No, Not Cereal...

In our weekly Rotary Club meetings, our club president usually offers raffle tickets to club members who can answer trivia questions. He also generally does a "This Day in History" feature. Sometimes, the questions will relate to the history he shares.

One night, he offered a ticket to anyone who could provide a name: "Today in history, the first known female serial killer in American history was executed in Florida. What was her name?" I looked around the room, waiting for someone who'd seen Charlize Theron's Academy Award winning performance in Monster. (I didn't see it; I avoid R rated movies until they're on TV or I can buy them in edited form.) No hands went up, so I raised mine and offered, "Eileen Wuornos."

I was right; several club members were surprised. "It's kind of creepy that you know that," one said. I went home and related that comment to my family. My 16 year old laughed.

"Have they met you?" he asked.

Indeed, my family is quite aware that I have all sorts of information about unsavory criminals, especially serial killers, in my head. I could have answered questions about Wuornos's childhood, victims, girlfriend, nickname and jail time. I know things not just about the well known individuals - the Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler - but people like Arthur Shawcross and Joel Rifkin. Often, I've watched interviews with them, so I can describe the things they did in their own words.

This is not, apparently, what people expect of a religious, middle aged mom with prudish taste in entertainment. I don't even watch horror films. What gives?

As with many things, the explanation lies, I think, in my growing up years. For one thing, I don't think of this information as entertainment - not at all. I tend to think of it as reconnaisance - scoping out the enemy.

I can trace this back to 1979, the year that I was 13. That year, a girl I knew from church and her best friend disappeared. They were 13 and 14.

Brenda Judd was never in my class at church, but I knew who she was. Her family was prominent in our congregation, and Brenda was pretty, popular and talented. I'd never met her friend Sandra Colley, but I can see, in my head, her face in the school photo her family provided to the newspaper, even more than 30 years later.

They disappeared from the Nevada State Fair. Having someone I knew disappear from a familiar place was shocking. I stared at their photos on the front page, and I wondered. When the time came for our church's summer camp, we wondered aloud to each other. Brenda should have been at camp; where was she? What happened?

Gerald Gallego and his commonlaw wife Charlene Williams happened. They killed at least three people in Sacramento, drove 2 1/2 hours over the Sierras to Reno, took Brenda and Sandra, killed them, and buried them somewhere about two hours east of their homes. (Their bodies weren't found until 1999.)

It was horrifying. Safety and security are hotbutton issues for me, and to have the feeling that terrible things could and did happen to someone in our own community shook me in a way that I don't think it's possible to fully recover from.

Williams cut a deal, testifying against Gallego in exchange for a lighter sentence. She was released years ago; she changed her name and disappeared. Gallego was sentenced to death, but cancer took him before the state did.

Putting a name and a face to the devil wasn't the worst part of the experience; it was reading the details. It didn't matter that it was years after the girls disappeared, after Gallego and Williams were in jail. Those details blew to shreds any remaining feelings of safety.

All kids of my generation were taught things designed to keep us safe from what's now called "stranger danger." We were told: Don't talk to strange men. Always stay with a buddy. Don't go into deserted areas in public - stay with the crowd. Don't let someone give you candy, drinks, alcohol or drugs. Don't get into strange cars. Let your parents know where you are, and what time you'll be back. Go out in the daylight hours, not at night. If someone suggests something that makes you nervous, say no. Don't engage in suggestive talk with any adults, or with kids you don't know (or for that matter, with kids you do know). Brenda and Sandra had followed every one of those rules on the day they were taken, every single one. And they ended up dead.

Williams, a tiny, softspoken woman barely 5 feet tall, had approached the girls at the fair and offered them $20 to help her put flyers under the windshield wipers of the cars in the fairgrounds parking lot. According to Williams, one of the girls even expressed relief that Williams wasn't trying to "hustle" them into something unacceptable.

The girls were arguably still safe until the sliding door of the Gallegos' van opened. The amount of time between safety and oblivion was about two seconds.

No one had ever said to their kids, "Avoid small, polite women offering you a job in broad daylight in a crowded, public place." No one could imagine the need.

The idea that everything we'd been taught about staying safe, the very things I'd planned on telling my own kids, were woefully inadequate just undid me. It could have been anyone, anywhere. It could have been me and my best friend.

In 1977, eight year old Lisa Bonham disappeared from a park I'd been to many times. Her clothes were found in a trash can along the freeway; months later, hikers found her skull not far from town. I was horrified - I was only 11, after all - but I had decided that it was something that was so rare, so bizarre, that it would never happen again. Now, I could no longer think anything of the sort.

My mother repeatedly assured me that my oldest sister, a university student, was safe when a woman was killed just off campus, but I feared for her safety. The fact that it was a garden variety interpersonal dispute helped a bit - at least someone wasn't stalking every woman at the U.

In late 1980, I was a freshman in high school, and first heard the name Ted Bundy. I didn't hear anything about Bundy, that I remember, until after he'd been convicted. I'd seen brief TV coverage of the Chi Omega murders that sent him to death row, and I'd heard something vague about "a suspect in multiple homicides," but it wasn't until I read a magazine article about him that the full horror became apparent. I should have felt better - he was behind bars, sentenced to death - but I didn't. Most of his victims were about the same age as my oldest sister, but his last known victim, Kimberly Leach, was my age, almost exactly. He had an uncanny knack for choosing honor students. He had a definite "type," and we fit it, me and both of my sisters.

After I read that magazine article on Bundy, I had to walk to school on a Saturday, by myself, to build sets. Normally, I'm comfortable by myself, but I can still remember how terrified I was that day. I couldn't help thinking of the interstate freeway, only 10 or 15 minutes away, and how far away I might be before someone noticed that I was gone.

Bundy victim Georgeann Hawkins, like Brenda and Sandra, had disappeared in just moments from a crowded, public place. There was no sign of a struggle, of a runaway, of a weapon, of anything that made sense. She was only steps from her own dorm room.

Here at home, in 1983 (when I was 17) Ricky Sechrest was arrested and charged with killing 10 year old Maggie Schindler and 9 year old Carly Villa. His grandmother was Maggie's babysitter. Ricky had gone to junior high with my sister, and she was sure he was not guilty. "He protected Belinda and me from bullies. He was so sweet! He'd never hurt anyone." She even considered going to visit him in jail - until he confessed. He'd molested the girls, then killed them with shovel blows to their heads. Sometimes I think about Maggie and Carly when I'm near where they were found (another familiar spot, a place where I spent significant time as a kid).

I'm sure that, psychologically speaking, learning everything I can about these predators is my way of trying to get my innocence back. I'm trying to build a protective bubble around myself and my loved ones, trying to ensure that we never fall victim. That's not entirely a bad thing. The day that Bundy took both Denise Naslund and Janice Ott from Lake Sammamish State Park in Washington, he approached other women with the same ruse. With his arm in a sling, he asked if they would help him load or unload his boat. Those who refused, because he gave them "the willies" or because they wondered why and how a man in a sling would be sailing, lived.

And so, I can tell you why I think the prime suspect in the Zodiac killings was able to pass a polygraph test. I can tell you why I don't think that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, and what Jack the Ripper theories I think are garbage.

I know that statistics say that people, especially women and children, are most likely to be victimized by someone they trust. I know, too, how many predators masquerade as authority figures.

They always try to appear harmless (and they're good at it). I can tell you what happened to Georgeann; a pleasant, well dressed man on crutches asked for her help carrying his things to his car. Once at his car, he hit her in the back of the head with a tire iron, then rolled her into the front of his car, where he'd removed the passenger seat. It took mere seconds.

Sometimes my sensibilities are still too tender. I had to stop reading, return a book to the library and read nothing but fluff for months after finding out that Bundy was a necrophiliac. I didn't bat an eye at finding out the same thing about Gary Ridgway. By then, I could fit that piece of the puzzle in to a number of predatory behaviors.

I devour the books written by John Douglas, an FBI profiler back when profiling was considered of about as much value as reading tea leaves. I can tell you all kinds of things that no one should ever really know about why these predators do what they do. I can point to the red flags in their childhoods. I don't subscribe to the mindset former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi does about members of the Manson Family, that they were born bad. Nobody is destined to behave this way. That's what's so frightening - that these people were, once upon a time, ordinary.

Of course, I'm also very aware that if someone is determined to cause you harm, they will, no matter how well informed you are.

My kids used to think I was kidding when they wondered out loud why I was so freaked out when they were only 10 minutes late, and I told them that I worried they'd been taken by a pedophile or a serial killer. At some point, they all figure out that I'm not kidding. (Or given to hyperbole.)

While I keep the gory details to myself, I share enough with my family that I don't think it's odd when one of my children asks, "Was it Gacy who hired his victims to work on his house?" While I want them to believe that most people are good, I want them to listen and act if someone ever gives them "the willies." I want them to know what the ploys are.

I parent differently than I thought I would, once upon a time. My kids have always had strict instructions never to go anywhere, with anyone, unless they have checked with their dad or me. That includes their grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents of best friends. It includes going just next door. It very definitely includes getting into anyone's car.

"Geez, Mom," they have said, more (much more) than once. "What do you think is going to happen?"

Dear God, I think each time, please don't let anything bad happen. Please let them live uneventful lives of security.