A Couple of Murderers I have Known

In my life, I have known murderers and people who have been murdered - in one case, I knew both, the young girl and her mother whom she killed (It's a Small Sometimes Ugly World, October 2010). As far as the former group, I knew two well, Tom and Patrick.

I met Tom late one night while playing pool near the campus of my university in 1978. It was a small, friendly bar populated equally by locals and college students. It had a lot of pool tables, I enjoyed going in there on weekends and spending time. Eventually, I got to know most of the people who regularly stopped by, and I felt pretty comfortable there. I was playing pool one summer evening, when a small, dark haired man (more like a boy) came up and put his quarter on my table, challenging the winner of the game. He wore dated clothes, with a Native American necklace that looked far too big for his neck. He had a pack of cigarettes in his t-shirt pocket, and he looked like he must have had a rough life in his few years. I noticed that when he came in, there was a visible reaction in the room. The noise changed, it went from a happy buzz to a series of low whispers. My challenger didn't seem to notice.

I won the game I was playing, and he dutifully racked the balls and I broke. We played a few games, splitting the outcomes. All the while, I noticed that the other patrons were watching intently, not for the acumen of our game, their eyes hardly left him. Gradually I knew his name, and he told me had returned to the area after a long period away. When he went up to the bar for a coke, no one talked to him. I found this very odd later when I discovered everyone in the room but me knew who he was, what he was.

Tom didn't talk much, and he seemed just happy to be there playing pool. After an hour or so, he excused himself and left. When the door closed behind him, sound returned to the room. People were laughing strangely and looking at me. I ignored them and continued to play pool. When I went into the bathroom, an acquaintance followed me in, perhaps nominated by the group. I found it odd when he started talking to me, as he was violating a well known rule of conversation in a men's room. He was brief though, anxious to tell me who I had just interacted with. Tom had been a well known trouble maker in his early teens, and he came from a family with a very bad reputation. On one horrible evening, the fifteen year old had taken a friend out into the woods and slit his throat over a few dollars and drug deal. He was sent to a juvenile facility for several years, and just recently been released. My informant shared the story with a tone like I had been lucky to have survived the evening.

I saw Tom several times after that, and we usually played pool and sat together between games. No one else ever talked to him. Over the course of the two weeks, I learned more about him, as he slowly started to reveal his past. One evening, he started the conversation with "you know what I did, don't you?" I told him I did and he asked me if I wanted to know what happened. I nodded, and he told me the story. There were no mitigating circumstances, no excuses. He told me flatly why he did it, and the details his life since. I sat there amazed, not so much for the sensational subject and detail, but because he told the story with absolutely no emotion. When he finished, he asked me if I had any questions. When I said no, he added "you know, I would do it again in a heartbeat." That sent shivers down my spine. He then switched the topic to pool and we never discussed it again.

I avoided the place for a long time, not wanting to see him again, and not wanting to avoid him if I did. It was a cold lesson in evil that I learned that summer, looking into those brown eyes. I heard he had been arrested on another charge and he had returned to prison. Tom had fired the first salvo against my liberality, I never again supposed that all men were fundamentally decent, and were products of their environment. Tom was a killer, always was, always would be.
Patrick was a different story. He was a student in the first class I taught at the college level, and we stayed in touch for several years. On the first night of class, I knew he had been in prison after I heard him speaking to the other students. Many former inmates I had know employed the same sort of distorted pragmatic logic. He spoke again in class, and he must have noticed my reaction, as he came up to me afterwards and asked me very bluntly, "you know where I have been, don't you?" I told him I supposed I did, and he asked me if he could talk to me. When I agreed, we sat down and he told me his story.

Eight years before, he had been dating a pretty mulatto girl across town. He was young and wild, and their affair had been tumultuous. After an argument one evening, she told him it was over, and in his words, he lost his mind. He went out, got drunk and high, and returned to her house with a coke bottle of gasoline, a sock, and a lighter. He stood outside her house yelling, and when no one replied he hurled his Molotov cocktail up on the porch, igniting in a small explosion. No one had been home, and the fire did not reach the main structure. He stood there for a minute watching his handy work, then decided it would be prudent to leave. As we walked back up the street, he was accosted by an elderly Black man who angrily demand he return until the police came. Patrick hit him as hard as he could, and when he hit the ground, the old man was dead. Patrick fled, but was picked up several hours later and was convicted of arson and manslaughter.

He told me that story as he didn't want me to be uncomfortable wondering what he had done. I thanked him, and we didn't speak about it for a long time. Patrick passed the class but dropped out a year later. He got a job as a travelling salesman selling advertising in college catalogs. It was good work for him, as it allowed him to exploit his charm and frenetic energy. We kept in touch, usually when he called me late at night to discuss some political issue or philosophic point. He never lost his prison rhetoric, and his life followed suit. He did not return to prison, but he bounced around, wheeling and dealing, one step of what ever trouble was following him.

I got to know both these men, and it gave me a far more complex understanding of the human psyche and evil. One was an evil man, the other was a man who did evil things. In either case, I decided I would not envy the individual, program, or society that would endeavor to help or rehabilitate them, having no idea where I would start.