He walked amongst us. Magnificent efficiency.
The killer the media dubbed “LISK.” His burner phones. One phone for each victim. Untraceable. He calls and kills. Once. No one sees. No one knows. They are gone. When we see the ones that have flesh they are headless, handless – tattoos and birthmarks sliced off their bodies. No dental records. No finger prints. No identifiable marks. When others are accidentally found they are bones in an impenetrable marsh next to Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach.
But it’s the taunting that impresses me. Placing headless handless torsos where he knew they’d be found. Placing them in denigrating sexualized poses. He’s a torturer. His sadistic depravity is not satiated through the rape, torture and killing. He wants to pile on the belittlement even after they are dead. To stigmatize all who are disturbed by what he has done. The feminists. The “snowflakes.”
And the calls. One from a burner phone to the best friend of a victim soon after the night swallowed her up. Then he disappeared. Then calls – no longer than a minute – to a victim’s teenage sister just days after the victim disappears into the blood red, black ether. When the call is done the phone’s signal disappears into the Infernus only to rise again.
LISK is the Rock Star amongst the many on Long Island: Joel Rifkin; Robert Schulman; Richard Cottingham; John Bittrolff; Allen Gormeley; Richard Angelo; Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck; Albert Fish; Roy DeMeo; Carlo Gambino; John Gotti Jr. – to name a few and many, many more that were never caught. But we know they’re there because of the bodies.
No one counts them. Except me.
A lot of people get “whacked” in this book. Victims of serial sex killings on Long Island. This is not about sympathy. It’s about the who, how and why – so it never happens again.
We set out to find evil. Not write sympathetic epitaphs.
This is about our ugly hunt for serial killers in a suburban abyss. It is as much about a bad place as it is about an evil ethos.
Over four hundred cold case sex homicides in one county alone. All confirmed by the task force that investigates them.
There are two counties here. The other one is not looking.
We went everywhere the serial killers went. At all hours. The location of a sex killing remains atmospherically charged. We prowled through marshes, forests and parkways where they dumped bodies. We waited for their return.
We stalked the town where one lived in. We stalked them. We haunted their haunts in the low humming soothing blackness of night. We looked for the killers so that I …
I don’t know for sure what I would do. We may see.
I am as mad as a hatter. As unforgiving as a serial killer.
***
I address the team.
“Listen up. We have a veritable Smorgasburg. A male head, torso and legs. A female torso, leg and arm. We’ll work our way into the interior. The killer wouldn’t risk driving those parts somewhere else.”
***
Just to wholesomely fuck with them I got out of the car. The radio blasting through the open door … Karma Police arrest this man. I stood on the front lawn of the Club House. Faced the Trump flag. I did five Heil Hitler salutes. Not quickly. I spasmodically jerked my head as I held each and screamed in a high pitched frenzy “HEIL HITLER” I got into the car. We slowly drove off.
***
OnlyFans is an amateur porn center where patrons pay to interact with nude females. Suffolk residents spent more than $12.5 million in less than a year. Nassau County residents ejaculated nearly $9 million. Nassau and Suffolk have a combined population of just under 3 million. They beat the spending intensity of entire European nations.
A kaleidoscope of hundreds of thousands of Long Island men wanking – spewing cinematic geysers of jizzum into the suburban air. A phantasmagoria of semen stained everything. Don’t shake hands here.
***
Currently fifty-nine hotels/motels under scrutiny for sex trafficking. 20% involved minors. An 11 year old girl trafficked out of Suffolk hotels was rescued – pulled out of a Red Roof Inn. A two room set up. The money handling room and the sex room. Both littered with boxes of condoms, cell phones, cash and lingerie.
***
This is the death rattle of gentile intellectualism. There will be no more. We deal in repugnant slaughter. The hunt for serial killers and their communal soul in a red maelstrom.
The night is young. It’s about to last forever.
Haec nox in aeternum durabit.
***
I often think when there is no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth.
Long Island. Hundreds of murdered women lie nude in the forests, marshes and along the wooded parkways – many hideously displayed in degrading sexual poses. Some dismembered torsos found lying on their backs. Butchered. Missing hands and heads. Legs spread wide.
A lot of nude massacred gay men just lying around too.
Is there a message?
***
Meanwhile a sexual sadist lures young women into his basement man cave. “Takes them down” by striking them. Then suspends them from the ceiling of his torture chamber. For days he engages in eccentric phantastic torture. The Internet dares him to increase his malignant sadism.
***
By the summer of 2021 I sit at home. My law practice gone. My body – once a marvel of violent athleticism – deteriorating.
And now I am become obsolescence. There is no purpose to me or for me.
I text the dead.
Then I read about the killer dubbed “LISK” because for the first time I am the center of nothing. No case. No team. No tournament. And days rip by like minutes now. Accelerated morose boredom hurtling toward death.
But LISK could be my Everest. His victims remind me of my niece.
His burner phones. And the taunting calls. No longer than a minute then the phone’s signal is gone.
He knows law enforcement capabilities.
How would I catch you if I were still in law enforcement LISK. Then it became the crazy. LISK my good friend how do I catch you because you’re clever but so am I.
***
I will do one great thing before I meet Hunter Thompson. I have no time for a bucket list. Just a last wish.
I want to catch LISK. I want to bind him. Torture him. Kill him.
I find torture all around me.
Mecum veni. Mortuus sum et solus nunc. Come with me. I am dead and alone now.
***
Turtle is sitting in one of those open booths along the window. The shooter opens the glass door. At seven feet he lets go with his 9mm. The crowd collectively gasps. At about the seventh flash/bang the gun stops flashing/banging. The shooter calmly bangs the butt of the magazine against the booth backrest. He’s clearing the jam.
That’s how you clear a jammed 9mm which frequently happened back then.
The flashes and bangs continued until they stopped. Turtle is a fat young man. His brains are all over the table. The seating. The floor. Gray brain matter on the ceiling – cooking on the lights. You could smell it and hear it fry. Fountains of blood going in all directions from Turtle’s perforated head slumped backward – eyes just whites – until he lurched forward face planting into his fried chicken. Even in death craving one last spicey wing.
“What a rush,” I say mesmerized by the poetry of the Brooklyn night.
***
LISK I don’t believe in profiling. I look at You the individual. Not the type.
The subconscious metabolizes facts into logical deductions. If I go to the same places as you went at the times you went there. See what you saw. Touch what you touched. Hear what you heard. Taste the same air …
I will know your mind LISK.
And when I know your mind I will find you there.
***
Moses Sithole brought his still living victims to a lonely place near a prison where he had already raped, killed and dumped what became a cluster of his dead victims. The poor living women could see nude bodies in various states of decomposition. Clearly bound. And the smell. In this miasma of death and decay Moses raped and intimately killed them. He visited the departed and the dying at once.
***
Taylor is easy to find and get to. Halsey Manor Road north over the Long Island Expressway. Hang a left onto a broken up road called the “Sump Access Road.” Travel fifty or so yards. Stop. Get out of the car. There is the pile of wood that held the platform where Jessica’s headless torso – missing its lower arms and hands – was found by a local woman walking her dog.
Jessica is laid out like she’s about to take it in a freaky lower legs spread, each leg bent at the knee underneath her torso – pelvis up – missionary position. This pose disturbs me. I think of the mind that decided to do this. I think of my mind: Does it excite some part of me? Why take the time and risk to carefully pose her. You saw this somewhere on the dark web.
“Get out of my head.”
***
The female dog walker found Jessica lying nude on her back with her spread legs suggestively bent underneath her. A macabre sex pose. Jessica is missing her head and her hands just below the elbow. That image sinks its claws into my brain. It won’t let go.
Rex knew she’d be found. You tell me his message,” I asked the boys as we walked the fields. They thought it a strange question. I knew then that they had healthy minds. I got the message.
“Degradation. He’s saying you have no identity. Just a vagina … anus … and breasts.”
The team winced collectively.
“These girls of the lower classes were put on this earth to satiate his uniquely American Authoritarian-Libertarian needs.”
Camus Frank dug the philosophical insight: “Well put Ray.”
***
We now know from Rex’s ongoing self-improvement notes to himself – his Tony Robbins style “How To” manual for the sexually depraved – and his inglorious Internet searches, that Rex was into the “sexualization of decapitation.” I have no idea what that means. I know Ed “the Co-Ed Killer” Kemper used the decapitated heads of some of his victims for oral sex. Perhaps Rex mounted the place where the head used to be. Or he whacked while dismembering. Or did what Ed did.
Rex probably decapitated girls while they were alive. Exsanguination – life ending blood loss. Rex enjoyed the screams. The look in the girl’s eyes.
***
Rex you loved the begging most. Ultimate control.
I bet you played with them too. I bet you promised them mercy if they did things to you and for you. And then you laughed and laughed as you just went on torturing them. And at the height of the torture you made the same promises. And did it again. And the thing is – it hurt so much … the terror so intense … the victims always believed you. You broke their souls over and over again even as you bathed them in physical agony.
***
Sandra had numerous “sharp force injuries” to her face, torso, breasts, left thigh and “vaginal area.”
Welcome to America. Quaint Long Island. When I see you there I say, I bet you miss the Trinidadian sun. There’s no such thing as the American dream. The streets aren’t paved with gold. Just blood … snot … spit … cum … and urine.
But you keep on smiling.
***
At a press conference DA Ray Tierney announced that the task force that caught LISK widened its investigation to include more killings beyond Gilgo. That evolved into the investigation of cold cases.
Finally a number leaked out: 128 murdered females; 260 murdered males. Approximately 390 known cold homicide cases. Their bodies found scattered around Long Island. The females are almost all sex killings. Many of the males appear that way too.
***
We walk near the surf line. It’s almost light out at close to 1:00 am. The moon at its fullest as we walk toward it in the eastern sky. The ocean doesn’t just deposit waves. It heaves billions of gallons of water back out to sea. All in one gigantic rhythmic hum … as far as the eye can see east into the moon … and west to the lights of the beach communities on the next barrier Island over.
All of this sound is silence. No one says a word.
Always the seagull. One seagull. Alone. On the beach. It doesn’t avoid us. Doesn’t follow us. Ignores pieces of donuts. It just looks at us with its sad omniscient eyes. “In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.” I wonder is this the spirit of a Lost Girl. Then it shimmers into magnetic waves caused by the ions of the crashing surf. It’s so lonely. It wants to leave this place but never can. It softly disappears. But the shimmer remains.
***
I have no character arc. I never left the Bad Place.
The red swirling maelstrom spins around me. Months rip by like minutes. Time made bloody. I am sucked down.
“I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody wants to die. Welcome to the club.”
Today hunting that man I felt alive. I thought what is a meaningful life. There is no meaning. Just the limited time that is you.
And now it’s almost gone. What have I done with it?
The dying ground of my potential.