@@CHAP@@ PROLOGUE
@@CHAP@@ I Must Be in Hell
I must be in hell.
It was the only logical explanation. I was tied down and naked. The pain was unbearable. My arms and legs were being lacerated by some kind of blade. Every orifice of my body had been penetrated. I was choking and gagging from something shoved down my throat. Sharp objects had been stuck in my penis and rectum and felt like they were tearing me apart. I was bathed in sweat. Then I realized what was happening: I was being tortured to death by all the killers and rapists and child molesters I’d put away in my career. Now I was the victim and I couldn’t fight back.
I knew the way these guys operated; I’d seen it over and over again. They had a need to manipulate and dominate their prey. They wanted to be able to decide whether or not their victim should live or die, or how the victim should die. They’d keep me alive as long as my body would hold out, reviving me when I passed out or was close to death, always inflicting as much pain and suffering as possible. Some of them could go on for days like that.
They wanted to show me they were in total control, that I was completely at their mercy. The more I cried out, the more I begged for relief, the more I would fuel and energize their dark fantasies. If I would plead for my life or regress or call out for my mommy or daddy, that would really get them off.
This was my payback for six years of hunting the worst men on earth.
My heart was racing, I was burning up. I felt a horrible jab as they inched the sharp stick even farther up my penis. My entire body convulsed in agony.
Please, God, if I’m still alive, let me die quickly. And if I’m dead, deliver me quickly from the tortures of hell.
Then I saw an intense, bright white light, just like I’d heard about people seeing at the moment of death. I expected to see Christ or angels or the devil—I’d heard about that, too. But all I saw was that bright white light.
But I did hear a voice—a comforting, reassuring voice, the most calming sound I’d ever heard.
“John, don’t worry. We’re trying to make it all better.”
That was the last thing I remembered.
“John, do you hear me? Don’t worry. Take it easy. You’re in the hospital. You’re very sick, but we’re trying to make you better,” was what the nurse actually said to me. She had no idea whether or not I could hear her, but she kept repeating it, soothingly, over and over again.
Though I had no idea at the time, I was in the intensive care unit of Swedish Hospital in Seattle, in a coma, on life support. My arms and legs were strapped down. Tubes, hoses, and intravenous lines penetrated my body. I was not expected to live. It was early December of 1983, and I was thirty-eight years of age.
The story begins three weeks earlier, on the other side of the country. I was up in New York, speaking on criminal-personality profiling before an audience of about 350 members of the NYPD, the Transit Police, and the Nassau and Suffolk County, Long Island, Police Departments. I’d given this speech hundreds of times and could just about do the whole thing on autopilot.
All of a sudden, my mind started to wander. I was aware I was still talking, but I’d broken out in a cold sweat and I was saying to myself, How in hell am I going to handle all these cases? I was just finishing up with the Wayne Williams child-killing case in Atlanta and Buffalo’s “.22-Caliber” race murders. I had been called in to the “Trailside Killer” case in San Francisco. I was consulting with Scotland Yard on the “Yorkshire Ripper” investigation in England. I was going back and forth to Alaska, working on the Robert Hansen case, in which an Anchorage baker was picking up prostitutes, flying them out into the wilderness, and hunting them down. I had a serial arsonist targeting synagogues in Hartford, Connecticut. And I had to fly out to Seattle the week after next to advise the Green River Task Force in what was shaping up as one of the largest serial murders in American history, the killer preying mainly on prostitutes and transients in the Seattle-Tacoma corridor.