Kind, Ordinary, Simple, Twisted: Meet the ‘Serial Killers Next Door’

“Who lives near you?” asks psychologist and true crime expert Emma Kenny in The Serial Killer Next Door: Chilling True Stories of the Killers Hidden Among Us (Mobius).

“Perhaps a friendly postman or a businessman in a sharp suit? These are the faces you know, individuals as ‘ordinary’ as you or I. But it is precisely in the depths of this ordinariness that a frightening anomaly may be lurking .

“For within some of these seemingly normal souls lie desires so dark that they are almost impossible for most of us to fathom.”

“The Serial Killer Next Door” revisits the stories of 15 notorious mass murderers, from the most famous, like Ted Bundy, to others like Dorothea Puente, who killed nine elderly and disabled residents of her boarding house in Sacramento, Calif. ., and Jerry. Brudos, the ‘shoe fetish killer’ from Salem, Oreg.

“Uncovering the minds of serial killers requires a strength to delve into the darkest recesses of human nature,” Kenny writes.

From the start, the book is equal parts graphic and disturbing.

The story of David Parker Ray, the so-called “Toy Box Killer”, is one such case.

A sex torturer and serial killer suspected of more than 60 murders beginning in the 1950s and ending in the late 1990s, Ray kidnapped women before chaining them to a windowless, soundproof trailer at home his in Elephant Butte, NM, and subdue them. unimaginable abuse for months.

Many died, their bodies then filled with cement so he could dump them in the local reservoir or river, knowing they would never surface.

Those who survived “were pumped full of a cocktail of drugs designed to confuse them and induce a state of amnesia,” Kenny writes. “That would ensure they wouldn’t be able to implicate Ray to the police.”

It wasn’t until 22-year-old Cynthia Jaramillo escaped his clutches in 1999 that the full extent of Ray’s depravity became known.

“His innocuous-looking trailer turned out to be a horrific torture prison,” adds Kenny. “David Parker Ray’s story serves as a chilling reminder of the depths to which humanity can sink.”

Like all the killers featured in the book, David Parker Ray shared the same seemingly normal characteristics that allowed him to hide in plain sight.

“Ray was known within the community as a kind man who held down a full-time job and was well-respected as a mechanic. He also had a clean record,” adds Kenny.

It is this ordinariness, Kenny argues, that makes their crimes all the more shocking. “How does the coexistence of banality and brutality make sense? she asks.

Take ex-soldier Israel Keyes, who took his own life in prison while awaiting trial for a series of gruesome murders across the country between 2010 and 2012.

He was, Kenny writes, “quiet and introspective. . . The unassuming man who could have waved hello as you picked up your morning paper.”

But what these killers also have in common is power “gained through the infliction of physical and psychological pain and humiliation.”

It’s also, Kenny says, a means of boosting low self-esteem on the one hand, and a way to escape or erase memories of difficult backgrounds, usually involving abuse, violence and “a deep-seated ‘fear of rejection’ on the other hand.

That’s certainly the case with Aileen Wuornos, who killed seven men and is considered America’s first female serial killer.

Her childhood was dominated by the violent sexual abuse she suffered from family members, and she had attempted suicide six times before her killing spree in 1989.

“Her life was the epitome of a horror story from her conception to her execution by lethal injection on October 9, 2002, when she was just 46 years old,” Kenny writes.

Indeed, when Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron in the 2003 Oscar-winning film “Monster”) was executed in October 2002, one of the last things she said was, “I deserve to die.”

Kenny also reveals how many serial killers don’t fit stereotypical notions of what a mass murderer might look like.

Tamara Samsonova, for example, was a “small and frail” 68-year-old grandmother who, however, killed her lodger and a woman she later lived with before dismembering their bodies, t would eat their lungs and scatter the remaining parts in the areas around her home, the Fruzensky district of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Now 77, Samsonova remains in custody as police investigate 14 other possible murders, including that of her husband.

“Older women are rarely perceived as capable of heinous crimes,” Kenny writes.

“This understatement, combined with the lack of overtly questionable behavior, created a perfect smoke screen.”

It’s further proof, if it were needed, that you can never tell what your neighbors might be up to behind closed doors.

By the end of the book, as Kenny concludes, “you may find yourself looking a little closer, listening a little more carefully, and asking yourself: Do I really know who lives next door to me?”