Bringing a new life into the world is a weighty, awesome responsibility. Some people say you feel that responsibility to the marrow, but in a way, I feel it right down to the genes, at the level of the very building blocks of life itself. I consider the child’s health: will he be sickly or healthy? Will he be emotionally stable? How do I protect him from the worst in the world without sheltering him from all the goodness? How do I teach him, nurture him, bring him up as a productive, caring member of a family in particular and of society in general? The questions I asked myself were endless.
Because of the horrific nature of serial killers, I have protected my own children from information about them. They have been kept out of the loop, and the subject material that you have read in this book has never been discussed in any way with them. They do know I have been on television, and that I do talk about people who hurt others, but it was not until our oldest child was in seventh grade that he knew I had spoken to John Gacy. This came from a friend of his who asked him about a TV show he had seen in which I talked about Gacy and others. I explained to my son and his friends that I am a “talking doctor,” that I work with kids and adolescents. I keep my professional life as separate from them as is possible. And they rarely see me on television. TV in our house is not restricted per se, but my two sons are so busy with school, sports, and other activities that Friends or SpongeBob are afterthoughts.
Some of our friends think that I am too restrictive when I say I feel it is not necessary for kids to know everything about their parents’ lives. This may be an old-fashioned idea, but kids need to be kids in their developmental phases. I feel the boundaries we have laid down have given my kids a sense of safety. There are so many examples of how we have failed our children because we were afraid to put limits on them, or failed to tell them not to do something because we wanted them to like us or to be their pal. Kids do not learn by osmosis, they learn by our being role models and by our active teaching. It is not essential for my children to know everything, especially about the violence and evil with which I deal, because it can be so pervasive.
I’ve certainly had an unusual perspective on the worst that parents can go through. From the devastated families of victims to the shocked parents and families of the serial killers in society, what I’ve seen is never a pretty picture. The guilt, shame, and denial of Marion Gacy, the mother of John, was only the tip of the iceberg. Other parents too experience a range of emotions about their ill-fated children, all dreadful, all sorrowful, all ultimately deadening of the spirit. And it is not only the parents who experience such wrenching emotions. It deeply affects the brothers and sisters, and the mournful, angry wives and the serial killer’s children as well. You can see it by what’s not said by the victims’ children and wives. They usually won’t talk to me because they’re overwrought. And if I do eventually make contact, I’ll often find on my next attempt that the phone number is disconnected and the family has moved away. One of the great mysteries of researching serial killers is how the families of the victims deal with their pain over time.
Graham Greene once wrote that “there is a moment in childhood when a door opens and lets the future in.” As I’ve mentioned before, I believe there is something that happens in the earliest life of a baby that sets the stage for his future as a serial killer. At least there is something there that indicates the child will not be whole. It’s difficult for parents to recognize this moment, so involved are they in the day-to-day activities of raising a family and earning a living. So it’s no fault of their own that they often can’t see it.
If it’s true that a door opens in childhood to let destiny and free will lead the way, it’s also true that a door closes on many dreams for the future when a mother and father begin to realize they have spawned a serial killer.
Then the parents sometimes can be painfully unpleasant to deal with. In 1985, Bobby Joe Long’s defense team had asked me to attend his pretrial hearing. I stood outside the Dade City, Florida, courtroom, a nondescript building in a small town about half an hour outside of Tampa. It was a long day in a tiny, ugly courtroom, and I really needed the brief break the court had given us. As I breathed in the humid Florida air and relaxed for a moment, looking at the few tropical flowers placed outside, I felt someone approaching.
I looked up to find myself confronted by Joe and Louella Long, Bobby Joe’s parents. It was instantly clear that they wanted to lash out at someone, anyone who had anything to do with their son’s case. They were angry, boiling, and they needed to vent.
At the hearing, they had heard things about their son that went completely against what they believed about him. They had not merely heard about some of the unsavory details of his ghastly crimes, but they had also heard from me that in my psychiatric sessions with him in his jail cell, Bobby Joe had said he disliked his parents and his upbringing.
During the break, Louella watched a female television news reporter begin her story by saying that it was Bobby Joe Long’s upbringing, particularly his lack of love from his mother, that led him to future life of rape and murder. Later Louella would say that she was so furious on hearing the reporter’s words that she wanted to slap her. Instead of going after the reporter (who would have put it on the local news), Louella and Joe took it out on me.
The divorced couple, bonded by a firm disbelief regarding their only son’s crimes, was livid. Joe, a tall man, was bending over and in my face, angrily taking me to task. They felt far too close for comfort, and it was almost like being mugged.
“We did the best we could with our son!” shouted Louella.
Joe got even closer to me than he had been. “You’re making it look like we weren’t good parents.” He had managed to intimidate me. And I don’t intimidate easily.
The confrontation had escalated in the blink of an eye, and I felt I was being pounced on. I was the enemy. If I didn’t say something immediately, he’d be close to me as paint on canvas. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if he himself would become violent. It’s dark, I thought to myself. It felt like overwhelming darkness, like a shroud had been tossed over us. The Longs didn’t believe their son had done anything wrong, regardless of what they heard in the courtroom. They must have thought, If only this woman had understood that their son couldn’t have done this, then their son wouldn’t have been in the mess he was in.
I realized that both parents were under a great deal of stress, but I was working to help, not hurt, Bobby Joe Long. Anger helped none of us. I said more than once that I was working “for Bobby and not against him.”
They weren’t having it. I made every effort to try to explain. “It is not me personally who is saying these things. This is what Bobby Joe said to me when I evaluated him. We are all trying to help him. He is not going to go free, you understand that, don’t you? But what the lawyers are doing at this hearing is to try to get him a life sentence. And they’ll continue that every step of the way. He’ll be behind bars, but he’ll have his life.”
It all seemed to fall on deaf ears, though. I did not need to fight with the Longs; I needed their help. I needed details about Bobby Joe’s life as a child, teen, and young adult, along with a clear picture of the lives of Louella and Joe. It was indeed a tightrope to walk; I needed information from them, yet I had to stand my ground as a doctor. I wouldn’t be bullied by them, and the tête-à-tête ended in a kind of standoff.
Even before the hearing, on March 11, 1985, I sent the Longs a letter asking them to complete a lengthy child history document so that I could better assess Bobby Joe. On April 15, I sent another reminder letter, since neither Joe nor Louella had taken the time to post the essential information. It wasn’t until May 3 that Joe returned his survey, but it was incomplete, lacking most information on the family medical history as well as other more minor facts like birth dates and occupations. Either they had forgotten or they didn’t really want to know how Bobby Joe came to become what the newspapers in the Tampa area were calling a shameless monster who had killed nine women. I kept after them, though, trying to win their trust, as it was crucial to the research that was needed for Bobby Joe Long’s upcoming trial. It meant writing a series of impassioned, single-spaced, three-page letters, but eventually I won them over.
Joe Long, an earnest man who was permanently injured while working in a paper mill, said he didn’t see anything wrong with Bobby Joe throughout his son’s childhood. But he and Louella separated before Bobby was a year old. The only odd incident he could recall from Bobby’s childhood was that “Bobby was scared of snow and a snowstorm. He was young and flying here [from Florida to West Virginia] alone. Due to a very bad snowstorm, his flight was delayed in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was put up in a hotel room alone all night.” Joe did go on to say that his mother had had “seizures for as long as I can recall. Over a long period of time she has been tested by several doctors and they could never determine what caused them.” Joe described these episodes as “she will slap her chest and stomp her feet and say there is a hot smothering sensation that overcomes her. There are times that she will pass out for a few seconds…. She is then perfectly normal.” He also mentioned that his brother suffered from a “deep depression. During that time of the brother’s illness his father-in-law was slowly dying of cancer.” This family history really had nothing to do with the killings that Bobby Joe committed in the Tampa area. It’s true that Bobby Joe’s grandmother had seizures. It’s true that Bobby Joe’s uncle felt depressed. But nothing linked these illnesses to serial killing, so they were unrelated to Bobby Joe’s problems. As the surgeons frequently say, “True, true, but unrelated.” There were no signs that Bobby Joe had any kind of seizures or any deep depressions, either, and no signs of inheriting any type of genetic illness.
Though Joe was adamant in saying that his son had no health problems, he did reveal that the boy failed the first grade, “due to his changing school and that perhaps he was too young to become interested.” Later, Bobby Joe also had trouble with insubordination in the armed forces at Homestead Air Force Base near Miami, Florida. He received a dishonorable discharge (which was later changed to an honorable discharge).
It was while in the Army that Bobby Joe suffered what his father called “the accident.” To him, it was such a significant injury that he never even referred to the details of “the accident” in a many-paged handwritten letter to me. It was as if the result of the accident was too monumental to comprehend. Bobby Joe suffered severe trauma when his motorcycle was hit by a car and he was thrown forty feet from the vehicle, landing on his head (which was somewhat protected by a helmet). Joe said that it was after the accident that life changed for Bobby, and he offered proof in the form of a doctor’s statement from the armed forces saying that Bobby Joe had indeed suffered brain damage resulting from the crash.
There are a few people who believe there is a direct link between serial killing and brain trauma. Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, in her book Guilty by Reason of Insanity, writes that a brain injury through accident or through physical abuse is evident in some of our most vicious killers. As an example, she writes about Arthur Shawcross, a vile murderer whom I have profiled. Shawcross took the lives of eleven women not far from the Upstate New York community of Rochester in the late 1980s. The sight of the mutilated bodies shocked the hunters and policemen who found them in and around the bucolic Genesee River Gorge. When more information became available, it was learned that with a knife, Shawcross removed and ate some of his victims’ vaginas during his crimes. While these facts will hold some interest for fans of true-crime books, I had no real eureka moments with Shawcross or with police or lawyers during the case.
What engages me is this. Dr. Lewis states that under hypnosis, Shawcross told bits and pieces of his crimes, so Lewis theorized that he suffered incomplete temporal lobe seizures that wreaked havoc with his memory. She believed that the seizures occurred only when Shawcross was alone with the women, most of whom were prostitutes. After poring over the results of an MRI, she also found a cyst growing at the base of Shawcross’s temporal lobe. Her partner, Jonathan Pincus, also found “two straight little scars” on both temporal lobes. While these are important findings, they are just not enough to prove that the growth precipitated or even influenced his behavior. What she hadn’t proven was that one thing led to the other. That’s not to say she was wrong. She needed to study the patient more fully, and more fully means attaching him to a machine that studies the brain while he is carrying on normal daily activities. Certainly, Dr. Lewis needed to examine more than one person who had a brain cyst and who murdered in a serial fashion. As I’ve detailed, John Wayne Gacy’s brain had no tumors or cysts whatsoever. I do not believe brain trauma caused Arthur Shawcross to kill and I don’t believe it caused Bobby Joe Long to kill. Again, it’s true; true, but unrelated.
Letters from Bobby Joe’s mother were more emotional and detailed than those from his father. Despite her various jobs as a bartender, a carhop, and a barmaid, Louella was an old-fashioned gal at heart. She claimed she drank alcohol fewer than fifty times in her forty-six years and that she never touched a beer or hard liquor. She said she preferred buttermilk.
She admitted that she had married far too early, so early that she didn’t know how babies were born. Like many small-town girls of the time, she thought children “came out of the navel.” After her father was killed in an on-the-job accident, Louella and her mother lived in what she frankly described as “a shack.” Louella wrote, “Mom was a good person morally, but she didn’t know how to raise children, and so we didn’t know how to raise children (either).”
It was clear that Louella cared dearly about her only son, and the following letter is indicative of her doting nature. Louella wrote:
Son,
Do you realize, Bob, that until the other night, I’d never heard you talk dirty in your life. It ripped me to shreds. Have you become so hardened, son, that you just don’t care anymore. Don’t you know that I have planned and thought hundreds of times how I could get you out of there? I find myself doing this and I think, What’s wrong with me, am I really planning this? Am I crazy? There’s no way I could get you out and then I think more about it and I know I wouldn’t want you out right now—in the shape you’re in. Son, what’s happened to you?…I remember your voice on the phone the last 2 or 3 times before all this happened. It’s so unreal. I guess I’ve never really convinced myself you could’ve done these things—even though I know you did. It’s just so impossible, seeing you with people and living with you, and knowing how you were with your children. I can still see you so many times combing Chris’ hair for him, helping him put on his shoes and socks, brushing Bobby Joe’s hair. Washing and drying the laundry. Folding their little clothes so carefully and putting them away. Taking them out with the dog and going to the lake. You were such an ordinary kind of person—what happened to him. Oh, son, don’t let yourself become so hardened [that] no one can reach you. Be kind to people. Search for the good in them. You’ll find more people wanting to help you…. Anything I ever did that hurt you or humiliated you, I’m so sorry for. I’m so sorry for everything I didn’t do that I should have, and things I did that I shouldn’t have.
Bobby Joe Long himself said he didn’t remember enjoying all that much happiness with his mother, and on hearing this, Louella was aghast. She wrote about her feelings as if she had been stabbed through the heart.
I don’t see how Bob could have blocked out every happy thing we did in our lives. The first 6 or 8 years we were in Fla., we went everywhere together. I have movies and photographs from all those places—monkey jungle, parrot jungle, seaquarium, porpoise show in the keys, Daytona, Spook Hill, and hundreds of pictures of many different days each year at the beaches. When he was small, we spent all our time together…. I never brought a man home and “kicked Bob out of bed.” We lived in decent people’s homes and I had to enter that home and come out of that home and I did not bring men home, as it was told at the last trial.
Whether Louella Long was telling mistruths or whether time led her to recall only good things doesn’t really matter. Although she wasn’t telling the whole story, as we’ll soon see, nothing Louella did as a single mother bringing up her child made Bobby into the killer he became. To some, that may sound obvious, but it needs to be said because so many parents resort to self-blame, or are blamed by others for the serial murders of their child.
Millions of children are the products of terribly broken homes, and while they may harbor some emotional scars, they don’t resort to the odious crimes for which Bobby Joe Long was tried. Whether or not Louella once asked Bobby to leave her bed so she could have sex with a boyfriend has no bearing on the crimes he committed later in life. As he murdered, he was never trying to lay retribution upon a society or a mother that he felt had dealt him a horrible childhood. However, Louella’s overwrought emotions were indicative of the bottomless guilt and hostility a parent feels when her child commits the most morally and ethically repugnant crime of all…over and over again. Some parents and families never get over the weight of it all, condemning themselves to wallow in a past of shock and sorrow, constantly reliving the precise moments when they heard their son was accused. They pore over their past lives with their child, searching for clues as to where they went wrong. It’s almost a twilight zone of regret, a self-made purgatory from which they never emerge whole and unscathed.
Louella (as well as Joe) was indeed suspicious of me early on, questioning my motives, as though I were working against Bobby Joe. But as I gained Louella’s confidence, she began to open up, most specifically in a long missive in October of 1985. In the nineteen-page letter, handwritten and single spaced on legal-size paper, Louella detailed a few peculiarities in Bobby Joe Long’s childhood that bear mentioning.
Louella’s mother, Mamie, told her that “a couple of times she found him in the closet hiding and he told her something was after him and he was scared to come out. Naturally, she stayed with him ’til he went to sleep, I never knew of him being afraid.” But in a letter to me dated November 30, 1985, Mamie wrote from her home in Shenandoah, Georgia,
When Bobby was little and had to be by his self, he would hide in the closet with his ball bat crying his eyes out. Said Big Eyes was out to get him. I begged his Mom to get him help but she said she couldn’t and then just before this [Bobby’s crimes] happened, I told her their was something bad wrong with him. And her and Joe just would not listen. He acted like his mind was so troubled and didn’t even look like his self. I ask God to please watch over him and give the judges the mind to not give him the chair.
Who was Big Eyes? Most monsters imagined are fully formed, not disembodied. Children see the monster under the bed, a shadowy figure, but a figure with a body nonetheless. But what Bobby Joe saw generally is a symptom that appears with people who fear being watched, kind of an early paranoia. Serial killers are suspicious folk, even before police are watching them. What Bobby Joe saw was an example of a very primitive psychological state, as though he had not moved emotionally from the earliest stages of infancy. Babies don’t initially see you; they see shapes, forms, undefined types of pieces that lack wholeness. They see parts. It hit me like lightning striking. Like other serial killers I had profiled and interviewed, Long had never matured emotionally beyond infancy.
Additionally, Louella had written to me about a hormone imbalance that made him appear as though he had breasts like a woman. Called gynecomastia, it’s a fairly common anomaly caused by either excess fat or glandular tissue. It can be somewhat embarrassing, since it gives the chest area a decidedly female contour. Louella gave a lot of thought to Bobby’s dilemma, ultimately deciding on surgery. Said Louella, “A doctor gave him 6 or 7 shots hoping to decrease his chest, but it did nothing, so they suggested surgery. It wasn’t that bad, but bad enough that it made him very self-conscious about his shirts and the doctor said for his mental sake, we should have the fatty tissue removed.”
She also said she hadn’t seen “Bob cry since he was hit by the car when he was 7 years old, except when the kids tormented him at school about his teeth protruding so much.” There were also periods when “he was so cold and indifferent—days at a time.”
Like many fifteen-year-olds, Bobby hid some pornography from his mother. But she also discovered his curiosity went far beyond photographs. “There were holes in the bathroom and in my closet which adjoined his (at the top as a separate compartment with sliding doors and he’d made a hole in his & could look directly into my dressing table mirror & see the entire room. I don’t know how many years it had been there.” Louella thought that Bobby may have played the voyeur and watched her with a boyfriend who lived with the two briefly. “Bob hated his guts. They had a terrible fight one night (over the placement of some shoes in the living room)…It was a bloody mess. I couldn’t believe the hatred in Bob. He bloodied Jim’s nose and beat him pretty pitifully…I don’t know if Bob had watched us make love through that hole in the closet or not, but I feel in my heart he did, and that’s why he hated Jim so much…. But Bob has never been able to forgive anyone anything. Why? He’s hated my family for years & he wouldn’t even speak to them. Why can’t he forgive people?” Again, this boundless rage is the kind of reaction an emotionally immature person would exhibit. When children see their parents having sex, children often think one is hurting the other. Although Bobby was a teenager, he didn’t have fully developed emotions. In fact, he never would.
According to Louella, Bobby began to imagine things that never really happened regarding the family. “He thought I was a mean, hard person who slapped people. Even said I slapped my sisters Luanne & Sharon right in the face. That’s never happened in my entire life, but he really believes it—like he believes he very nearly drowned and they had to grab him in and resuscitate him. [But actually] he was holding onto a raft and the lifeguard went out & got him. We were up eating at the hot dog stand 5 minutes later.” Bobby had posted two angry letters to Louella from jail chastising her about the near drowning that she adamantly believes had never occurred.
John Wayne Gacy’s sister Karen was not as forgiving of her brother as Louella was of her son. Karen again and again acknowledged that Gacy’s killings were a huge burden on her family. In early 1979, she wrote to John,
You probably have wondered why I haven’t written, but what does one say. I am shattered inside and out. I have not been able to function like I did before because the nightmare is always there.
I was so proud of you, that you changed your life after Iowa [where he was incarcerated for sodomy], and then this. Why is all I ask? Why? Was sex that big a thing with you that you had to pick on innocent boys and then kill them because they would tell on you. God, why? Why didn’t you come to us for help?
My family has been torn apart by this; I only pray to God that the kids are not affected by this. Sheri was so torn up we had to get counseling for her. I’m still under doctors care, and Mom who know what its affects have been on her.
What in God’s name can I say to you. I am sorry I didn’t get the chance to help you. Several times I got the feeling you wanted to tell me something and never did. You have been sick for a long time and I only wish I could have spotted it and helped you.
We are going to try and piece our lives together the best we can as I know there is no way we can help you now. Only God can help you.
Mad Biter Richard Macek’s wife, Sandra, was ambivalent about the misdeeds of her husband. She avoided going to see Macek at Central State Hospital in Wisconsin, saying, “I really haven’t gone up to there myself or taken the kids up to him because I get very upset. He upsets me. He upsets them. I get all uptight. [My daughter] cries for days afterwards. At first I thought I wasn’t going to make it through it, because all I did was walk around crying.”
Unsurprisingly, she just didn’t want to believe Macek was a murderer. She went on at length about how Richard helped the neighbors, repeatedly carrying a wheelchair-bound neighbor’s mother down the stairs. “He even took days to make a lion costume for our daughter for Halloween. He brought animals home for the kids. A whole menagerie. I had four dogs. I had two cats. I don’t know how many ducks. I had four birds. A tank full of fish.”
But just as I detailed at the beginning of this book, Macek could change within seconds. Sandra related, “The day I went up to be with him for the lie detector test—he was boiling because he told me not to come unless I drove, and I felt I didn’t want to drive. The weather was bad and I don’t like to drive when it gets icy. So I took a train. They couldn’t test him because he was so fired up at me. He was mad at me the whole day.”
Worried, I recall leaning over to Sandra while we talked at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, saying, “I have concerns for the safety of several people he feels have crossed him if he ever got out. Do you think he would hurt you?”
She started by being somewhat indignant. How could he hurt her? They were married; they had a deep bond. But then she opened up. “I’ve never been afraid of Richard before now, and I’m not afraid of him now. But I do want a divorce. I’ve had girlfriends say, ‘Well, how come your husband hasn’t come around to see your new baby [who was born while Richard was in jail]?’ I just say ‘I don’t know. He’s in California somewhere.’ I can’t handle it any other way. If they ask about the Macek who’s in jail, I say, ‘I don’t know who that is. Maybe it’s a relative of Richard’s family, but I don’t know.’ That’s why I want to have my name changed. I don’t want it to be Macek anymore. I don’t want my kids to go through any more questions about their father being a murderer.”
I can only imagine the trauma, the distressing combination of embarrassment and sadness, that a child can go through when harassed by other children about their father’s murdering ways. They have to think about it every day of their lives. If they meet anybody new, the questions, formerly innocuous but now dire, inevitably come up. The innocent questions people ask when first meeting someone become dark and burdensome to answer. They echo loudly and persistently: How many brothers and sisters do you have? What are they like? Where’s your family from? What do they do? Do you confess that your father had killed so mercilessly and fiercely? Never. You can only do one thing. You lie. You have to.
And imagine the ordeal of the divorced mother of the child, sitting alone at night at the kitchen table after everyone has gone to bed, trying desperately to make sense of something that makes no sense at all. Her friends have disappeared. They’ll have nothing to do with her. If she testified for her spouse, she was immediately branded: she was as bad as he was. Kinship and loyalty are not supposed to exist with someone who has committed crimes so grievous as serial killing.
Friends and acquaintances sense that the family must have known that the killings were going on; therefore, the parents are guilty too. They have spawned this monster, and they must pay a price. Do townspeople march up to their houses with burning torches and raised pitchforks and scream “You grew a killer!” similar to the old Frankenstein movie? No. But there are more subtle and no less hurtful responses, like being shunned. If you haven’t left town before the neighbors turn against you, you probably will when they do.
After thinking about all these things and more, Louella wished she could change not only history but also everything in her life. She had described herself as an “outsider—always aching for someone to love me” and had said that her life as a child was “a very scary time,” for her and her sisters; as a result, they “suffered from colitis [the intestinal ailment] almost all our lives.” At the end of her letter Louella wrote impassionedly, “It’s such a shame that we can’t live our lives over, after we’ve smartened up and come to realize the true values of life—like our precious children and our devotion to them & God, who gave them to us to bring them up in the right way.” I truly wished that things had turned out better for Louella, but history can’t be changed. Louella would eventually deal with the crimes of her son, yet somewhere in her mind they would always haunt her. It might hit her when she was making coffee or when she looked at a family photo or when she was at the beach or when she woke inexplicably in the middle of the night. She would be reminded of Bobby. She would be reminded of a killer. And though she shouldn’t have, some part of her would always blame herself.
On the other hand, stewing angrily in his jail cell, there was Bobby Joe Long himself. He didn’t blame himself. He couldn’t. He had no remorse at all, not one molecule of it.