It was Thanksgiving 2002. I usually go all-out for the holidays, inviting twenty or more people over to our place in Chicago. For weeks before the big day, I take care to prepare all of the food myself, crepes with mushrooms and chives, salmon rolls, homemade cheddar cheese sticks, butter patties in the shape of turkeys, homemade gravy, and, of course, two twenty-five-pound turkeys. It’s a great feast for everyone, and with the combined demands of my medical work, family, and the food preparation, I don’t get much sleep from Halloween on forward. But all the work is worth the effort once everyone sits down to enjoy the feast and just talk.
But in 2002, Thanksgiving was very different.
A few days before the holiday, I received the long-distance call I was waiting for, only I had expected it to come in September around Labor Day, not during the Thanksgiving break. The call came from Brazil, and my intermediary there reported that Brazil’s most notorious serial killer was ready to talk to me. Although I had spoken to him before in the 1990s shortly after he was captured, I had been waiting a decade to sit down again with the killer of fourteen young boys. And so, when the call came, it didn’t take long to make a decision: for me, there was no other choice. I forgot about “over the river and through the woods” and the bracing chill of the Chicago wind that’s perfect for the holiday, and I used up a hefty chunk of our frequent-flier miles to make quick reservations for a trip that would take us to São Paulo and Rio de Janiero. Since the kids were home for the holiday, I packed them up, and my husband too. We’d all make the best of it, I thought, and I’d have a working vacation of sorts.
The kids knew nothing of the real purpose of the trip and they’d occupy themselves by exploring the islands, swimming, and fishing. By now, they did know that I sometimes talk to murderers, but I’ve told them nothing more specific than that. At the age of fifteen, my oldest son had actually seen me on television speaking about the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, but he didn’t ask any further questions. And I won’t offer answers. I trust he’ll let me know when he wants to know more details about my career, as will my younger son.
On the plane, I read a story that quoted a true-crime writer who said that there has been a conspicuous increase in the incidence of serial murder in countries whose political landscape has recently changed. He pointed to Russia, Brazil, and South Africa as examples where regimes had evolved into more democratic, more open, more permissive societies and where serial murderers have been on the rise. But this is a lot of bunk. Regimes, presidents, and policies aren’t the reasons for serial crime. Serial murderers are everywhere, but in some countries, we just don’t hear about them. It may also be true that the lack of a free press in China or Russia diminishes the number of reports about serial crime. In any event, serial murder is an international phenomenon.
In the village of Rostov in the Ukraine beginning in 1980, for example, Andrei Chikatilo ate some of the sexual organs of the people he murdered. All of Russia was horrified. It’s interesting to note that it was fairly common during World War II (and even before) for everyone from children to grandmothers to consume the bodies of the dead to prevent famine. During the height of the famines, people were even killed for their flesh. There simply was no food anywhere to be found in the more rural areas, whose landscapes were white, frigid tundras. Chikatilo witnessed and lived through these times; in fact, his mother told him that his brother was eaten for food. Of course, Andrei himself did not kill because he longed for a politically different time in the Soviet Union, when he could eat people without fearing that the authorities would crack down. Nor did he kill and eat to avenge his brother or as vengeance for his sexual inadequacy (though the latter was his explanation in court). There were many people in Russia who had to resort to cannibalism just to keep from starving, and none of these became serial murderers. So it can’t be said that what Chikatilo saw, horrible as it was, led him to kill or to eat the sex organs of his victims.
As the crude killer watched from a cell in the courtroom, his accusers screamed at him, chastising him. On his face was not the look of repentance. Moreover, during the testimony of witnesses and officials, he looked up at the ceiling as if to ask, Why are they oppressing me? Then he dropped his drawers and underwear to expose himself and said, “Here, take this if you want it.” I believe Chikatilo was medically insane, and society was not to blame. However, during a lengthy trial from April to August 1992, the point was driven home again and again: Chikatilo was ruthless and sane; he knew what he was doing, and he even took pleasure in what he did. Two months later, the Russian judge found him guilty of fifty-two murders. Chikatilo’s life was taken by an executioner’s bullet to the head in early 1994.
I thought about the many places to which I’d traveled to learn more about serial murderers, particularly India, and its Golden Triangle, which includes Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. From the colorful mosaics near the vibrant bazaars in Delhi to the historic marble minarets to the lush green gardens at the tomb of Akbar to a ride on the back of an elephant, every inch of India is full of romance and mysterious, ancient history, and, yes, poverty. In India, I heard the story of a beautiful lower-caste woman known as the Bandit Queen (though she was not royalty) and also as the Rebel of the Ravines. Phoolan Devi carried a rifle and wore a red bandana and a belt of bullets slung over her shoulder…and killed twenty-two politically influencial landowners in an uprising in the town of Behmai in 1981. It was one of the biggest slaughters modern-day India has ever seen. Devi’s sometimes considered a serial killer here in the United States, but she killed for political reasons, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor like a female Robin Hood. After serving an eleven-year jail sentence, she became a much-loved politician in the Indian Parliament, fighting for the rights of the lower castes. She was not insane at all, as her motive included vengeance to punish the upper-caste men who gang-raped her, and the men of Behmai who watched them do it. She was in no way a serial murderer. In 2001, Devi was murdered herself by a man wearing a mask outside her house, killed by a man who later said the murder was retribution for the massacre in Behmai. In India, many consider Devi to be a great hero to this day.
In the late 1990s in the Punjab city of Lahore in Pakistan near the Indian border, Javed Iqbal took an iron chain and choked, sexually abused, cut up, and threw the remains of a hundred street kids into vats of acid. He is said to have had three accomplices. The paunchy, giggling Iqbal, who wore a preppy-style pullover sweater and geeky-looking glasses when posing for cameras, turned himself over into the hands of editors at a local newspaper, proclaiming, “I could have killed five hundred.” Like Robert Berdella, Iqbal kept a detailed diary of his deeds. He also kept many of his victims’ shoes, eighty-five pairs of them, probably as souvenirs. An adamant, angry Judge Allah Baksh offered up an eye-for-an-eye sentence in which Iqbal would be cut into one hundred pieces and put in acid before a crowd of people. But it wasn’t to be. Like Fred West, Iqbal killed himself in his cell before Pakistani justice was served. Serial murderers rarely commit suicide. Could it have been that the structure of prison life led West and Igbal to experience some kind of coming together in their personalities to make them more humanlike? And when their personalities came together, could they have seen the horror of what they’d done? Could this “new human-ness” have led to their suicides? I have no real answer, but it’s an interesting question to think about.
The Japanese are reticent about many things, including cancer. Until several years ago, they considered even speaking the word to be taboo. A Japanese friend of ours who was stricken with the disease refused even to utter the word, as did the family around him. It was as if by merely saying it, the cancer would spread further. And this friend might have known better—he was a physician. The Japanese are also silent about serial killers. The 1988 case of Tsutomu Mizayaki stunned the residents of Tokyo. He abducted, mutilated, and killed little girls as young as four years of age and no older than seven, and called the killings a dream from which he had never really awoken. Five months after killing one child, he burned the body and dropped the remains, enclosed in a cardboard box, in front of her parents’ house. He consumed the flesh from the roasted hands of another victim, and claimed he began murdering after he saw visions of “rat people.” Like other serial killers, he at one point professed that his confessions were obtained forcibly by members of a violent police force. Mizayaki, whose voice never rose above a whisper in court, complained that police kept hitting him on the head to coax a confession. While his lawyers tried to convince the judge in Tokyo that Mizayaki was insane at the time of the killings, in April 1997 he was sentenced to death.
One country that is terribly ill equipped to identify or admit to the presence of serial killers is China. Some reports in magazines like Time have suggested that the reason (again!) for the upsurge in serial crime is related to the slight loosening of restrictions in a post–Chairman Mao era that seeks to open society a bit more than the old hard-line Communists permitted. Hua Ruizho, for instance, found prostitutes near the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in the capital of Beijing. Ruizho spirited them away in his van, raped them, killed them, and took the bodies to garbage dumps. He was executed in 2002. Another killer, security guard Duan Guocheng, murdered thirteen women, cutting off the breasts of some. On the run, Duan evaded police for months in 2001 by sleeping in flea-bitten hotels that cost a few dollars each night. Time reported that the network of communications among cities to which police have access was less than stellar. The idea of miscommunication among Chinese authorities is not a problem exclusive to the Chinese. It happens to this day in the United States to a lesser extent, possibly because China’s communications infrastructure isn’t as advanced as is ours. I’m quite sure that China always had serial killers in the time of Mao; they just were not reported to the police or to journalists, or officials kept the murders quiet and they weren’t talked about. Wherever serial murders occur in the world, it’s important for all governments and law enforcement agencies to be completely open and to share information, so citizens can learn more about this ever-present danger. Otherwise, the problem will continue…and grow.
Once we got off the plane and took a cab to the city, we were immersed in the dusty, noisy chaos that is always São Paulo, the world’s second largest city. Nearly seventeen million people live here, many of them in the favelas, the ghettos within the cities of Brazil.
Shortly after we settled in, the phone in our room rang: Marcelo Costa de Andrade, the serial killer, was having second thoughts about talking with me. He also made the request for ten thousand dollars for his time, which staggered me. I was crestfallen. Great. I had made the five-thousand-mile trip to Brazil, and I was expected to wait at the whim of a serial killer, at that. Why did I even begin to believe that he would be forthcoming? After all these years, why did I think anything would be different? Serial killers specialize in manipulation. While he sat in his cell making his grand decision, we decided not to wait around. Packing up the kids, we drove to Paraty, a little-known but beautiful fishing village on the ocean about two hours by car from Rio. We found that Paraty has sixty-five islands and three hundred beaches in the area to explore. Fishing and eating, we had a fine Thanksgiving time, Paraty style.
Occasionally, among the colorful tropical parrots and chirping tanagers, I would sit alone in the courtyard of our pousada and think about Marcelo Costa de Andrade. Nearly a decade ago, when I was in Rio for a neurology conference, I had seen a dramatic headline splashed across one of the tabloid newspapers about a twenty-five-year-old murderer who sometimes drank the blood of his victims. Because my Portuguese isn’t very good, I asked a colleague to translate for me.
I began to hear a startling story of the downtrodden favela in Rio called Rocinha where Marcelo lived. The word Rocinha means “little field,” and it’s located on a mountain called Two Brothers, but the place is far more ominous than the names would indicate. From where I was staying, I could look up on the impoverished city within a city made up of dwellings haphazardly constructed of drab concrete blocks, tin roofs, and wooden shacks. It was like a medieval town, without running water, plumbing, and often without electricity (unless someone illegally tapped into it). Back then, the only time a member of the upper or middle class would venture into Rocinha was to buy drugs or sex. But they can’t or won’t stop the drug lords that rule high in the hills, nor will they clean the canal reeking with raw sewage that constitutes the area’s main water supply. In Rocinha, it’s as though the nearby famous tourist towns and beaches of Ipanema are a planet away. Like many of the children in Rocinha, Marcelo lived a life full of violence, abuse, and hunger. Like Alton Coleman, he was beaten regularly by his relatives, sometimes so hard that he was dizzied and stunned by the blows. By the age of fourteen, he had begun to work as a prostitute. Soon he began a long relationship with an older man, with whom he eventually resided, but it was a utilitarian relationship during which his life became easier and better than what he had in the favela. He was fed, clothed, given gifts, and went to movies occasionally.
At the age of seventeen, Marcelo would listen endlessly to tapes of his brother crying (why, I don’t know), and then tried to rape the same ten-year-old brother, with whom he lived. When the relationship with the older man ended, Marcelo returned to his mother and began an honest, if badly paying, job handing out flyers advertising various items for sale in a Copacabana shop. Marcelo seemed to be making every effort not to stray from a straight and narrow path that might eventually lead out of the favela. Attending church regularly, he and his mother now lived in the more rural but still downtrodden town of Itaborai, twenty-four miles from Rio, where horse-drawn carts are still common. It’s horrifying but not so strange that parents of abused children refuse to believe such abuse could happen. She may even have had her own need, whatever that was, to keep Marcelo around, so she let the abuse pass.
The churchgoing became more frequent, as often as four or five times a week for four hours each night at the Brazilian-founded Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a sect that claims evil spirits are the roots of all troubles. They believe that depression and fear are caused by demons, and exorcisms are not uncommon within the church. Among their tenets is the notion that the church can cure illnesses like AIDS…and the “illness” that the church calls homosexuality.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God had been called suspect by many since its inception in 1977 because of its unusual practices. Leaders of the church have been investigated for alleged links to Colombia drug cartels. In Brazil, the group controls well over a dozen TV stations, over thirty radio stations, even a soccer team named Universal, and members of the church hold high political office. Also in Brazil, some church leaders under came investigation by the government for possible fraud. None of the group’s teachings, however, preach murder in the name of God in any way.
As I’ve indicated, religion is a major part of growing up in Brazil, and it infuses everything people do. It’s more than merely following certain rituals for an hour or so on Saturday or Sunday. In Brazil, practicing religion is considered to be as essential to life as is breathing the air. I wouldn’t say that de Andrade was overpowered by religion, however. No church—in fact, no religion of this earth would have been able to stop Marcelo from acting on the catalysts that lurked deep within his own afflicted mind.
The Brazilian tabloid press began to call de Andrade a vampire because he drank the blood of the children he murdered. They had begun to call him a “monster,” making him bigger than life. It was clear to me that Marcelo was about to become Brazil’s most infamous serial murderer. Yes, later there was São Paulo’s Francisco de Assis Pereira, who was charged with murdering nine women in 1998, and Larete Patrocinio Orpinelli, a drifter who was said to have killed ten children over a twenty-year period and who confessed in 2000 after having repeated nightmares about his crimes. But Marcelo killed quickly over a nine-month period in 1991, and he raped the children, had sex with the bodies, and sometimes drank human blood. It was like nothing that the good people in modern-day Brazil had ever seen before.
The boys whose lives were ended by Marcelo were kind of like The Runts gang portrayed in the sad and violent Brazilian movie City of God, which was based on a true story. These children lived on the streets of the favelas, hustling and begging, holding up little stores or mugging passersby to make their wages or, if they were “lucky,” running about as messengers and lookouts for the drug lords in an effort to become drug lords themselves one day. Their lives, in a sense, were dead-end lives, but they were precious human lives nonetheless. Children do end up missing in the favelas of Rio (which hold one and a half million people), sometimes at the hands of vigilantes who have had enough of the robberies, sometimes at the hands of drug lords during turf wars. But these children, poverty stricken or delinquent, deserve better. These children, one of whom was just six years old, deserved to make their way in life, whether it was in or out of Rocinha.
One thing that continued to annoy me was the way the press focused on the blood drinking. Earlier in this book, I pointed to the life of Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian countess who drank and bathed in the blood of her servants in the 1500s in a bizarre effort to remain young. In his fairly dry but still widely published 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, German neuropsychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing profiled over two hundred cases of such sexual oddities—including blood drinkers like vampires and werewolves. Krafft-Ebing made clear that the primitive need to drink human blood has a history, a long history dating back to the caveman and cannibalism, and it certainly pre-dates the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But Marcelo was no vampire. In reality, only twice did he drink his victims’ blood.
In early 1992 in Rio, I lost no time in trying to arrange a meeting with Marcelo. I didn’t really believe it would happen while I was there, but I felt it was important that I give it a try. What if Marcelo could tell me something the others hadn’t? What possibly might be lost if I didn’t get to him? By sitting down with de Andrade, could I possibly find another significant piece of the serial murderer puzzle? I had to find out.
It took a few days, but through an affable go-between who was a well-regarded and well-connected doctor in Rio, I got word that Brazilian officials would indeed permit me to speak with Marcelo. Still, there was one looming problem: my difficulty with the Portuguese language. My trusty intermediary helped me in tracking down a translator, and we set off for the prison in Rio, a run-down two-story stucco affair with wooden shutters over the bars that, compared to American prisons, wasn’t particularly secure. Additionally, vigilance wasn’t as high. Guards were not watching Marcelo’s every move (and in later years, he did make an escape, although he was reapprehended) as they do with serial killers here in the United States.
The sprawling country of Brazil imprisons more people than any other country in Latin America, and its prison population has doubled in the last five years. As I was led through the halls, I saw no visible signs of abuse, although the conditions were less than what Americans would call sanitary. Overall, the jail I visited was not a hellhole by any means, but within its humid interior I would see the occasional centipede creeping or cockroach scurrying by on walls whose paint was peeling.
The officials in Rio were a bit taken aback by my presence, wondering, “Who is this blond woman from the North, and why is she here?” But they were fairly polite and led me to de Andrade without hesitation. In a small, windowless room, there he sat at a rough-hewn wooden table, shackled, looking younger than his twenty-five years. While Marcelo was marginally younger than other serial killers, people in Rio don’t have the extended adolescence that we have here. They go to work sooner and don’t stay in school as long. Marcelo grew up more quickly than a serial murderer in, say, Illinois would have. So it wasn’t exceptional that his rampage came a bit early.
De Andrade himself was dark and round-faced, but calm, reserved, and almost resigned to his circumstance. His brown eyes appeared earnest as he tried to answer questions through the translator.
“What was it like growing up in Rio?”
“We were very poor,” he answered softly.
“It must have been difficult.”
He hunched forward and looked at the table. “We are so poor that we must do anything we can do to survive.”
“What does ‘anything’ mean?”
Marcelo sat silent for a minute. Then he scratched the back of his head and said, “I made money on the streets,” he said, referring to working as a prostitute. Prostitution is close to being a sanctioned occupation in Rio, a place that’s much more open about sex and sexuality than we are here in the United States.
It may have been difficult for Marcelo to prostitute himself initially, but it was difficult for him to live at home as well. “And then, after I worked, when I would come home, I was hit. My stepmother sometimes would not give me food.”
“What about going to school?”
He thought for a moment, stroking the light, few-days’ growth of beard on his face. “There was not so much school for me in the favela. There was just the street and everyone would try to make some money on the street.”
“What was fun for you?”
“We all make things for Carnival. It takes a long time. It is not fun always. It is work.” The people of Rio are obsessed with Carnival, the entertainment-filled festival that precedes Lent, especially the great parade with its grand costumes and floats that passes before at least 85,000 in the open-air Sambadrome. But I could see that for Marcelo, the making of costumes for Carnival was not something that he took much pleasure in doing—though everyone did it.
“What else do you like to do?”
“I like to ride a bike. Sometimes soccer. I like the sun. I would like to see the sun again.”
It was a challenge for me to try to keep up a conversation because the interpreter had to translate everything I would say and everything Marcelo said. I felt I lost a bit of the rapport I usually have when I can speak directly to a serial murderer. And I wondered whether the translator was being accurate, especially as we moved into the more serious parts of the interview. Yet I didn’t have time to be distracted. I forged ahead and looked straight at de Andrade.
“Marcelo, you have done some bad things.”
“Bad,” he agreed.
“Do you know why you did these bad things?”
“The children have bad lives here. If they are children when they die, they go straight to heaven. A better place.” I wasn’t buying it. I knew there were cultural differences between the United States and Brazil. I knew about his connection to the Universal Church. It’s no secret that Christians are taught to look forward to an afterlife in heaven. But no religion, certainly no Western religion, advocates murder, let alone the murder of children. I didn’t make my feelings known and continued.
“Why did you take young boys?”
“They were prettier. To me.”
“What did you use to kill?”
“My hands. Once with a machete. My mother had it. I would say that I was going for bananas. I cut off the head.” In this incident, Marcelo had already killed and raped an eleven-year-old boy called Odair Jose Muniz dos Santos, who he picked up while the child was begging and who resisted his advances on a soccer field. He returned to the scene to cut off the dead boy’s head.
“Why the head?”
“I wanted people to make fun of him in heaven.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“People used to make fun of me too. I did not want to hurt anyone. Sometimes I do not know if they are dead or alive. It was…I could not stop myself.” Again, it was like Michael Lockhart had described: something went awry and he was driven to kill.
“Why no one older than sixteen?”
“The adults, if they had sins, would go to hell. I did not want to send anyone to hell. Children when they go, they go to heaven.” I found all this ironic because he himself had killed so many people and, according to the tenets of his religion, would be bound for hell once he died as well. On the surface, his “logic” sounds reasonable, and Marcelo would tell this story over and over again to police and to journalists. But Marcelo had no real concept of religion. It was a complex concept too abstract for him to grasp.
In a way, de Andrade’s use of religion as an excuse was like John Wayne Gacy saying it was Jack Hanley who made him kill thirty-three people in Illinois. Both were giving something to us so that we “normal” humans can remark, “Oh, yes. That’s why he did it.” They hear us desperately trying to make sense of their crimes, so they offer reasons, excuses, defenses. In general, people cannot deal with not knowing the whys and hows.
How did Marcelo’s string of murders finally conclude? On December 11, 1991, ten-year-old Altair and six-year-old Ivan Abreu received permission from their mother to walk to a friend’s home to eat a meal of fried fish and bread. As they strolled, the two were as excited about eating as a child here would be to get a gift like a new toy. But when they stopped at a bus terminal to ask passersby for spare change, they met Marcelo. He promised that if they helped him light candles in the church of St. George, he would give the boys 4,000 cruzeiros (then about $20). It was a huge amount of money for boys who didn’t even have a bed to sleep on. Marcelo made small talk as they walked and even lifted Ivan and perched him on his back when he tired. Then, when they reached a deserted beach, Marcelo grabbed Altair and began kissing him. When Altair tried to run, Marcelo pushed the boy down onto the sharp pebbles on the beach, where he hit his head and began to bleed. Then Marcelo turned on Ivan, choking, raping, and killing Ivan as Altair watched. Altair stood stunned, unable to move or comprehend what he saw unfold before him. Then Marcelo moved toward Altair and opened his arms wide. Altair felt he was about to die, and he could literally smell his brother all over de Andrade. Surprisingly to the young boy, Marcelo hugged Altair, as though nothing wrong had occurred.
“Why?” asked Altair.
“I have sent Ivan to heaven.” De Andrade never used the words kill or rape or death.
“I love you,” announced Marcelo, who then took Altair by the hand. They spent the night together outside, on the ground in a thick forest behind a gas station, away from any people, their presence obscured by plants and shrubbery. The next day, the boy was taken to Marcelo’s workplace, a jewelry outlet in Copacabana. His heart beating fast, Altair was able to escape when Marcelo was distracted. Recalling the right buses to board, he returned to his mother, who informed police about Ivan’s disappearance. Meanwhile, Marcelo returned to the scene of the crime and placed Ivan’s tiny hands into the pockets of his pants. He said he did this to save the boy’s hands from the gnawing teeth of rodents.
When the police arrived at Marcelo’s shop a couple of days later, de Andrade seemed to expect them, wondering aloud why they took so long to arrive. Initially, Marcelo confessed to killing Ivan but no one else. It took two months in jail, but de Andrade then told police about thirteen more murders.
We had trekked back to São Paulo and dealt with the massive traffic jams on the street and the smell of fuel emissions that intruded even through our closed windows. Once we were back in the lobby of our hotel, the desk clerk handed me a message from my intermediary, and the news was not so good.
De Andrade had come down in price, but he still requested five thousand dollars for a talk. Nearly hitting the roof, I was livid that I had been duped and that I was gullible enough to have made my way to Brazil for nothing. When I calmed down, I resigned myself to the fact that at least it was a nice Thanksgiving vacation.
A five-thousand-dollar request from a serial killer is an obscene amount to me and it borders on extortion. Yes, it has always been my policy to make every effort to follow up with the people I have profiled and interviewed to see how the prison system has changed them. Has the person adjusted to prison life? What kind of life had the prisoner made for himself within the prison, such as Gacy had made with his paintings? Had he lashed out at another prisoner? (That’s a rarity; serial murderers rarely attack others in prison unless they themselves are first set upon.) How was the confining structure of a Brazilian prison beneficial or detrimental to the murderer?
But five thousand dollars! It was obvious to me that Marcelo thought he had become a celebrity. Like the serial killers stateside, he had gotten a kind of fan following, groupies who had written to him and fawned over him. Probably, the people who run Internet Web sites had gotten to him too. It’s ghoulish, but they sell everything from locks of hair to handwritten letters procured from the murderers.
I have never paid to speak to a serial killer and I vow that I never will. It’s not just the principle of the thing, it’s the questionable honesty and candor I would get by greasing a serial killer’s palms. He may say something dramatic that he thought I wanted to hear just to earn his wage. Another important consideration was this: offering any kind of remuneration is never an ethical thing for a doctor to do. It’s the kind of thing that could ruin a reputation, and it was silly for Marcelo to think that I would agree to his unscrupulous demands. Finally, the idea of paying money to someone who has taken the lives of children is repugnant to me.
I knew I would encounter more obstacles before I really could discover what makes a serial killer tick. And I still felt that, somewhere down the line, I would get to de Andrade again. I’m no manipulator in the way serial murderers are, but I do stick with things over time and that tends to wear them down. With some of them, I have requested interviews for over ten years. I just don’t give up…until they’re executed. Constant research is key in this business, and things have changed dramatically since I started back in the 1970s. It was time to consider the various advances in science that could well be used to help the world discover who isn’t a serial killer…and who is. And who can be stopped.