentally, Charles Lundquist received his undergraduate degree. Like so many other incarcerated women, Stacey is from a broken home where she suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

  Her stepfather, Harold, began to force himself upon her sexually when she was only eleven years old—that is, shortly after he entered her life. He told her that her mother, Alice, would be very angry with her if she ever found out what they were doing, so he insisted that what they did together had to be their special secret. In actuality, Alice was a self-absorbed alcoholic who noticed very little that was happening around her.

  As is the case with many children who suffer such abuse, Stacey felt terribly ashamed and somehow responsible for her stepfather’s incestuous activity with her. Within a short time, her personality and behavior changed dramatically for the worse. Normally an outgoing and friendly girl, she became angry, sullen and combative.

  Previously a good student, she began to fall behind in school. She acted out in class and started to get into trouble. She got into fights with fellow students, skipped classes, and began shoplifting from local stores. By the age of thirteen, she was engaging in sex with older boys and escaping reality through alcohol and drugs. She was on a very dangerous path but seemed oblivious and even contemptuous of the consequences. She had developed a hatred toward the world and herself, and she had become very self-destructive.

  By the age of seventeen, Stacey could no longer tolerate her living conditions at home. A few months before her eighteenth birthday, she ran away to avoid the abuse of her stepfather and the emotional neglect of her narcissistic and alcoholic mother. One warm spring day, after skipping out of school, she hitched a ride with a truck driver into Manhattan.

  She had very little money, no friends in the city, and no place to stay. However, Stacey is a lovely, tall girl with blonde hair, green eyes, and an appetite for risky behavior. Such attributes can create immediate but very dangerous opportunities for a young runaway in New York City. She seized upon those illicit opportunities and quickly found herself immersed in debauchery among the deviant and criminal elements in Manhattan.

  Before
long, she was addicted to heroin and turning tricks for a pimp named Little Anthony in midtown Manhattan. Stacey’s relationship with her pimp became violent and abusive, just as her relationship with her stepfather had been. Little Anthony would beat her when he believed that she was not bringing him enough money from prostituting her body.

  Stacey’s addiction to heroin made her a slave to Little Anthony. She was dependent upon him for the drugs she needed, as well as the protection he provided from other predators on the street. He also gave her a place to live and pretended to love her, which is the classic ploy of a pimp. Although Stacey knew in her heart that he was faking his feelings toward her, she was desperate for affection and extremely lonely, so she played along with his charade. It was easier that way, and it gave her some much-needed companionship.

  The disastrous events that sent Stacey to prison occurred approximately twelve months after she began working for Little Anthony. She had established a periodic and continuous relationship with a wealthy and prominent lawyer from Chicago named Bill Stevens. He was enamored of her youthful beauty, sexuality and recklessness.

  Stevens prearranged a date with Stacey approximately once every month when he was headed to New York for business. The two would meet at his favorite boutique hotel, the Soho Grand, which is located downtown on West Broadway. Their standard date had them meeting at the Grand Bar on the mezzanine level of the hotel at a prearranged time. They would have a couple of drinks together and then retire to his luxury suite.

  She would receive a substantial cash payment, approximately five hundred dollars plus a tip, and then perform the sexual acts that he desired. Stacey would normally leave him quite satisfied in his room in the middle of the night. She would not hear from him again until he was planning his next business trip to New York.