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For quite some time now, I have been looking to write articles in a new genre. Stories about the pathos of boxing and articles dealing with issues of individual freedom are great, but at some point there is a need to see if I can really be more versatile...to see if I can actualize that idea that has been ensconced in my brain for so long. Well, that time came and I decided to do a piece that either involved a spree killer or a mass murderer. Sooner or later, I'd work my way to a serial killer, but first things first.
I reside in northern New Hampshire which is adjacent to central Maine so where else could rural poverty, unemployment, and despair engender enough rage and anger to trigger spur-of-the-moment murders? Maybe West Virginia or Mississippi, but for my fictional purposes, the northeast is just fine. Thusly prepared, I began to map out plots and fill in gaps. As a factual backdrop, there were two stories in particular that haunted me and, I believed, would provide a solid conceptual platform for my new fictional pursuits.
One involved Andrew Cunanan, a real-life American Psycho who murdered five people, including famed fashion designer Gianni Versace, in a cross-country spree killing journey during a frightening 3-month period in 1997. Among other "colorful" things, he was called a crack head, brilliant child, male prostitute, clever cross dresser, aging kept boy, S&M porn star, and chameleon.
The first murder of Cunanan's spree was that of his friend Jeffrey Trail on April 27, 1997 in Minneapolis. Trail was bludgeoned furiously with a claw hammer between 25 and 30 times, mostly on his head and face. The next was his former lover, architect David Madson, who was found outside Minneapolis two days later with gunshot wounds to the head. One bullet had pierce his back and another had grazed his cheek. But the one that killed him had entered through his eye at close range and had passed through his head. Police quickly recognized a link, as Trail's body had been found in Madson's loft apartment. They then began an intensive manhunt. Cunanan, meanwhile, drove to Chicago where he killed prominent real-estate developer Lee Miglin, 72, on May 4. It is believed he took pleasure in torturing Miglin. He reportedly wrapped his head in masking tape, leaving small holes for breathing and then plunged a pair of pruning shears into his chest and slit his throat with a gardener's bow saw. A report documented 49 separate injuries to Miglin, including 19 blows to his head and face. It demonstrated the unbridled rage Cunanan was experiencing, not to mention his pattern of disfiguring his victims' faces.
Five days later, Cunanan, who escaped in Miglin's car, continued his killing in remote Pennsville, NJ, at a cemetery, where he killed his fourth victim, caretaker William Reese for his pick-up truck. A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the manhunt focused on Reese's truck, Cunanan remained in hiding in Miami Beach Finally on July 15, he chose fashion designer Versace for his fifth and final murder. Versace was gunned down in cold blood outside his Miami Beach home.
Eight days later Andrew Cunanan committed suicide with a shotgun blast to the head aboard a Miami houseboat. An autopsy showed that Cunanan had not contracted H.I.V., disproving speculation about what might have triggered his spree. No one will ever know his motives and after Versace's murder, the case was for all practical purposes closed.
The facts giving rise to the second story occurred much closer to home and involved one Carl Drega, a man from northern N.H, who killed 2 NH state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor and wounded three other law enforcement officers before being shot to death in a fierce fire fight with police in the small town of Colebrook (not far from the Canadian border). Drega used an optically sighted AR-15 to do his horrific damage. A search of his property following the rampage chillingly revealed hundreds of pounds of booby-trapped explosives.
What made the Drega massacre intriguing involved the events leading up to the flash point. Drega had long battled with local government officials, starting with a dispute in the 70's over whether he could use tarpaper to side his house. Then in 1981, he claimed 80 feet of the riverbank along his property collapsed during a rainstorm. Drega decided to dump and pack enough dirt to repair the damage, saying this would restore his lot along the Connecticut River to its original size. But state officials accused him of trying to change the course of the river. A state conservation officer, Sergeant Eric Stohl, claimed to have spotted the project from the river while passing the Drega property on a fish-stocking operation. The state hauled Drega into court, attempting to block his tiny "project." This action was piled on top of earlier charges by the local town, some dating back more than 20 years, and starting when the town of Columbia hauled Drega into court and threatened him with liens, judgments and finally property seizure over a "zoning violation" which was comprised of his failure to finish a house covered with the aforementioned tarpaper within a certain time frame.
Drega was barely literate and lacked legal assistance, and his self initiated legal filings became a laughing stock both in the courts and in the newspapers to which the obsessed man sent copies, asking for assistance. A keg of dynamite had been created and only awaited the "final straw" before it was ignited
In 1995, the town selectman Vickie Bunnell, accompanied a town tax assessor to Drega's property in a dispute over an assessment. In what should have been a clear warning, Drega fired shots into the air to drive them away. He then bought an AR-15 rifle and Armour vest, and began equipping his property with early-warning electronic noise and motion detectors against what he sensed would be an inevitable government assault. It appeared Drega was running out of patience with governmental red tape and what he may have perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be a pattern of unrelenting harassment. The warnings were there but no one recognized them. Surely he was aware of the government tactics used to confront civilians at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
On August 19, 1997, at about 2:30, two NH State Troopers, Scott Phillips and Les Lord, stopped Drega in the parking lot of LaPerle's IGA supermarket in neighboring Colebrook, for a "perception of defects" in his pickup truck. Arguably, this triggered the pent up rage and anger Drega had been harboring for so long. The keg of dynamite exploded and he shot and killed both troopers. Drega then commandeered their vehicle and drove to the office of former selectman, now lawyer and part-time judge, Vickie Bunnell. Fearful of Drega, Bunnell reportedly carried a handgun in her purse. She warned the staff in the building to get out before she herself left by the back door. Drega walked to the rear of the building and shot her in the back where she died. Dennis Joos, editor of the local Colebrook News and Sentinel, worked in the office next door. Unarmed, he ran out and tackled Drega. Drega walked about 15 feet with Joos still clutching him around the legs, then calmly shot him in the back, killing him as well.
Drega then drove across the state line to Vermont where he fired at NH Fish and Game Warden Wayne Saunders, sending his car off the road. Saunders' injuries were not life-threatening. Police from various agencies soon spotted the abandoned police cruiser Drega had been driving. As they approached the vehicle, they began taking fire from a nearby hilltop where Drega had positioned himself, armed with the AR-15 and about 150 rounds of ammunition. He managed to wound two more troopers and a U.S. Border Patrol agent before he was killed by police gunfire.
Carl Drega may have been pushed too hard by the government. The license plates on his rusty pickup bore the New Hampshire state motto, "Live Free or Die." Apparently he had made his choice, one that proved fatal for four innocent people.
If the Cunanan case stands as a poster child for spree killings, the Drega rampage is reflective of those kinds of situations where the killer has been eulogized as a kind of folk hero and martyr among radical activists who see his death as evidence of a Federal government conspiracy to deny Americans their rights, notwithstanding the number of innocent victims slaughtered by their "hero."
Another of this kind was Gordon Wendell Kahl, a 63 year old North Dakota farmer who was a tax protester best known for his involvement in two fatal shootouts with law enforcement officers in1983. During the 70's, Kahl organized the first Texas chapter of the notorious Posse Comitatus. In 1977, he was charged with tax evasion and placed on five years' probation. An arrest warrant was issued for him in March 1981 when he failed to report to a probation officer.
Kahl was driving his family home from a church meeting in Medina, ND on the evening of February 13, 1983, when he hit a roadblock. Shots rang out, and he saw his son gunned down. He pulled a Mini-14 automatic rifle from his gun rack, and a fierce battle ensued with local and federal officials--a battle that some claim was fought because the government wanted to silence Kahl's outspoken criticism of the income tax system. When the dust settled, Kahl, a highly decorated WWII veteran, had killed two officers and wounded three others. A series of events once again led to a flash point explosion with horrific results. In June 1983, he was discovered hiding out in an Arkansas farmhouse in the Ozarks and was killed in an ensuing shootout with law enforcement officers; a local sheriff was also killed in the exchange. Inexplicably, Kahl's body had been horrobly dismembered which gave rise to much speculation the nature of which could be the subject of separate articles.
Well armed with these bloody flashbacks, I was now prepared for my task. It was time to brew some coffee, boot up the computer and begin working. As is my wont, I started the piece with a title to wit: "Savage killings In Rural Maine." My style has always been to nail down a title and then work around it.
I then began to read it, "Over a period of four days, and in Maine's worse homicide case in more than a decade, a 31-year old cook with a spotty past and aimless future allegedly killed four people, cut three of them into pieces and set fire to the other. In between, he calmly reported to work at a nearby inn." The four-day rampage began at the start of the long Labor Day weekend and had the makings of a "macabre" movie rather than that of a frenzied spree. But the alleged violence didn't stop there. While in the holding tank, he attacked another inmate hitting him in the back of the head with a mop stick in an unprovoked attack that could have been serious had he not been restrained. And to add to the senseless rampage, the suspect, Christian Nielsen also killed three pet dogs. State Police Chief Col. Craig Poulin called it "a crime of horrific proportions."
Nielsen, who had been living at the Black Bear Bed & Breakfast for a couple of months, told police his first victim on Friday was Jimmy Whitehurst, 50, of Batesville, Ark., whose remains were burned, dismembered and discarded in the nearby town of Upton. Inn owner Julie Bullard, 65, was killed Sunday. The following day, her daughter, Selby, and friend Cynthia Beatson, 43, were also killed when they arrived at the inn unexpectedly. Police say Selby, concerned for her asthmatic mother, came to Newry to check on her, leaving her two children at a friend's house. Accompanied by Beatson, the pair apparently arrived as Nielsen was covering his tracks from the second murder. Police say he then shot them both and began trying to dismember and hide their bodies. Another terrible case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. All three women were horribly dismembered and initial, but unconfirmed, reports indicated the women's bodies were chopped up with a Chainsaw.
Whitehurst had split from his common law wife, a Maine resident, and returned south in May, leaving two of his four children behind, said his sister, Diana Whitehurst-Taylor, 52. But after a change of heart, he returned to Newry, his sister said. "He was just trying to get his two little ones and leave that place," she said. He was described as a handyman who was helping out Julie Bullard and had been while he was in the area.
In a chilling call, State police were alerted to the carnage Monday evening by Nielsen's father and stepmother who arrived at the inn, the Black Bear Bed and Breakfast (a remodeled seven-bedroom farmhouse in the rolling hills of western Maine), to find a woman's body and blood outside. Nielsen's father told troopers he thought his son had committed the killing. Nielsen then admitted killing all four people.
Julie Bullard had purchased the building, which had been converted into a B&B after moving to Maine two years ago. She had operated a bed and breakfast in San Francisco that she sold prior to coming to the Newry. "Her daughter, Selby, had just lost her husband in a car crash and I think in some ways she and Selby were....getting a fresh start," said Robin Zinchuk, of the local Chamber of Commerce. Julie decided in February to close the Black Bear, Zinchuk said, and there was a "For Sale" sign out front. And Selby Bullard had a 12-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son. She had recently been working part-time with a real estate firm in nearby Bethel. The phone rang unanswered Tuesday at the Inn.
As news spread, people in the community were shocked. Newry is near Maine's border with NH. The slayings unsettled people in the pastoral towns near the Sunday River resort, about 80 miles northwest of Portland. The days between Labor Day and the start of the foliage season are typically a quiet stretch when tourists canoe, fish and play golf at Sunday River. "The whole thing is surreal.. a shock to this small community," said Nancy White, co-owner of the Sudbury Inn, where Nielsen worked. White described him as a reliable employee, a good cook and "soft-spoken, quiet individual. He had a history of driving offenses that included an arrest for drunken driving, but nothing more serious. His license had been revoked a year ago. Authorities declined to discuss a motive for the killings.
Sadly, Julie Bullard has four biological children, four stepchildren, 20 grandchildren and "not a single enemy." "She was just an amazing woman," said a daughter. "Loving and gracious." Diane Whitehurst-Taylor said of her brother James: "Oh my God did he love his kids, he would do anything for them. I want to know why, just why, why, why did this have to happen to my brother?" she said through sobs.
Nielsen was ordered held without bail. He appeared in court Tuesday wearing an orange jumpsuit. He uttered only two words in court: "I am," when the judge asked if he was present. He appeared calm and was smiling as he was brought into and left the courtroom. As he read about the happenings in a newspaper the next day, he seemed to enjoy his notoriety even laughing at times. Maine is a state known for its low crime rate, so the killings came as a brutal shock.
Well there it was. The makings of my fictional Journey into a new genre. But there was one very big problem problem. The story involving Nielsen was not fictional and I didn't write it; it actually occurred during this past Labor Day weekend and local and national papers carried headlines like the following: "Cook held in Maine B&B murder spree." The above is a composite from different sources. The real scary part, however, is that I had scoped out a story but got only as as far my title, "Savage Killings In Rural Maine." How was I to know that Christian Nielsen would be the one to work around it and fill in the gaps. The story already had been completed, albeit in tragic and horrible fashion. The entire experience was chilling.
Well, I'm back at it again and it's Wednesday, September 13, 2006 and I plan to write about either a mass murderer or a serial killer. The unsolved New Bedford, MA serial kllings would be my backdrop if I decided to go in that direction. From April to September of 1988 a serial murderer haunted New Bedford dumping his victims alongside highways outside of the city. The slain women were prostitutes and drug addicts, the last of which was not found until April 1989. All told eleven women were believed to have perished at this slayer's hands, two remained missing. Adding to the mystery was the fact that several of the victims could be linked to one another. There was one suspevt who committed suicid and another who moved to Florida after which the murders ceased and this, too, intrigued me.
Interestingly, there was speculation, though I didn't buy it, that this killer and Europe's "Lisbon Ripper" were the same person. The Ripper was a Portuguese serial slayer suspected of the killings of prostitutes and drug addicts in Portugal and other European countries that began about the time the New Bedford killings ended. Curiously, New Bedford does have a very sizable Portuguese population.
But the backdrop that most intrigued me was a mass murder that occurred on December 6, 1989, when Marc Lepine killed 14 engineering students at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Lepine, a moody, 25-year-old loner who blamed "feminists" for a series of failed career starts and lost jobs, gunned a bloody trail through the classrooms and cafeterias. When he finally shot himself with his Sturm Ruger 223-calibre semi-automatic rifle, the toll reached 15 dead and 13 wounded, all in just 20 minutes. It was a horror that shocked Canada and triggered deep soul-searching about the roots of violence against women The mass murder prompted tighter gun laws, which included the creation of the controversial national firearms registry. It also prompted Parliament to create the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women in 1991 to coincide with the December anniversary of the tragedy.
Playing the random "rage against society" angle, I was once again prepared to persue my goal of writing a fictional piece..........this time on a mass muderer type, but once again my efforts were thwarted since the truth apparently is indeed stranger than fiction. On the very same day, September 13, 2-006, world wide papers papers reported on still another mass shooting, and this one also occurred in Montreal. Early accounts were as follows:
On September 13, a lone gunman attacked a Montreal college. Dressed entirely in black, he had "a stone cold face" and opened fire without warning, eyewitnesses said. About 20 people were wounded in the attack on Dawson College in the city center. One woman may have died later in hospital and several other victims were listed in critical condition.
Witnesses said the man began his random assault outside the college before walking through the front door and continuing to shoot inside before police fatally shot him. At times, he hid behind vending machines before emerging to take aim. "He said nothing. He had a stone cold face, there was nothing on his face, he didn't say anything, he didn't yell out any slogans or anything. He just started opening fire. He was a cold blooded killer," said student Soher Marous. One distraught student said she had been outside smoking a cigarette with her friends when the attack began. "There was a guy walking in a black trenchcoat and huge black boots with this retarded haircut and he had a huge machine gun. He was walking down (the street) in broad daylight with a gun -- no one says anything to him -- and then he started shooting," she told CBC television. One woman said the shooter was white, about 19, and looked like "the stereotype, with the long black trench coat and all the studs and piercing's and stuff like that."
Police said the 25-year-old attacker was from the Montreal area, but provided little other information. His car was still at the school, and police were searching his apartment.
Once again defeat was snatched from what I hoped would be literary victory. One again, I was stopped in my tracks. This time, rather than try to do something different, I'll stick with the pathos of boxing and pieces dealing with the philosophy of Ayn Rand. There simply is no way anyone can stop, much less slow down the real killings that are going on out there. And I cannot keep up with them.
Ted Sares can be reached at tedsares@adelphia.net
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