KILLER FICTION: The Annotated Ghoul

GJ Schaefer	Sondra London
I walk into the bar and look around. There is something special that I am looking for, or should I say someone special. A woman with that look about her, that look of wildness, uncaring, a willingness to do anything for a price. A whore or someone like one.	I think he was attracted to me because even though I was a virgin, I did project that look of wildness. That image triggered his sexuality. Once homing in on a likely target, where he'd go from there would depend upon the results of his testing.
I have to be sure she is the right one because one blunder could be the end for me. When I find the one that I'm looking for, I have to be sure through conversation. I'll make sure that no one notices me and then I'll make my offer. And if she accepts she has signed her death warrant.	This is how he sorted his target out as to whether she was to be worshiped or slaughtered. He'd written off this MO elsewhere in terms of offering a potential victim twenty bucks for a BJ, "and if she took it, she was dead meat." I didn't fall into that category.
Everything has been arranged long before in preparation of this event.	This is emblematic of the organized serial killer; one who has used fantasy to conceive and rehearse his crimes, and conscious intellect to plan them with an eye towards being able to get away with murder so the compulsion could be indulged again and again.
I take her for a ride. I am cordial enough and make no threatening motions. I give her no reason to become alarmed.	He's conscious of his demeanor and able to calibrate it to the situation. Please note in that regard, that this is an account of a single event. In other situations he would lose control. What developed as an ability became a disability.
I drive out to the place that I am going to leave my car, a place I have left it many times before, so as not to draw suspicion. I could be an ordinary traveler out of gas or taking a nap on the side of the road. Nobody would think differently, not even the police. That is important.	Like he was teaching a course! Can't you just see Professor Schaefer tap-tap-tapping the lectern! He's still young and relatively early in his career of deviance. And yet he sees himself as one who not only analyzes and prescribes what will happen but takes time to issue a NOTA BENE "to whom it may concern."
I pull over and casually say that we are here, and for her to get out. Maybe it is then that she starts to worry because of the fact that we are in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it is then that I have to show her the gun and remind her of the consequences for disobedience. If she knew what lay in store for her, she would gladly choose the bullet.	This is the horrification. There is so much more to his motivation than the mere ending of the life. He uses this heightened tension to reenact the issues that are troubling him from beneath the surface.

I have traveled over this trail before so the darkness is of little hindrance. The trail is well hidden. No one has ever been down it before, because of the desolate location and the thickness of the jungle around it, but with little difficulty I know where the trail is and where it goes.	Boy, I know that's right. He was an avid outdoorsman. I have been with him in the everglades and out on the open ocean. He really did know every stump and puddle. It was his enthusiasm. I could relate to fishing and hunting and boating. But how could I imagine that while we were in the same place together, what I saw through the eyes of innocence was far from what he saw as an experienced perpetrator. Entrances and exits, how to get in and how to get out. How to ditch evidence so "it" will be alligator meat by morning (the unforgettable quip he made to me, along with its chirpy corollary, "No body, no crime!"
Deep in the swamp is a huge tree with limbs strong enough walk on. It is completely surrounded by jungle. This is the place I seek. I have been there many times before, only those times it was in rehearsal and there was no victim, only the fantasy of it all. But I do know what will be done and how to do it step by step.	The obsessiveness; the repetitiveness. The way fantasy builds towards enactment. It really doesn't matter whether this document is a total fantasy or a literal diarization of a true crime. He describes the entire cycle and how he relishes every little bit of it. Thus he imagines what he wants to do, he writes it up, he reads it, he does it, he writes what he did and reads that. It would be interesting to know exactly what part of that daisy-chain we have here, but on the other hand, it's equally important to see it as a cyclic process.
The woman is by this time very frightened. This is good, because the more frightened she is, the greater the thrill for me.	Well, there you have it. Deriving pleasure from causing fear is only listed as one of the possible symptoms of sadism. But I think it deserves to be in the driver's seat in this case. Especially after surviving his TOXIC THOUGHT SYNDROME during the prison years when he contrived written assaults and fired them off at me, reveling in my discomfiture. He didn't have to kill anyone any more; he could just focus on causing fear and get off on that.
I tell her to strip, but I let her leave her underwear on. I tie her to a branch and gag her if she is too noisy while I go about the business at hand. I bring over the white sheet and a pillowcase to go over her head. I explain that I am going to hang her and she might as well accept the fact and cooperate. The gun is persuasive and there is always hope, so she cooperates. The limbs are arranged perfectly for the deed, all the right height and distance apart. It has taken a long time to find the right tree and the right person, but I finally did it.	The script is ritualistic, though not in an occult sense. Although much of what he did was for the thrill, he kept that keen eye trained on staying undetectible so he could get away with murder and live to kill again.

I arrange the rope and the noose and I dress the woman in the white shroud, place the pillowcase over her head, and then if I feel like it, sit down and entertain her with a bit of my conversation. Terrorize her.	That's a very accurate way to look at the underlying crime he perpetrated, both when he was able to physically kill, and later when all he could do was terrorize me in writing. He knew enough about me to push my buttons. He charged me with responsibility for the "countless women who died" because I had spurned him years before. He taunted me with information I had withheld from him: my whereabouts and movements. He threatened my child.
Give her my ideas on what she will look like while she is hanging there, fighting the rope that is slowly choking the life out of her. Make it as real as possible for her, so that she is petrified with fear. Make her know that she is going to die.	He just wants to get a reaction. I'm sure he was quite convincing in this role, with his gleefully lurid descriptions. Most of the fun for him was psychological. In the preenactment, the actual event, and its written-up and then re-read Report. A friend of ours who went on to become an MD described an episode where he told her he was surprised that he was not invisible. This indicates the nature of his fear. By provoking a reaction, he proves to himself that he exists.
The noose is arranged so that she will strangle slowly, and she sits on a board between two limbs with a long rope leading off into the jungle.	This is exactly the scenario he got caught enacting years later with Ms. Trotter and Ms. Wells. The way Dennis Rader aka Mister Bind-Torture-Kill suspended little Josephine Otero on her tiptoes was straight out of the Book of Schaefer.

When it is time, I will go off into the jungle and pull the rope and she will hang. Then I will go home to have something to eat, and bright and early the next morning I will be out hunting. I will find the body hanging from the tree and only then will I really notice it. Maybe fondle it and maybe even have coitus with it. I will leave and then return so it will be unbelievable to myself that I did the deed. I will not be able to remember doing it. Funny isn't it.

His script calls for him to leave and then return. That is what he did with Ms. Trotter and Ms. Wells. The remark about it being funny was etched in with pen as an addendum to this typescript. And though he willingly responded to my questions about this episode he never revealed why he went away or where he went or what he did. So that's just going to have to remain a mystery.

He comments elsewhere that "murder is thirsty business" and describes the hearty appetite he would have after pulling off a kill. He reveals enough insight to observe that he leaves and comes back so it will be unbelievable that he did the crime. However, an insight expressed in a moment of reflection does not reside permanently within his mind. Even though he would read his own journals, there would always be compartments of his consciousness where he could handle the insight, and other parts where he would remain paradoxically oblivious.

This is dissociation. One part of his personality sets up the scene then another part discovers it. Somewhere within that cast of characters is the one who sets the others in motion so that they will intersect. I doubt any kicks could ever be enjoyed by that stunted little guy within, who remained frozen, humiliated and angry from some deeply buried trauma whose elements can only be inferred by the ritualistic reenactments of his adult alter ego.

Then after many hours I will dispose of the body in a place that has never been seen by man, and it will soon rot away in the tropical heat, with the help of the bugs and vermin, the rats and raccoons that abound here.

He was well acquainted with those rats and raccoons. He was out there with them all the time. "Gator meat by morning." He said that same thing to Ms. Trotter and Ms. Wells so many years later. Quotidian, but also symbolic, such comments were essential to his self-aggrandization.

This is what I intend to do, but I do not know why. There is a drive within me so powerful that it completely takes over my sense of reason and values. I am at the mercy of this insane maddening drive to commit the ultimate crime of horror, and only when it is done will I be at rest. I have to fight off this desire every day of my life. Why? Why? That is the question. If I could understand what causes these emotions then I might be able better to combat them.

This eloquent cry is perhaps the only sincere thing he ever wrote. It speaks for many who feel driven from within by some power that does not feel like the Self, and that persistently threatens to overthrow the Self.

The eternal quandary of the mind at war with its own criminal nature has been described in the Book of Romans, Verses 19-23:

"For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwellers in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members."

I do positive things to prevent this happening. I stay away from bars, the beach, dances, anywhere that I might come in contact with that person that might put me over the edge. Twice this has nearly happened, but both times my senses prevented disaster before I had gone too far.	He describes a conscious effort to prevent perpetration. He has identified his triggers and claims to avoid them, and in this he is quite sincere, while at the same time the essay leads with just the type of scene he claims to avoid. In dealing with Schaefer, I learned how dissociation allows this kind of contradiction to appear on one and the same page. Sure enough, it is inconsistent, but it's nothing so simple as a lie. A professional law enforcement officer who is dissociated from his own criminal nature is not the same thing as a liar. To understand the dissociative mind, you have to overcome the customary tendency to resolve a contradiction by accepting one expression as true and rejecting the other as false. As Schaefer painstakingly explained to me, the mind of a serial killer is intrinsically contradictory. Since he can only see from one point of view at a time, it is only through extended exposure to such fluctuations that you can learn to discern the opposite point of view that is momentarily latent.
Once I picked up a girl at the beach and took her to a place that I had picked out for just such an occasion. She stood beneath the limb that she was going to hang from and somehow I just prevented myself from exposing what it was I had in mind. She was really frightened, and I was so nervous that I could barely speak. This was accompanied by violent headaches, and even as I recall this information to put on paper, I am plagued by headaches and a ringing in my ears. I have been tempted to do away with other women too, usually ones that I am sexually attracted to but do not know personally. One girl whom I almost killed I later became good friends with and drove her to the airport to fly up north. It was an experiment to see if I still wanted to kill her after I got to know her, and I didn't. In fact, I am still rather fond of her.	Schaefer never drove me to an airport, but in a prison interview he admitted to planning to kill me after I broke up with him. It was after a high-school football game. I was trudging along the dirt road to the parking lot when he pulled up next to me in his car offered me a ride; I said no thanks. If I had gotten in his car, I would have been murdered.
Once while in high school I playfully strangled a girl into unconsciousness, and have longed for the feeling it gave me ever since.	That girl was not me.
I have always liked the idea of strangling women. But I never do, because I am afraid I will be caught and confined. The idea of confinement is horrifying to me. I don't mind death, and have often thought about suicide. But it is the idea of confinement that keeps me from doing anything on the spur of the moment.	He's describing how it feels to be under control, while allowing that maintaining the equilibrium was not effortless; he could suppress these unlawful urges. But there would be other occasions when the threat of incarceration would have no power over the compulsion to kill. Even the most prolific serial killer can't fulfill Panzram's grim motto: "kill 'em all."

Often when I was sexually attracted to a woman and wanted to kill her I would steal her clothes and dress up in them, and then hang myself instead. This is a little risky, but I have only been caught at it twice by strangers, and I managed to wiggle out of it both times.

I used to have piles of women's clothes that I stole, but it got to where I didn't have anywhere to keep them, so I have to work with a minimum amount now. There was a time that I had wardrobes of clothes in trunks out in the forest, but then one day a forest fire destroyed the area, and I had to start all over.

At the heart of these self-torture rituals, I find more than just a straight-up dose of gender dysphoria. In this discussion, Schaefer doesn't parse the distinctions between the suffering alter-ego and the punishing one, but he does elsewhere.

Again, we see how similar the multifarous mind of the BTK killer is to that of his forebear in crime, our Sheriff Schaefer.

By ritually enacting this primitive conflict, with the cruel, dominant male punishing the naughty, vulgar female, these complex psychodramas give the Suffering Soul the sensation of wreaking order from chaos.

Both Rader and Schaefer took pictures of themselves in bondage drag, and in both of their cases, these pictures wound up filed as evidence of mens rea, the guilty mind that distinguishes a common homicide from a depraved murder.

One can only wonder if the True Detective and Inside Detective articles about Schaefer that appeared in 1972 were among those BTK used to flog along his fractionated fetishes, as was his wont.

Hanging seems to be the most exciting way of dispatching a victim, but in a pinch I would resort to strangulation. I can't explain why. The experience of imagining a woman hung produces intense sexual excitement. It is always the same thing: the preliminaries to the woman being hanged, and then ejaculation as she vanishes through the imaginary trap.	Well, he can't explain why, but maybe I can: both hanging and strangulation cause defecation. His disgusting unpublished writing makes it clear that defecation was his fetishistic payoff. If he couldn't "scare the crap out of her" with psychological and physical terrorism, he could always resort to terminal provocation of this primitive response.
Recently I have become seriously emotionally attached to a girl and she to me. We have experienced coitus together on several occasions. I always feel for her a deep and strong love, and will marry her if all works out in the future. But I am not completely emotionally wrapping myself up in her, so in the event that something does happen I won't do anything foolish. When we make love, it leaves us both feeling terrific and unguilty. But the only way that I can experience an orgasm is to think of that woman going through the trap and hanging there. I can make love all night and never lose the erection unless I think of that hanging woman. I merely wait until my girl is beginning to climax, and then I think of the woman hanging and I automatically climax myself. This bothers me but it doesn't take away the deep and intense feeling that I have for the girl that I make love to.	This disturbing passage forces recognition that no matter how intimate an encounter is, you never know what it means to the other person.
It has long been known that men ejaculate when hanged. A favorite method of self-gratification, used in the Middle Ages and still today, is what might be called do-it-yourself hanging. The sensation of choking produces an erection that culminates in less-violent orgasm, sometimes during the dying process. This stimulation has not been lost on the sexually perverted, who constantly cast about for more intense pleasures to replace whipping, self-scourging, biting and the like. The maniacal rapist murderer represents the unholy marriage between sex and death.	Thus intones Herr Professor.
I wonder if he understands his act. I don't understand it, even though these same feelings are occurring within me all the time. I would like to be able to free myself from this world, because it inhibits my creative ability. My mind cannot function properly when it is preoccupied with averting a social calamity and a personal tragedy. It is trying to fight the urge to relieve these terrible cravings. I am sure that there must be an answer somewhere, and some day I will be cured.	Actually, no, Dear John, you will never be cured. You'll just get badder and badder, until you get yourself murdered, you and your bad self. There's your criminal justice. Thank you very much for all you taught me; thank you very much and goodbye.