Chapter 4

Allow me to re-introduce myself to you. My name is Doris Night and I run a funeral parlor down here in the virtually unknown city of Needles, California. I am also running for the job of Mayor and have high hopes in that area due to a lot of backing from the Democratic party in these parts which is powerful in such matters. Of course, I sure as hell don’t hold with any of those progressive liberal concepts from my Democratic colleagues. I cried for an entire weekend when Daddy Trump lost that election to that clueless excuse for a President with all the signs of a man afflicted by fast moving dementia. Still most voters in these parts vote Democratic because their mamas and their papas trained them to be blue dog Democrats.

I am the only female member of the city council, and I assisted the police chief with his investigations because of payroll problems and shortage of law enforcement personnel due to the defund the police atmosphere and the restrictions of the covid infections.

It was easy for me to identify our “person of Interest” Billy Bob as being a sick puppy pervert, but he was no killer in my book. Still, the press tried their best to label him as the prime suspect with their typical ignorance of the facts and unknown details.

I knew Billy Bob well enough to identify his perverted fetishes and, in all honesty, I could testify that they were sordid enough without adding the proposed charges the prosecutor was contemplating down at the courthouse. Still, that didn’t make him any murderer or serial killer by any stretch of the imagination.

Right up front, I want you to know that old Billy Bob was a “sniffer” of all things feminine like panties, thongs, socks, shoes, and bras as well as tops with smelly armpit fabric that had been worn for more than one day. Back in high school, he had stolen some of my personal items and I caught him with them covering his face whilst he pulled his dick like an obsessed wrestler searching for a choke hold on a submissive opponent. I kicked his ass hard after that little incident and he seemed to enjoy my pummeling fists on his arms, legs and yes, even his offending erection.

I stupidly went to a party after graduation, and he must have slipped something into my drink because I woke up with a horrible ache in my bottom deep inside where I never let any boy touch me under any circumstances. I was still terribly naïve in those days and any thought about anal sex was absolutely disgusting to me in any situation.

I was on the swing on the back porch and the party was still going on inside the smoke filled house. I looked down and saw that I was totally bottomless, and his stuff was running down the insides of my legs like major forensic evidence of his use of my body for his perverted pleasure.

I saw the guilt in his eyes, and he kept saying over and over again, “I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to go that far.”

I started to dress myself without saying single word and he shut up knowing that I was pissed beyond belief. After that incident, I was extremely careful about not drinking any liquid that was already open or handed to me without me making it myself and carefully watching it the entire time I was drinking it.

In retrospect, it was further evidence to me that he was a true pervert but not a killer and that his sense of guilt would stop him from going down that lonely road of a serial killer.

I had a large blackboard in my office that was filled with crime photos of the murdered girls and lots of post-it notes describing the crime scene and the forensic evidence found at that location. On one side of the board, I had placed the photos of the persons of interest including Billy Bob. Without exaggeration, there had to be almost a dozen persons of interest all with past histories of aggression against female victims and a couple with convictions for physical assault. None of them were convicted killers and I didn’t put a whole lot of confidence that our serial killer was in that group.

The mail that day brought a letter to my desk that suggested that the killer might possibly be a female because a couple of the victims were known lesbians or bi-sexual females with a history of prostitution. The sender was careful because there were no fingerprints and it had been mailed at the general post office in the regular first class mail.

We had a total of six victims at that point in time. At least that was the body count of the discovered bodies in our area of operation. Of course, we were on a major interstate route and the killer could have been a truck driver with bodies strewn up and down the highway in other areas but I hadn’t had any reason to suspect it is anything other than a local modus operandi by a local killer with no other motive than just the pleasure of seeing the life drain out of a female body as he had his jollies using their flesh to satisfy his carnal urges.

I caught myself using the familiar pronoun “he” or “his” because of my own gender bias that the killer must be a man because ninety percent of all serial killers were males, and they usually choose females as their victim.

Taking that recent letter into consideration, I went back and checked the backgrounds of the eight female victims and discovered that all eight were sexually active and there was a total of four of them that had connections to prostitution in one form or another.