Berserk: The Shocking Life and Death of Edwin Valero. Don Stradley

Ugly stories seeped out of Venezuela. Valero was unhinged and out of control. He'd spent nine days in psychiatric care. His wife had been hospitalized with mysterious injuries. Yet his manager was still trying to set up a fight for him in Mexico. Valero hadn't yet fought a major opponent, but pundits had dubbed him the sport's next moneymaker. He was the fantasy of all boxing fans, a reformed street fighter with a sledgehammer punch who didn't even need proper leverage to knock opponents cold.

      “He loved to be in the ring,” said Rudy Hernandez, a trainer who knew Valero in earlier days. “I told him, ‘The difference between you and a lot of other fighters here is that you love being in the ring. That's why you're going to be a superstar. Keep working as hard as you do, and you'll be the next superstar of boxing.’”

      He'd come at opponents like an evil spirit. He was a bizarre vision of a fighter: he'd charge in with his hands low, his eyes ablaze with cold fire. Sometimes he'd yell or hiss when he threw punches. To be in the ring with him must have been nightmarish. “There is something inside me that I have to unleash on someone,” Valero once said. “Perhaps it's anger, hatred I feel at having been denied a childhood.”

      Gales of paranoia whipped through his mind now. Increasingly distrustful and depressed, Valero had spent the weeks after his latest victory arguing with family members and embarrassing himself in public. He believed criminals from Venezuela's underworld were following him. He confessed to a doctor that he was a drug addict. He told his manager that events in his childhood haunted him.

      He was in a morbid tailspin. A psychologist said Valero's problems stemmed from an old head injury and extended drug use. The word “psychotropic” appeared repeatedly in medical reports.

      Just two months earlier he'd scored an impressive tenth-round stoppage of Antonio DeMarco, a solid fighter who some had predicted would stand up to Valero. In the early rounds, DeMarco boxed well. Yet Valero grew stronger with each passing round, roaring forward like the living bulldozer in Theodore Sturgeon's old science fiction tale, Killdozer. DeMarco's corner, realizing their man was done, stopped the fight after the ninth. It was the greatest victory of Valero's career, but after this bout his strange behavior reached a scary crescendo.

The fighter's wife, Jennifer, had dealt with his behavior for years. For reasons known only to other women who endure abusive husbands, she stayed with him. Perhaps it was for the sake of their two children, eight-year-old Edwin Jr., and five-year-old Jennifer Roselyn. Valero loved his children. He had been abandoned by his own father and vowed to give his son and daughter the love he hadn't been given. But bizarre things happened around the Valero home. He once took Jennifer to the hospital with a bullet wound in her left leg. He said gangsters had driven by their home in Caracas and shot her. Meanwhile, he had his chest tattooed with the face of Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez and played around with unregistered guns.

      As the clock reached 1:35 a.m., Edwin and Jennifer made their way to room 624. Valero had asked the staff to check under the bed to make sure no one was hiding there. He believed someone had been following him and Jennifer all night. Once he was satisfied the room was empty, he and Jennifer went inside. There's no telling what went on during the next few hours, or where his paranoia took him, but in that room something terrible happened. At 5:30 a.m. Valero appeared in the lobby. As calmly as one might order something from room service, he told the staff that he had just killed his wife.

      • • •

      He was a storyteller.

      He described his early days as if he'd been born in the Seventh Circle of Hell. People absorbed the stories and spewed them out in different ways. Some said he'd been a homeless child, starving in the street. Others said he was an industrious little kid who went door to door selling bags of garlic to housewives. You get the sense that he had some unimaginably hard times but manufactured a frightening autobiography to amuse people. He was selling uplift and desperation.

We know his father left the family. Edwin mentioned it in practically every interview. The father, Antonio Domingo, eventually got sick of being the villain in his son's story.

      “Ask my other children if I have been a bad father,” he said. “I left the house because of problems with his mother, but I never abandoned them, I was always aware and I helped them financially. Edwin told me one day: ‘Dad, I say all that because it gives me more fame, so they see me as the child who suffered a lot.’”

      Domingo asked Valero to stop telling those stories. Valero never stopped. Valero controlled the narrative. He was hawking poor pitiful me.

      Yet, even if he enjoyed portraying himself as the forsaken child who fought his way out of the rubble of Venezuela, other family members say Valero's childhood was indeed traumatizing for him. He cried often, even as an adult. He was stuck on the idea that he'd been deprived of a regular upbringing. “Edwin had a void that he never explained,” said his younger brother Luis. “He never said what he felt.”

      Listen to his family and friends. You might find yourself believing he never touched drugs until the months before he killed Jennifer. Listen to them. You might even believe he didn't kill her. You might end up believing the stories about kidnappers and thugs and government conspiracies.

      The trainers and sparring partners who knew Valero won't buy that he had major mental malfunctions. A psychologist who diagnosed Valero in Venezuela dropped a word: schizophrenia. Valero's old gym acquaintances can't accept such things. He'd been too focused. He could hit a heavy bag so hard that the foundation of the city seemed to quake. How could such a good fighter be schizophrenic? Old-time head doctors had a term for it: funneling. A person like Valero could focus on something with a sniper's precision even as his mind frayed at the edges. It's that ability to focus that kept the bad thoughts at bay. Of course, this kind of focus only works for a while. The mind falls in on itself.

Jennifer was no match for him. Valero once told a reporter he wished he could keep his wife and children in a crystal box so no harm could come to them. When she was found dead, the blood from her slit throat had clotted on the hotel carpet. It looked like a small pig had been slaughtered. Still, her body was placed on the floor very much like a little doll in a box.

      Some reports said he had taken her to the hotel against her will. Others said they were both on the way to a rehab center in Cuba. She was a drug user. She needed help too. The story has two sides. And with each side, there are those who deny and debate and disbelieve.

      You could tell it as a straight psycho tale. You could simply focus on her injuries. The bite marks. The gunshot wound. The perforated lung. The time she overdosed and nearly fell off the roof of their apartment. The sad look on her face as she sat ringside. He's winning championships. She's fearing for her life.

      You could tell it that way. You could get away with it. There's a thirst for madness. You could draw from a big pool of nasty details and rumors.

      He had secrets. We learned enough of them to think we knew him. We'll never know him.

      The Venezuelan media treated the Valero case as a tragedy. The American coverage made it a horror story. It's possible that it was both. You take what you need and project it to your audience. Americans like to judge; Venezuelans wanted a hero.

      He's dead now. Mental illness and drug addiction took him down. He was found in a jail cell, a picture of his family stuffed into his mouth.

      He's dead now.

      He doesn't care how the story is told.

      • • •

Edwin Antonio Valero Vivas was born in Bolero Alto, a tiny village in Merida, Venezuela, on December 3, 1981. Wedged between three national parks, Bolero Alto, is part of a parish named after Gabriel Picón González, a war hero who helped win the Battle of Los Horcones in 1813. It was a place where superstition still lived, where the elders might tell stories of babies being snatched by river witches. Less than 100 miles away is Lake Maracaibo, where on most nights of the year you can see terrifying lightning storms at the mouth of the Catatumbo River. The indigenous storytellers