Chapter 16

Strychnine Strangers in a Bundy World

We were young and nothing could pull us down

We would run and never touch the ground

We carried the weight of the world on the wings of a butterfly

“Reaching Down to Touch the Sky”

Safely tucked away in our little piece of paradise, we measured violence by the occasional shove of childish frustration, and anger, by how long it took a friend to invite you to his sleepover after arguing with you about something seconds earlier. We weighed jealousy and mistrust against the boredom and loneliness of going it alone. In most cases, our worst moments of friendship served as lessons learned, steeling us against any serious repeat.

The most enduring lesson about friendship and citizenship centered on The Fort in Jim Maples’s backyard. Over the summer, we spent most of our waking hours working on it. We gathered junk wood and other materials from the neighborhood and contributed the occasional prized possession from our personal collections. The Fort was in Jim’s backyard, but it belonged to all of us.

I suppose it’s a good sign that I can’t remember the exact cause of the rift regarding The Fort. After all, it was but a short-lived ripple in an otherwise placid flow of friendship. All I do remember is the other boys and I were angry with Jim about something to do with The Fort. Whatever it was, it was at least temporarily unforgivable in our minds and marked the only time that the group turned on one of its own.

With pint-sized indignation and oversized righteousness, we marched into Jim’s backyard to tear down what we had all built up. Without Jim having any idea of what we were up to, the rest of us scaled the wooden behemoth with crowbars and hammers in hand. We ripped apart and hauled away any board, wire, or other contraption that we claimed as personal property. Halfway through the breaking and the ripping, Jim stormed out his back door. Hurt feelings and angry words filled the air. Jim’s mom interceded first, followed by several of the other parents, all letting loose emphatic disappointment and intimidating commands.

“What do you guys think you’re doing?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

Not used to seeing such animosity among us, much less destructive chaos aimed inward, our parents were confused and disgusted.

“Get down from there right now!”

“You are supposed to be friends.”

That last phrase stopped the carnage in its tracks. Like the objects of Medusa’s stare, we collectively turned to stone, unable to drop even the incriminating hammers and two-by-fours in our hands. We looked at each other as feelings of rage gave way to shame and then thankfully, to the loftier heights of remorse and forgiveness. The ugliness didn’t last long, and luckily, there was no permanent damage to friendship or property. What we originally built up and tore down was built back up again. Like an Amish barn raising, we once again relied on group effort to repair and renew. That kind of grace rarely repeats itself once you’re an adult. When pride gets in the way, it becomes harder to admit that you’re wrong, so much so that we often accept isolation over making a simple apology. In adulthood, selfishness is often the bullet we use to ourselves in the foot.

The enduring lesson of that event at the Fort was stark and straightforward: that which divides us is shallow and frivolous when measured against that which binds us. Self-righteousness, especially when you are ten years old, is about as overrated a human condition as there is because of what often follows it—loneliness. Loneliness was an enemy of the Starmount ethos. It was the antithesis of all we practiced, and thankfully, exceedingly rare for the Sons of Starmount to feel. The occasional flu or short-lived grounding caused loneliness to slip into our thoughts but never our souls. We fought back against any semblance of loneliness with dreams of tomorrow’s adventure and the knowledge that our friends would always be waiting for us.

Unfortunately, the harmony of our little neighborhood utopia did not extend beyond the immediate horizon. There were darker, more sinister deeds afoot at that time in Tallahassee. And like ancient fears of falling off the edge of a flat world should one sail too far from land, the life we recognized as perfect, seemed to fall off the edge of the world at the busy end of Starmount.

That summer, a newspaper article quickly and dramatically became the stuff of urban legend. According to reports, a strange man in an ominously plain truck was prowling suburban Tallahassee and poisoning the neighborhood dogs. There was no description of the man, but we envisioned him in a clichéd trench coat, balding, dirty, and dubious. The truck was described as being some kind of delivery vehicle, like a modern-day UPS or FedEx truck.

This man was cruising neighborhood streets filled with families, looking for stray or unleashed dogs to kill. His particularly sick and twisted strategy was to drive slowly through a neighborhood, and if he saw a dog, he’d throw a slab of steak, tainted with the poison strychnine, in its direction.

Strychnine is a class of rodenticide. It is odorless and cruel, causing internal bleeding and organ failure. Designed to kill mice and rats in your garage, it is equally deadly for dogs, cats, and almost any other kind of childhood pet.

The Sons of Starmount were on guard most of the summer, scrutinizing every van and truck that passed through our lands. It was not possible to make a delivery in our territory without the suspicious surveillance that only a child with a dog could muster. The Neighborhood Watch movement had just begun a few years earlier but had yet to establish itself on Starmount. We were its precursor. We embodied both the sense of civic duty and the over-eager, citizen-police vibe of the organized program. We were vigilant, and we were armed. BB guns, sticks, slingshots, and rocks were our weapons of choice. And those weapons were field-tested and battle-ready. We had used them all against each other for most of the summer, so we were more than confident in their effectiveness against an actual bad guy.

Several concerning vehicles frequented our street that summer, not delivering anything, just turning around at the dead end and heading back up toward Meridian Road. We ran alongside those trucks, weapons drawn. Sometimes we even locked eyes with the drivers; who knows what they must have thought about the little Lord of the Flies gang stalking them.

It is more than possible that the dog killer in the ominously plain truck did indeed canvass our neighborhood, but he found no victims. In the end, the only pets lost that year were to an alligator’s natural predation and not to the wickedness of man.

A disgruntled dog hater was the least of Tallahassee’s troubles. Within months, a far more notorious assassin gripped our city. A soon-to-be-infamous serial killer rolled into the state capital just days after escaping a Colorado jail. Ted Bundy prowled the campus of Florida State University, hanging out in collegiate bars and lurking in the large lecture halls. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, the monster in him awoke.

Around 3:00 a.m. on a bitterly cold morning for Tallahassee, Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house and found his first two victims asleep. The headlines graphically depicted the bludgeoning and strangulation deaths of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Bundy also attacked fellow sorority sisters Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner with a log. Unfortunately, the killer’s thirst remained unquenched, and his destructive storm raged on. Before the sun could rise again, he left yet another young student, Cheryl Thomas, brutally beaten, but alive.

These local events were my first exposure to real violence and outright evil. My parents explained it to me as best they could and in the manner they always did—honest and straightforward. The newspaper headlines shocked me, but a developing conscience too innocent to grasp the full horror of what had occurred so close to home temporarily protected me from the madness.

“Did you hear about that Bundy guy killing all those girls last night?” I asked Jim.

“Sick bastard! He better not show his face on our street.” Our confident bravado marched like a drum major far in front of our actual abilities.

“Yeah, he better not mess with us,” I shot back with a smug smile.

Ted Bundy’s rampage finally ended with his arrest just one month later, three hours west of Starmount, in Pensacola, Florida. Sadly, that arrest came a week too late to save his final victim, twelve-year-old Kimberley Leach. We heard about his being caught, but didn’t know anything about that final victim, and that was a good thing. The knowledge of such violence against a girl barely two years older than we were would have shattered our innocence.

Life had yet to calibrate our minds to understand pure evil. Even making a good friend cry or feel left out, though temporarily empowering at times, always had the effect of diminishing our sense of inclusion and rightful place in the world. In most cases, we offered an immediate apology and set out to right our wrongs, even if we did so out of selfish need. After all, hurting someone’s feelings often left us in the unenviable position of playing alone.

Children are not immune to losing their sense of humanity. Thankfully, our families nurtured and encouraged us, and never abused or ridiculed us. Life had spared us that tortured existence. We could not comprehend the kind of power that some people got off on when they hurt others. For us, causing pain only served as a distraction from joy.

Growing up in the peaceful preserve of Starmount protected us from the destruction and delinquency of some less fortunate children. That is not to say that we were sheltered offspring. Our eyes were wide open early on, and our ears sensitively tuned to tone and intent. Yet together, we were able to circumvent most evidence of evil and suffering. I don’t know that we were endowed with any enlightened moral compass or beyond-our-years wisdom, but we had an uncomplicated view of what a life should look like, and we did our best to embody it. We carried no baggage on our journey, no hidden agendas, no manipulative intent. Our only pathology was that of unencumbered adventure, comradery, and fun. We demanded attention, but only in the pursuit of a good time. We fought for position, but in the end, were mostly satisfied with just being included.

Nothing appears or disappears in a vacuum. You make a decision, and then you reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. Understanding that others around you can also reap the rewards and suffer the consequences of your decisions allows for the kind of changes necessary to become a good person. Empathy is the sixth sense.

Thankfully, perfection has nothing to do with becoming a good person or not. If it did, we’d all be screwed. We can make huge mistakes, but we can redeem those mistakes through larger acts of kindness and forgiveness. I was fortunate enough to learn that lesson in childhood when the marrow of one’s life is still forming. But that is not to say that I haven’t made huge mistakes.

I have been on both sides of causing and enduring pain. Life has exposed me to both the ugliness and the beauty this world has to offer. To ignore any of life’s ugliness or beauty is to buy into that tired old thought that the world is flat and everything that doesn’t fit in our narrow little box, we send flying off the edges. In the end, I discovered for better or for worse, that both Starmount Drive and the outside world were round after all.