Roy was sitting at the kitchen table with his grandfather on a rainy Saturday afternoon in November listening to the radio. Johnny Hodges was blowing the first chorus on “Gone with the Wind.” His grandfather was eating smoked fish and drinking beer while Roy, who was nine years old, watched him wield fork and knife to pick apart the flesh from the bones with surgical precision. Roy hated the smell of the smoked fish but was fascinated by his grandfather’s dexterity. Not once, it seemed to Roy, did even a very small bone elude his grandfather’s diligence. When the record ended, a man with a deep voice began talking. The news on the radio included a report of an eight-year-old girl having been found behind a row of bushes in a park. Roy’s grandfather reached over to the counter where the radio was and turned it off. Roy looked out the window. For some reason, the sky looked more red than gray.
“Terrible,” said his grandfather. “Many years ago, the young son of a friend of mine was kidnapped and murdered by two older boys. The three boys knew each other, they lived in the same neighborhood. All of them came from well-to-do, respectable families.”
“Why did they kill your friend’s son?”
“The pair who committed the murder had planned everything carefully. Both of them were twenty years old, brilliant students at the university, and they devised what they thought would be a perfect crime. They considered what they were doing an experiment to prove to themselves that they could get away with it, that they were more clever than the police. Nobody else would ever know that they had done this; they pledged to one another that it would be their secret for the rest of their lives. Just the fact of knowing they had carried out the plan and succeeded in not being found out would be sufficient. It turned out not to be, of course.”
“How did they get caught, Pops?”
Roy’s grandfather put down his knife and fork, then took a swallow of beer.
“They couldn’t stand the anonymity, Roy, not being given recognition for their ingenuity. After the boy was reported missing, they volunteered, as concerned friends of the family, to help the police find him. Convinced as they were of their own genius, they decided to amplify the experience by witnessing first hand how inept the investigators were, to share a private joke at the expense not only of law enforcement, but the parents of the dead boy and, of course, the public, who were certain to be horrified, frightened and mystified. Eventually, after they slipped up and one of them confessed, they led the police to a culvert by a drainage canal where they had hidden the body.”
“What happened to them?”
“After a spectacular trial that was in the headlines for weeks, thanks to an outstanding defense lawyer who was a crusader against the death penalty, the murderers were given life sentences. One died in prison, knifed by a fellow inmate in a shower stall, and the other served more than thirty years before being paroled under special conditions. He volunteered to participate as a guinea pig in medical experiments, testing antiviral and anticancer drugs. He actually married and lived for many years following his release.
“The persons who suffered the most, of course, were the parents of the murdered child. As I said, I knew the father and considered him a friend. He was a good fellow, we belonged to the same club. He died of a broken heart not very long after the trial. His wife lived a few more years before she, too, had a heart attack. She survived but remained an invalid until her death. The boy was their only child.”
Rain was pounding the roof and the windows harder now. Roy shivered, even though the radiators were turned on all the way.
“That’s really a terrible story,” he said.
“Yes, it is. Books and plays have been written about the case. I read recently that a movie about it is in the works now. People just could not understand why these outstanding young men, both of whom were otherwise destined for great careers, would have risked everything by committing such a despicable act.”
“Maybe that’s why they did it,” said Roy. “I mean, if school was so easy for them, if they were so smart and came from rich families so they had everything they wanted, maybe taking that chance gave them a kind of excitement they couldn’t get any other way.”
“You’re right, Roy. The papers called it a ‘thrill’ killing.”
“Did they ever say they were sorry?”
“One of them did, the one who eventually got out of prison. He said he wanted to try to make up for his crime by allowing himself to be used by medical researchers to discover drugs that could save lives.”
That night, before Roy fell asleep, he thought about why people did terrible things. It wasn’t enough to just say that people who do something awful are sick in the head, there had to be something more, a kind of evil force that exists inside them. Maybe it exists in everyone, Roy thought, but some people have more evil in them than others. Roy wondered when he would find out how much of this force he had in himself, and what he would do about it if he had too much. Perhaps there wouldn’t be anything he could do, that the evil power would just take over his brain and use him as an agent or instrument of destruction. He was only nine years old, but Roy knew that this thought would be in his head for the rest of his life.