The serial killer’s trial was the first of its kind televised live. Seventy different news organizations attended, and it was shown on national cable news networks and broadcast live on WDJT, our local radio station. This station obtained record ratings. These legal proceedings would eventually cost the city of Milwaukee more than any other court case in the city’s history. The serial killer’s lawyer, an infamous prosecutor turned defense attorney named Gerald Boyle, had appeared in a highly publicized case during the 1980s. Dee and I were only girls at the time, but since that case made the national news and the lawyer was on TV and in the newspapers, I recognized him. He had previously defended two cops who murdered a Black man named Ernest R. Lacy they’d falsely accused of rape. They were acquitted. He had also defended the serial killer once before, when he’d stood trial for molesting a thirteen-year-old boy. Boyle told the judge, We don’t have a multiple offender here.
This time, though, no one wanted to hear the defense Gerry Boyle had cooked up for his client. Even then I knew we couldn’t have it both ways. We wanted the serial killer to be sick, an inhuman aberration, because this was an explanation we could live with, one that meant we were sound and healthy. This explanation, however, allowed him to skirt responsibility for his crimes. We could not live with this. People in Milwaukee wanted the serial killer to, as one family member put it, “stand up and take his justice like a man.” So we were caught; on the one hand, we wanted to hear what those experts had to say—This is a sick man, a defective man, a man who cannot control his sick impulses, a man who is himself a victim of terrible diseases. And yet this allowed him to escape culpability, and we needed him to be completely, unequivocally guilty. And so we were forced to admit that his behavior existed on the terrifying human spectrum of that which we are capable of doing to one another. And listen—everywhere in the country, people were reading the details of his crimes, and listening to his interviews from prison, and watching the trial, and consuming his story with such appetite that, really, it was not hard for me to believe his behavior was human. We are a terrifying bunch.
Leif was in prison but on work release, and I was spending my days watching the clock until I had to pick him up at prison, drive him to Ambrosia, and then drop him back off at prison. Leif tried to carry himself more stoically than ever, a performance for my benefit, perhaps, but a performance nonetheless. He spoke in fragments. Monosyllables. And he seemed to grow thinner and more wiry every day.
We listened to the serial killer’s verdict on the radio during one of the drives. Though Gerald Boyle had argued vigorously that the serial killer needed mental health care, not prison time, the judge and the jury did not agree. He was found guilty and sane on all fifteen counts of murder. He was sentenced to fifteen life terms. Three months later, he was extradited to Ohio, where he was found guilty of a sixteenth murder and sentenced to sixteen consecutive life terms in prison: sixteen hundred years behind bars.
Leif was loudly chewing a cheeseburger I’d bought him. He rolled the window down and tossed out two pickles. “Peg,” he said. “You know I hate these.” He motioned at the car radio and shook his head. “That guy will not last in there.”
He was certainly right about that.
Before they took the serial killer away, the judge allowed the victims’ families to give what he called “Victim Impact Statements.” Some of the families spoke directly to the serial killer. Others spoke about or to their loved ones. Reporters said Shirly Hughes, Anthony Hughes’s mother, held up the sign language symbol for I love you.
After the trial ended, the national news outlets packed up and left. They’d begun their slow exodus from the city back in September when national interest in the serial killer’s case sharply declined. After the trial ended, when they were all finally gone, it was clear that they’d done a lot of damage: They’d tampered with and harassed witnesses and their families, they’d stolen privileged court documents, and perhaps worst of all, they’d made a celebrity out of the serial killer. Everyone in America now knew his name.
After they left, the city felt empty of people but full of quietly boiling fear. The news had done that to us, although we were complicit. Outside the courthouse, the trash cans overflowed with weeks of reporters’ garbage, and no one seemed in a hurry to tidy the street. Instead, they held a candlelight vigil to heal the community, but no one was impressed. I stood at the end of North Avenue, where the street spilled over the bluff and ended above Lake Michigan, and watched the sidewalks flicker awake with white light as people came out of homes and restaurants and bars and coffee shops and lit candles. They weren’t lighting them to honor the men and boys whom the serial killer had murdered. They were lighting them as a weapon against their own fear of one another.
Some days while Leif was in prison, if we had extra time before I had to take him back, we’d find an empty spot off the highway or behind an abandoned gas station, and I’d give him a blow job. I liked to make him beg when he asked for head. This was never as satisfying as I thought it would be.
During those days when he was in prison, and Dee was gone, and Ma was complacent, and we were all setting ourselves up for the long wait of the rest of our lives, which we knew was coming, I didn’t feel much of anything at all. Some days I could tell how bad he wanted it, but he couldn’t seem to get hard no matter what I did. I knew all his favorite spots. I knew what he liked and how he liked me to act, and still, he’d be limp in my mouth. I got the sense that he wanted badly to get rough with me, maybe even hit me, because I knew how this turned him on, but he stayed restrained. He’d lift my chin up and away from his crotch and kiss me so soft and sweet, the length of his tongue brushing against my open lips. It was like a threat.
Other days I drove aimlessly around Milwaukee’s sprawl. I had an overwhelmingly painful rush of nostalgia for the beginning of last summer—before Walker’s Point, before Erik was hurt, before Dee got serious about Frank, when Leif and I would walk for hours around the city, not concerned with the next shifts we had to work, talking about poems and writers we admired, about our childhoods, about our favorite foods. I drove under the sweeping highway overpasses and saw the homeless camps—people living their lives in the places the city hadn’t yet figured out what to do with. There were a dozen tentlike structures and the smell of burning plastic. During the brutal Wisconsin winters, homeless people congregated around the massive steam tunnels for warmth. Sometimes the city sent police on horses to clear out these camps.
After the reporters left, the police strutted around the city with their chins a millimeter higher, but their shoulders sagged. They felt as if they’d been dragged through the mud. If they had, I didn’t think much of that mud had stuck. In the fall, more demonstrators marched on the Journal’s offices and the MPD to protest the way the city had handled the serial killer. They said this case was proof that the police had never been concerned with the safety of minorities in Milwaukee and that the media cared more about glamorizing the serial killer than respecting his victims.
People said their sons’ disappearances would have been taken seriously if they’d been pretty white women, not gay men of color. I wholeheartedly agreed. I only wanted to add two words—pretty, rich, and good white women. I knew my family was at an advantage—at least we’d gotten a report filed for Dee, at least we had Wolski, for whatever he was worth. I knew it was more than some families ever got. But it turns out you often have to be a lot of things to make the news care about you and to make you worthy of search and rescue. This is why you’ve heard about that woman who got kidnapped in Utah, but you can’t name a single man the serial killer murdered. Or why you’ve probably never heard of Alexis Patterson.
I think Frank hoped to doom Dee’s case immediately, and in many ways, when he cooked up his story about her “night job,” he succeeded. The shoe fit, even if our family knew it was ridiculous. I knew Dee wouldn’t have kept that a secret from me, if only because she would have loved to lord it over me: Look at how dangerous I am now. No, she wouldn’t have been able to keep that a secret. From our perspective, it was a lie. But I saw how the lie answered a lot of questions, especially for Wolski, whose efforts to find Dee began to flag significantly after his conversation with Frank. Not that his effort level before was impressive, but it had been somewhat steady. Maybe, in his eyes, Dee became a little less worthy of finding. Or maybe he just felt like it explained, to his satisfaction, why she had disappeared. The media had done something similar to the people murdered by the serial killer—they said these men and boys were criminals, they were prostitutes, they were drinkers and drug addicts, they willingly posed for nude photographs—as if this helped people to make sense of the cruelty of their deaths. No one wanted to admit that nothing could help us make sense of that.