Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

usually within the scope of explanation; perhaps he wants to shoot you because you’re sleeping with his wife (or perhaps he just thinks you are, which is just as bad). If someone is trying to break into your house after midnight, he probably has a clear motive; he probably needs money to buy crack or crystal meth or Wonder Bread. Most American crime is no random accident. I suppose nobody deserves to die, but it certainly seems like most people in America who get murdered have put themselves in a position where getting shot or stabbed is not an unthinkable consequence; their lifestyle dictates a certain degree of risk. However, that’s not the case with serial killer victims. I realize serial killers tend to ice prostitutes more often than anyone else, but they’re not killing them because they’re prostitutes; it’s not like serial killers are sexual moralists.[62] Hookers are simply easier to kill (no one notices when they disappear). If given the choice, the typical serial killer would just as soon shoot a dental assistant. In fact, he’d just as soon shoot someone like you, and maybe someday he will. This is why serial killing strikes me as such a modern act: It validates the seemingly irrational fear that someone you’ve never met before will just decide to capriciously end your life. It’s not figuratively senseless (like a gangland killing, which is stupid but still explicable), it’s literally senseless (inasmuch as there’s no connection between the two involved parties and no benefit to the assailant, beyond giving him the opportunity to masturbate on—or into—a corpse).

My obsession with serial killers began when I was ten years old. My fourth-grade teacher told our class that we should never hitchhike, because the only people who picked up hitchhikers were perverted serial killers. This advice was complicated by what my fifth-grade teacher told us the following year; she said that we would all have driver’s licenses in a few years, and the one rule we always needed to remember was never to pick up hitchhikers. This was because all hitchhikers were serial killers. According to what I learned in public school, every person on every freeway was trolling for destruction. I used to imagine nomadic, sadistic drifters thumbing rides with bloodthirsty Volkswagen owners, both desperately waiting for the first opportunity to kill each other. Hitchhiking seemed like an ultraviolent race against time.

Keeping this threat in mind, I began casually studying serial killers in my spare time, mostly through TV documentaries on PBS and British books with comical names like The Mammoth Book of Murder and The Mammoth Book of Killer Women. Due to my age (and my interest in the band W.A.S.P.), I suspect part of me was intrigued by the necrophilia gruesomeness of the police reports. However, what I found more fascinating were the skewed details about the killers’ lives, all of which seemed more original and more cliched than anything I experienced through literature or film. It didn’t “almost” seem funny; it seemed completely funny, pretty much all the time. I will never forget the 1985 arrest of Richard Ramirez, the infamous California “Night Stalker.” At one point in his court hearing, Ramirez held up his hand with a pentagram scrawled on the palm and hissed the word “Evil!” My cousin Greg and I were twelve when this happened, and we saw this particular image on television while attending a weeklong Catholic retreat that was hosted by local nuns. For the whole week, we drew pentagrams on our paws with ballpoint pens and constantly said “Evil!” in the hope of amusing the girls at this event, most of whom loved Culture Club and wore Esprit T-shirts. This was the same week we learned how to be altar boys.

However, my interest in guys like Ramirez went a little further than Greg’s, since he only saw all this as comical. At a very early age, an understanding of serial killers seemed important to me. The fact that Ramirez and I had the same favorite AC/DC song ( “Night Prowler”) didn’t freak me out, but it certainly made me wonder if I was somehow predisposed to freakish impulses. My all-time favorite serial killer was the never-captured Zodiac, the San Francisco–based mastermind who bragged to newspapers about his murders through a byzantine code and may have actually killed people because of his interest in math.[63] Somehow, that sounded like something I would come up with. I didn’t relate to these guys, per se, but I always wondered if I was a “serial person”—a Midwestern Zodiac who simply had no desire to kill.

This is why I can’t resist badgering my acquaintances who have encountered genuine madmen; perhaps my obsession with serial killers has less to do with what makes them different from everyone else and more to do with what makes them similar to those of us who don’t feel compelled to kill hookers. As I said, I have three such chums: Beyond serving as a firsthand witness to Sarah’s dance-a-thon with the second-rate death machine Cowboy Mike, I also know a guy who became friends with John Wayne Gacy (the much publicized “Clown Killer”) and another who attended high school with Jeffrey Dahmer (the most stridently prototypical serial killer in pop history). Much to their unilateral annoyance, I continually find myself compelled to ask them different versions of the same question: What does it mean to know a serial killer? And it seems like the answer is the same every single time.

It was on the last day of 2001 that I discovered I knew a man who knew John Wayne Gacy (or maybe it was on the first day of 2002, depending on how you quantify time). Near the conclusion of a rather dull New Year’s Eve party, I found myself chatting with a dude named Eric Nuzum, who works as the programming director for the National Public Radio station in Kent, Ohio. I was mostly arguing with his clever Asian girlfriend about the value of Bjork (she seemed to think Bjork was the cat’s pajamas), but the conversation somehow touched tangentially on the fact that Nuzum has one of John Wayne Gacy’s paintings hanging in his living room. I was immediately curious about this, but I found that Nuzum was reticent to talk about the subject (beyond casually admitting that he did, in fact, have one of Gacy’s paintings and that he did, in fact, carry on a friendship with the sociopath for roughly three years while the ex-clown sat on death row). I managed to pry a few more details about this relationship from him at the party, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly stoked about being hammered with questions about Gacy in the context of a New Year’s Eve fiesta. However, I asked him if I could interview him at length about Gacy at a later date, and he said, “Oh, probably.” When I e-mailed him about that possibility a month later, he was clearly more enthusiastic about having such a conversation. And by the time I finally showed up at his house, he seemed downright excited to be talking about John Wayne Gacy, at times behaving like I was a psychiatrist and he was a patient reminiscing about formative experiences from his childhood. It almost felt like the old Bob Newhart Show.

What happened, I think, was that my journalistic interest in Nuzum’s relationship with Gacy—as opposed to my prurient interest in Gacy himself—sort of jarred Eric into realizing that there was something noteworthy about having made small talk with someone who was about as nocuous as any twentieth-century American. This is especially true when one considers that Nuzum was not some kind of obsessive death groupie; his involvement with Gacy stemmed from involvement with an anticensorship group called Refuse and Resist (Nuzum is something of a First Amendment fanatic, having written a book titled Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America). It seems Nuzum had discovered that Gacy was the only inmate in the entire Illinois penal system who wasn’t allowed to sell his paintings commercially, and—being the spunky twenty-four-year-old idealist that he was—Nuzum decided to remedy this injustice. His first step was contacting Gacy by mail (he had to make sure Gacy wanted to be liberated), and things just kind of took off from there.

Like most incarcerated humans, Gacy loved mail; unlike most incarcerated humans, Gacy was picky about his friends. When anyone wrote to him, he returned a typed, two-page survey that asked fifty-two questions about artistic affinities, political ideologies, and personal values. Nuzum still has that form. The most ironic section of the questionnaire asks the applicant to describe what kind of advice he or she would offer to children; one assumes Gacy’s honest advisement would have been, “Don’t struggle while I sodomize you.” But the bottom line is that Nuzum responded to the fifty-two questions and slowly found himself a new pen pal. After a year of writing, Gacy began calling him on the telephone (collect, of course).

“He had HBO in his cell, so we talked about what was on HBO a lot,” Nuzum recalls. “He liked classic movies, but he really seemed more interested in mainstream crap like Footloose. His tastes weren’t very sophisticated. But sometimes I suspect that he liked big, bang-up Hollywood movies like Patriot Games because he knew they were culturally popular with people on the outside, and that made him feel more normal.”

While Nuzum was telling me about Gacy’s appreciation for the early work of Kevin Bacon, I found my eyes drifting over to the rudimentary portrait of Elvis Presley on his wall. This was the painting he had mentioned at the party. The image was of a relatively young Elvis, sadly staring at the ground against a sky-blue background. In the lower right corner, I could see the signature of “J.W. Gacy.” It’s not a stellar painting; I doubt Nuzum would hang it in his living room if it didn’t come from someone who snuffed the life out of thirty-three Chicagoans and stuffed