I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps

the leaves will turn. The trees will become skeletal. The air will have a bite to it. And the snows of November and December will bring in the icy freeze of winter and send people hibernating inside their homes.

      Tonight, though, it is a relatively warm late-summer evening. As he sits inside Kenney’s and continues watching her, he is no doubt posing her in his mind: unconscious and naked from the waist up. You see, that’s his gig. His fetish. Strangle them until the white light approaches. Tear off their tops and bras. Expose their large breasts. Pose them. Then, of course, pleasure the sexual demons by doing whatever it is he does.

      If they awake, well, that’s their loss.

      Out come the knives.

      II

      As she walks out the front door, he takes one final sip of his beer, grabs his car keys from the top of the bar, and follows, nodding to the bartender.

      “See you tomorrow.”

      “Take it easy,” the bartender says.

      The one he’s been watching pushes the door open, steps onto Capitol Avenue, and hooks a sharp right, clutching her pocketbook closely to her side, while walking a few steps north. Her nephew and a guy they call “John the Security Guard” are outside the bar by the entrance.

      She sees them. Stops. Chats.

      Meanwhile, he walks out of the bar and turns left toward his car. It is late—and very dark. Although Hartford is at once a bustling city during the workweek’s daytime hours, being the birthplace of insurance, the creatures come out at night: dope dealers and addicts, urban crack-cocaine consumers and the suburban white middle-class junkies, carjackers and gangbangers. It is a virtual den of thieves and predators.

      Tonight, of course, he is among them—but also one of them.

      Those words he wrote years before, those words of confusion and regret for getting caught, they mean nothing to him right now. Instead, the need to quench that thirst supersedes any rational thinking on his part.

      Satisfy Mr. Hyde.

      It is the only way.

      Satisfy Mr. Hyde.

      I’ve ruined my life…, he wrote, [I need to] get help to change my thinking towards women.

      III

      In one of his letters from prison, he explains what is, essentially, a natural, even spiritual, connection he has with Bundy. The two of them share many attributes, he feels. He can state “with confidence,” he wrote, what Bundy was “feeling”—it is a “sexual thrill”—when he held the life of his victims in his hands and, staring coldly into their eyes (something he likes to do, too), took that life at the precise moment of his choosing. It is the last breath, that sudden rush—or, should we say, hush—of air from the lungs when the soul leaves the body.

      It is the defining moment for the killer. Total control. It’s what most of them crave.

      Our guy, the one following the woman from the bar, gets off on it. He’s stimulated by it. “He told me,” one of his cell mates later says, “that the moment before the woman dies, that is the moment he lives for—when he has the authority to allow her to live or die.”

      Certainly there is a sexual thrill to it also.

      “The erection he gets,” says that same inmate, “is so profound that he orgasms from it.”

      Whatever you want to call it, though, don’t call it a power trip. Because it isn’t. It’s a way to sustain a craving, he admits in those same letters, that can never be completely satisfied. He relates to those feelings Bundy experienced, because when he kills women, it is that same burn that Bundy felt that tears through his body, too: the racing heart, the adrenaline rush, the sweaty palms, and, yes, the growing desire—always too much to take—to feed into the sexual fantasies that come along with it all. There they are: those thoughts of violent sex driving every move.

      Every decision.

      Every thought.

      He can walk away from Kenney’s at this moment and find a hooker. He can offer her money. The same way he has in the past. He has money. He can give her a Ben Franklin and she’ll no doubt do whatever the heck he tells her.

      But that has nothing to do with rewarding the demons. Feeding the beast.

      It has to be this way. It has to be her. The one he saw in the bar. The one he knows. Follows.

      The one he chose.

      A substitute won’t do.

      IV

      While in prison, he compulsively studied Bundy’s modus operandi (MO), Teddy Boy’s signature way of killing. In a sense, although he would never admit it, he looks up to the famous serial killer, learns from him, especially admiring his choice of prey: college students. For him, perhaps the most vitally important part of it all was (unlike Bundy) choosing the vulnerable. The forgotten. Those women in society he believes won’t be missed. (Prostitutes, of course, are a favorite among some of those serial killers he’s read about.)

      Not only that, but Hartford has a serial killer lurking, skulking its streets, killing hookers. (It’s not him, by the way. Definitely not him. Don’t jump to that conclusion this early in our story. He’s much, much smarter than the other guy.) Almost two dozen so far. They call him the “Asylum Hill Killer.” He beats his women into an unrecognizable pulp of blood and tissue, masturbates on them, then leaves their bodies out in the open.

      Naked. Bruised and dead.

      Bundy would never have done that.

      Our guy would never do that.

      Still, he scolds himself: Bundy’s way…, he wrote, is a textbook for what I should have done…. If he had just followed Bundy’s plan in the past, he says, it would have helped him to “avoid arrest.” Bundy, he wrote, planned his crimes. It would be a Friday night. Bundy would leave work and drive one hundred miles to another town, where he would just settle in at a bar until he met a girl. He views Bundy’s life of killing as a “hobby.” A way to pass the time and, all at once, satisfy what he himself, since childhood, has been trying to complete: the supreme craving. It is akin to the same itch an addict feels when he wakes in the morning and begins thinking about that first bag of dope. He knows feeding his addiction with one bag won’t cure it—but it will certainly sustain him until the next time.

      Our guy is no different.

      As he wrote those letters sitting in his prison cell during the mid-1990s, he got down on himself for the way he had gone about it in the 1980s—behavior, in fact, that had put him in prison to begin with. He realizes now that he has never allowed himself to “actually sit down and plan something” in the same methodical way Bundy had.

      And that, well, that is the one mistake—a mistake he vows never to make again—that he believes put him away the first time.

      But he’s out of prison now. Out and about and prowling the streets of Hartford. “I’m surprised he couldn’t plan the perfect murder,” someone close to him says. “He is so smart and intelligent. It’s shocking that he couldn’t do it.”

      Comparing himself to Bundy, he is positively angered by the notion that he has not learned from Bundy’s few faults. He hates the fact that some damn prosecutor, the state’s attorney, David Zagaja, a name no one can pronounce (Za-guy-a)—it’s all his fault—will call him a Bundy “wannabe.” In truth, he did get away with that first killing, strangling, and stabbing her to death. It took cops four years to catch him. He left no fingerprints. No hairs. No fibers.

      Nothing.

      He was even questioned by the police shortly after the crime. He took a polygraph, one source says, and passed.

      So, in the sense of a hunt, the cops never actually caught him.

      Yet, that second woman, she lived to tell her story. He’d made one mistake—allowing her to live.

      Damn