I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps

him could recall—has he kept a girlfriend longer than the time it takes her to figure out how perverted and abnormal he is. And even then, the only girlfriend on record he’s had was later found murdered—stabbed and strangled, her body posed—in her apartment.

      But what is an ex-con supposed to do with his life after prison? Where can a convicted felon—a man who has admitted strangling and stabbing a woman to death, and strangling and stabbing another who survived to identify him—go for a job? He is lucky that after he came clean with his boss about his past, the guy hired him anyway.

      None of that matters at the moment, though. Right now, he sits and he stares. Thinking about her. Waiting for her to leave.

      Yes. Waiting for her to walk out the door so he can follow.

      Tonight, he’s decided, it feels right.

      Tonight, most definitely, it’s her turn.

      2

      I

      After that stretch in a New Jersey prison—nine years short of his sentence, mind you—he moved into a motel down the street from his childhood home for a few months, and then, in August 1999, he knocked on Mom and Dad’s door in Berlin, Connecticut, some ten miles south of the bar he hangs out at in Hartford.

      He had grown up in Berlin. The suburbs. The sticks. It was strange and humiliating, he claims, being back in the same house where it all began forty-something years ago, living once again with them. How pathetic, he thought one night, tossing and turning, contemplating suicide. How disappointing.

      No wife. No kids. Mooching off his elderly parents.

      But what else can he do?

      There is a bedroom available upstairs, but he opts for—some later say insists on—the room in the basement. “He wants to live in the basement,” says the prosecutor who soon goes after him. “He wants to live…in that little workshop—that little sexual fantasy den.”

      It seems weird and, all at the same time, wonderful—that is, his choice to live in an unfinished, musty basement and sleep on an old ragged couch (simply because for ten years he got used to sleeping on an iron mattress in prison). Stranger still, considering there are four bars within a mile radius of his parents’ home, is that he frequents this particular bar in Hartford. Does he need a second DUI (to go with the one he got last year after hitting a parked car) on his rap sheet? What about his job? It depends on keeping an active driver’s license.

      And yet, according to some, for him, the pros of trolling downtown Hartford far outweigh the cons. It’s something he must do. He cannot help himself. He has a few regular prostitutes he meets at the bar. He likes to treat himself once in a while. He likes to get rough with them, too, several later report. Put his hands around their necks and squeeze. Call them filthy names.

      Bitch. Whore.

      Maybe even make idle threats to their lives.

      Some wonder if this is why he drives into Hartford on such a regular basis—to maintain that control over females? To make sure that no one in his hometown sees him. Or to simply frequent the seedier bars, trolling…searching for that perfect victim. He had once said the perfect woman, in his eyes, was a blonde, good-looking, big-breasted, laid out and posed, topless, dead, there for him to do as he wished. So this must be why he travels into Hartford. But then, it can’t be. Because within earshot of his home in Berlin are three strip joints and a few underground clubs with an “anything goes” policy if you can swing the cover charge. In fact, if you know where the clubs are, you can walk in and set the rules, tell the ladies what you want, and they’ll oblige.

      Regardless, it’s Hartford he chooses: night after night after night.

      And so Hartford it is.

      II

      He has no family or friends in Hartford. No work contacts. But here he is, bellied up to the bar at Kenney’s, on Capitol Avenue, mixing it up with the regulars, watching his favorite baseball team on the big screen, playing pool, eating his favorite meal (tuna salad with extra Russian dressing), and cracking jokes—not to mention talking to the prostitutes as if they are below him.

      Imagine that: a convicted, admitted killer who looks down on hookers.

      In the bar, he feels superior. Suddenly he is the more respected member of society. He’s cocky that way; there isn’t a law enforcement officer or former peer who later says different. Still, in a certain way, he’s an enigma. Because for every person that says he’s strange, weird, or even scary and dangerous, there’s someone out there who says he’s smart. Bright. Articulate. Borderline brilliant.

      The Hartford prosecutor who will soon make him a priority, however, views him differently: “The embodiment of pure evil,” Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) David Zagaja says. “A persistent dangerous felony offender,” Zagaja’s boss, State’s Attorney (SA) James Thomas, adds.

      Others put it more simply. More direct: “Scariest person I’ve ever met.”

      “The Devil incarnate.”

      “Even his cell mates thought he was weird,” a prison source says. “And these are guys who’ve murdered and maimed people.”

      Nonetheless, to those around him inside Kenney’s on this night—especially her, the one he has his eye on—he comes across as the friendly salesman who looks like a cross between a high-school math teacher and a professional golfer. His kinky, dirty blond hair is cut Wall Street short, his eyes comforting and sad. He likes to wear ties. Nice sweaters. Mildly expensive shoes and slacks. In a way, he seems to fall in somewhere between the peculiar and the unconventionally charming. He appears gentle, laid-back.

      Quiet. Unassuming.

      Dare we say it…harmless.

      III

      The fact of the matter is, no one really knows him, or the compulsions bouncing off the dark walls of his soul. He harbors secrets. Sick thoughts, he himself later admits, that have penetrated, pervaded, and perverted his mind in waves, like motion picture slides, since the second and third grade. One secret he admitted while in prison was an innate—teetering on an uncontrollable jealous—fascination with sexually sadistic serial killers. He likes to cut out articles about them—Gacy and Dahmer and the “Green River”—from newspapers and magazines and store them in files in his basement bedroom. One of the most infamous serial killers of all time, however, is unquestionably his favorite. For the sake of argument, let’s call this killer his mentor.

      Born in 1946, inside a home for unwed mothers in Vermont, Theodore Robert Cowell soon took his stepfather’s name, Bundy, and in 1968, while a student at the University of Washington, he was said to have been devastated after his first real girlfriend, a woman he fell deeply for, ended the relationship unexpectedly, shortly before graduation. This was said to have set Bundy on a path toward evil.

      “He continually talks about Bundy,” David Zagaja says of the man who adores the famous serial killer. “He continually talks about Bundy’s prior experiences: what went right and what went wrong.” He criticizes Bundy. Critiques him. “That’s where you have the evolution of a killer—that’s where you have his true and sincere reflections of what he did in the past and how he will improve his conduct in the present.”

      IV

      Without a doubt, as he sits on that bar stool, staring at her, surely undressing her with his eyes, sipping from his favorite beer (Moosehead, which the bar, for his convenience alone, keeps a case on hand per his request), there is a violent monkey on his back that no one—especially this woman and the patrons passing by him night after night, or the bartender serving him those skunky beers—can see or feel: a sexually cruel past that includes one homicide, an aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder, and, well, another that is indisputably, undeniably, in the works.

      3

      I

      It is the fall of 2001, the time of year when that