Reflections – Portrait of a Serial Killer (Part Two)

Part Two.

The second one was just as easy. She was a forty-eight years old housewife and mother of three youngsters, only one of whom was with the guy she was married to at the time. Her name was Belinda Something-or-other. I can’t remember her surname now. My knife took her life as painlessly as it had taken Jenny Slade’s.

My reaction to Belinda’s killing was almost exactly the same as it was to Jenny’s: the almost-immediate incredible high followed by those awful tics and tremors and shakes when I got home. Some emotionless, callous killer I was turning out to be! Clearly my subconscious was trying to assert itself and make me feel some level of guilt for my actions, but I didn’t take any notice. I wanted no part of thinking negatively about my murderous impulses. I was enjoying myself too much for that.

The local press picked-up on the fact that both murders were ‘probably’ caused by the same weapon, which didn’t take much working out once the post mortem results were known. My ‘weapon of choice’ was a Sabatier six-inch long chef’s knife I had liberated from the kitchen of a hotel I worked at briefly a couple of years previously. There was uproar when it went missing. Who knew chefs were so bloody attached to the tools of their trade? I mean, come on, bursting into tears because you’d lost a sodding knife? Pathetic.

In hindsight I must have already formed some kind of subconscious plan for the knife, otherwise why steal it? I wasn’t a thief by nature and I sure as hell had no intentions of taking-up a career in catering! No, I was attracted to the knife for one reason and one reason only: its lethality, although I was not as clear-minded about it at the time I took illicit possession of the thing. It was only after I’d killed Lara and found myself pondering what it took to be a killer did I give serious consideration to the beautifully crafted weapon concealed in the false bottom of my old-fashioned dark wood wardrobe as a tool of destruction of life.

My third murder finally got me labelled as a serial killer. She was Georgina Templeton, a former model-turned-local-TV-presenter. At thirty-two, she was still stunningly beautiful and had a body to match. Her death caused outrage in the community, as though her beauty conferred on her special attention. It made me feel quite sick to think that people – the general public - were so bloody shallow. My other two kills had had their attractions, too, I’m sure their families would have said. Just because they were not as obvious as Georgina’s didn’t make their murders any less outrageous.

It was those thoughts that marked me out as different to all the other serial killers I had ever heard about. I don’t recall any of them getting pissed at the media for giving more column inches to a former beauty-queen model than to a mum of three who had died at the hands of the same killer. Oh no, none of those cold-blooded bastards would have felt the sense of personal outrage and injustice that gripped me for my kills.

My twentieth birthday was still several months away yet I had already notched-up four murders. Not bad going for an ostensibly ‘ordinary’ teenager just starting out in life. The press do like to give names to serial killers. They tagged me as the ‘Steel Blade Killer’, which was about as boring and unoriginal as you could get! Couldn’t someone, somewhere, have come up with something just a little more imaginative? Christ. I thought journo’s were intelligent.

It was more than two years since I’d killed Jenny Slade. The police were none-the-wiser two years down the line than they had been they day her body was found. I had not so much as been questioned about her, even though she and I were seen together that evening. As for my other kills? Same story.

Unlike many other serial killers I had no wish to be caught. If you believed all the bullshit psychiatrists and psychologists and their like spouted, all serial killers had sexual motives, had mother issues and secretly wanted to be stopped if not caught. That was why, apparently, so many of them involved themselves in the investigation of their crimes. Some even contacted the police directly to taunt them (think Jack the Ripper as the most famous taunter). Not me.

As I said at the outset, I had a very healthy and very active sex life, thank you very much. From the age of thirteen I had never had to work very hard to get into the panties of any girl I fancied. I’m not bragging but they were virtually throwing themselves at me pretty much as soon as I hit puberty, so there was no sexual angle to my kills whatsoever.

As for mother issues? My mum is the single most important person in my life. She’s my rock, my confidante and, yes, even as I look forward to entering my twenties, she is my best mate. I cannot imagine life without her, which probably sounds a bit stupid when you consider that if I ever get caught and convicted I’ll more than likely spend the rest of my days behind bars. But that’s not a possibility I can see happening. I just have this feeling that I won’t get caught, simple as that.

You see, so many criminals are utterly stupid. They do stupid things: they open their big mouths when they should keep them shut, they behave differently and they do things that they would not normally do. In short, they draw attention to themselves. I, on the other hand, have behaved exactly as I always have. I do the same things I always do, go to the same places, see the same mates and generally live my life like any other guy of my age. I am, in that respect, unexceptional. It is, actually, what makes me so damn exceptionally exceptional!

For no particular reason at all, I didn’t kill again for more than twelve months. It’s not as if I wasn’t tempted, because I saw several good potential candidates to fall victim to the kiss of my blade. I just couldn’t be bothered, truth be told. For all of that period I was a model citizen going about my daily life just the same as everybody else was. It was almost fun – but never enjoyable.

It cannot be denied that I have an outsize ego. Heaven knows I could not have achieved all that I have achieved without so much as a smidge of suspicion being directed my way and it not having an effect on me. I am, though, extremely careful. I keep my smugness concealed behind my charming and friendly persona. I have a well-developed supercilious air that only surfaces when I am forced into dealing with genuine dullards and those mentally and emotionally unable to differentiate between my pleasant self and the nasty bastard laying just beneath the surface of my bonhomie.

Kill number five came exactly two weeks after I celebrated my twenty-second birthday. All I remember about her was that she was older than all the others, fat and ugly and had a really bad personal hygiene problem, which made me angry. There is no excuse whatsoever, in my book, for not washing and keeping oneself clean. Ugh!

She died less than an hour after I met her. I didn’t even know her name until I read it in the newspaper the following day. I felt exactly nothing for her or about her. All she was to me was another notch in my murder campaign. She was ‘Number Five’.

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