Serial Killers-Personal Narrative

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Some of you will remember this story. It was ten years ago, and I was employed then as a forensic psychologist in Marin County. Much of my work involved talking to criminals, then testifying as to their sanity in a court of law. On the afternoon this all began, for example — that afternoon when I blacked out in Sara Johnson’s apartment — I was scheduled to examine a man who’d been accused of strangling his wife.

Because of that incident, and all that has happened since, I know many people will be suspicious of anything I put down here. Jake Danser is not to be trusted, they will say. I have ulterior motives. I pretend to be whole-hearted, confessing minor flaws to hide a deeper evil.

I am not innocent of everything, I admit. I was thirty-seven
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Though she was not a naive woman, it was a naive question. Her eyes were still closed. The look on her face said she was moving towards some secret place within. We fell onto the bed. There was a delicious coolness about her body, a tautness. My thoughts drifted. My wife again. Our beautiful house out at the point. . . our beautiful things. . .

Then I thought about Angela Mori, and the morgue photos I’d seen splayed across the desk of her husband’s attorney.

Sara and I had not undressed yet. She was in her office clothes, a skirt cut at the knees, a blouse that unbuttoned in the back. She ran her fingers on my collar, then down the length of my tie, touching my belt. Soon things between us grew feverish. I lifted her skirt. She clutched me tighter, excited. My tie was undone, and the end of it got tangled between us. I pulled the tie off and it snaked across her chest, and somehow it got wrapped around her wrist and my wrist, too.

"Your eyes," she said to me, "they have a life of their own. The way they glimmer."

"The window to the soul," I joked.

"Do you believe in
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Out the window, there were low clouds coming down the hill. White clouds, fog really, and before too long that fog would come rushing down. The wind had already begun to nag at the rooftops. I was familiar with that nagging breeze — it hounded my house, mine and Elizabeth’s, on the other side of the point, over in Golden Hinde.

"What’s the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing. Let’s slow things down. Make the time last."

The room held a vivid luminosity. The curtains, Sara’s toes, her blouse draped over the chair — all were etched with light, an aura not unlike that which precedes certain types of seizures. It was often there for me at such moments, like the glow of the sun after it slips over the edge of the world. Entranced, though, lost in the moment, I sometimes did not recognize its presence until afterwards, in memory, so I cannot be sure even now, as I write this down, if it was there at all.

Sara rolled toward me. "We’ve been meeting like this for a while now," she said.

"Not so long. A few weeks."

"It wasn’t what I had planned, you know. This kind of thing, with a married man. I have a boyfriend."

"I

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