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Friday, March 28, 2008

DESTINY'S DAMNED: A PRELUDE TO MURDER

The stray cat on the bedroom floor, sleeping over the crack, was
purring, the steady, familiar rattle soothing, as Judy Bowers lay stiff
in her sub-floor coffin., grateful for the company. Sneaking in the
house through some opening, probably in the basement, the cat was a
loyal companion, coming back immediately after each of her visits,
comforting her as she calmed, her wounds unattended. “You my kitty?”
she whispered. A triangular-shaped head, half distinctly black, the
other half fire and stone, the mottled colors of the earth, peered
through the crack as the tortoise shell female purred perceptively
louder. “Got somebody to feed you?”
He was there just that morning,
impatient with Judy because he forgot her food, in a hurry because he
had some kind of meeting with a friend, rushing, not getting a rise
from himself and, in anger, sodomizing her with a broom, hurting her
like he had never hurt her before.
Though he had not brought her
food for more than three days, and though she bled from her rectum for
what seemed hours after he left, she was peaceful, knowing he would not
hurt her again, at least until tomorrow.
Bound at the wrists and
ankles, while staring blankly at the tortoise shell’s fir, wishing she
could make some physical contact with something alive other than him,
she became aware that something cold was crawling up her arm.
Occasionally hesitating as if there to inspect her skin for edibility,
it then continued. Near hysterical, she shuddered. Rolling her
shoulder, bumping her body as best she could against the underside of
the floor, she tried to shake or knock the thing off. Strength a luxury
she did not have, her effort was useless. The tiny feet crawled onto
her neck. Bound tightly, the only defense left to her the movement of
her head, she twisted quickly, and the muscles of her spine unraveled.
“Oh..h..h,” she groaned, unable to fight further. Straining her eyes to
see the creature that now crawled across her cheek, she was horrified.
Through the blur, was a long, shiny creature with pincers.
Fear
turned to lust, and as the creature ventured further, she opened her
mouth and turned in its direction. Catching the scent of her breath,
lured to the fleshy cavern, the creature changed course and crawled
inside, to be instantly trapped and eaten.

Much later, possibly
an hour or three hours later, the instance with the insect lost in a
fog of other memories, she slept. Not realizing the cat and her purrs
were gone, she took a peaceful breath which while descending down her
throat stopped and went no further. The front door was closing. Heart
pounding, breath trapped inside her throat, she listened as the feared
and familiar footsteps came toward her.
“Hey, bitch,” he called, words slurring, anger seething. “Where’s my dinner?”
Confused,
her world more nightmare than reality, she accused herself, reviewing
in her half crazed mind a conversation that never took place. Dinner.
My God, whydidn ’t I fix him dinner. He told me he’d be back. He told
me he wanted roast beef, rare,.and scalloped potatoes. But, where’s the
refrigerator?”

Excerpt from DESTINY'S DAMNED.

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
available:
www.pilchuckpublishing.com
amazon.com
books stores and libraries

Thursday, March 20, 2008

PAGAN CROSS IS RICH IN SYMBOLISM

The symbolism of the cross goes much deeper than what the Christians assign to it. The Christian symbol of the cross incorporates only part of its ancient pagan meanings. Pagans attached a much greater significance to it.
The cross symbol originally represented fire and looked like a swastika. As the sign of life, the cross was always associated with fire and the sun. The cross was also the symbol for several pagan gods. The vertical arm of the cross symbolized the masculine forces of the sky, the horizontal arm the feminine forces of darkness. When used to symbolize a god being crucified it might have, above the god’s head, an upside down crescent moon symbolizing death and resurrection. The crucifixion of a god represented the sun’s passing through the equinoxes. In the spring, the sun reaches the vernal equinox and is resurrected. In the winter, it descends in the sky until the solstice when it stops or dies for three days, then on December 25th, moves north and is reborn.
The cross symbolizes the threshold between time and eternity. Death and resurrection. The cross is the threshold over which a soul leaves this earth and enters eternity. It is also the threshold at which the soul comes back from eternity and is reborn. It is a gateway between life and the afterlife. A god on the cross signifies his control of that gate, symbolism less obviously adopted by the Christians.
In the celebration of Easter, an outgrowth of ancient pagan festivals, we should remember the cross’s much greater heritage and symbolism.

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
available:
www.pilchuckpublishing.com
amazon.com
books stores and libraries

Monday, March 17, 2008

SERIAL KILLER: DAHMER-MOTIVE OR EXCUSE

JEFFREY DAHMER murdered then sexually molested, mutilated and/or cannibalized 17 young men and boys. WHY?
Look at what he did.
He murdered his first victim right after he graduated from high school in 1978. He picked up a hitchhiker, took him to his parent’s house, drank beer with him and had sex with him. When the hitchhiker tried to leave, he killed him, bludgeoning him to death with a barbell. To hide the crime, he dismembered the body, dumped the pieces in plastic bags, and buried them in a wooded area behind his parent’s house. About three years later, right after he was unceremoniously discharged from the army for drunkenness, he went back to his parents and dug up the decomposing body parts. Not finished with the mutilation, he beat the body into tiny pieces with a hammer and scattered them through the wooded area in which they had been buried. Apparently, he had not yet turned into a necrophile or cannibal.
He began killing again about 1987. At first he had sex with his victims before he murdered them. Later, he waited until they were dead.
He lured these 16 young men and boys to his apartment, promising them alcohol or sex, offering them money to appear in nude photographs or just plain companionship. Promising anything that would get them there. Once a victim was in his apartment, he slipped sleeping pills into the beer he served them, and when they fell asleep, he strangled them. He had sex with their corpses.
He dismembered his first four victims and disposed of them in the garbage. He took pictures of the rest of his victims both before he killed them and after. He kept their skulls for souvenirs or trophies. He told police he kept the skeleton of his eighth victim and ate some of him. He dissolved the bodies of his other victims in a huge barrel filled with acid.
He was a monster.
An excuse might have been his severe alcoholism. But, what sense does that make? How many thousands of alcoholics never kill anybody?
The first symptom of Dahmer’s compulsion for murder revealed itself when he was a child. He started killing his pets and other small animals. See my articles “Growing a Serial Killer” and “Marine Killing Puppy Reveals Something More Deadly.”
The motive most often suggested as to why Dahmer so brutally murdered and destroyed his victims is lust. Sexual gratification. He was a dangerous sexual predator. But, was that his motive?
His childhood murders of small animals might well have begun before he was sexually active, their murder more a natural act for him, than a sexual lust. There is also no evidence or suggestion that when he served in the army for two years he committed any murders. In the army, in a barracks at least part of the time, he would have been in close contact with hundreds of tantalizing young men. If he was compelled to murder for sexual gratification, why not then?
In my thriller DESTINY’S DAMNED, the serial killer is a compulsive murderer. He’s been killing for many lifetimes and is damned. As he begins each life there is no forgiveness, no starting over. He carries his evil acts with him into each reincarnation. As the numbers mount, his evil compounds. He lives in a hell already, and he cannot turn back. He is compelled to murder from the day he is born.
Dahmer was a compulsive killer who must have lived in his own hell. If he got sexual pleasure out of murder, why not stop at that? He had to shame his victims by having sex with their corpses and eating them. He then had to destroy them, to pound them into little pieces and scatter them, to cut them up and throw them in the garbage, to eat part of them, or to annihilate them with acid.
What if he didn’t get any sexual gratification at all? What if that’s why he went so far, because he was incapable of getting gratification from anything? What if he put his victims through hell because he wanted them to share his hell? Maybe he wanted to be better than them by winning, by exercising the power of life and death over them, to punish them for not giving him the pleasure he so desperately needed. Maybe he, too, was pure evil, destined to kill from the moment he was born.

For background on Dahmer see:
• www.murdersdatabase.co.uk; “Jeffrey Dahmer.”
•The Biography Channel; “Heidnik And Dahmer: Great Crimes And Trials;” http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_story/489:346/1/Jeffrey_Dahmer.htm.

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
available:
www.pilchuckpublishing.com
amazon.com
books stores and libraries

Friday, March 14, 2008

DESTINY'S DAMNED: A Serial Killer's Nightmare

A serial killer obsessed with the Crucifixion and the salvation it
offers murders to please God. Already damned, terrified the Crucifixion will disappear, he has a nightmare.

3:00 a.m. Sunday
12th day of Lent

Sleep a dark cave in which demons dwell, ans he was always afraid to close
his eyes. But, chest battered, face sore, thigh simmering with
infection, in desperate need of rest, he ignored his fears, and allowed
himself to fall into the hole that took him there, reluctantly
embracing the darkness. Tumbling into the depths of the earth, mind
whirling, his limbs growing limp, his heart slowing, he lost all
consciousness as he reached the cave’s entrance, coming to rest in a
cold, musty hollow. Head back, arms to the side, body exposed, he felt
the wind on which the demons rode and waited. Fists clenched, tears
flowing, he prepared himself.
Dirt an abrasive which was washing his bare skin clean, the wind its master, he choked, unable to breath as it whirled around him. Blind to all that did not deal with him, he sank inside himself and, in the hollow of his soul, began to drown in sin.
Screams not his own, but from those he murdered, rose in his gut and tore
through him. The figure of the demon that drew near was lost in a dark
brown robe that flowed over its head. Sleeves growing out of its
shoulders billowed down its arms and toward the ground, forming a train
that extended three to four feet out to its sides and back, moving with
the wind but never touching the earth. Draped around the demon’s neck
and over its forearms was a white, silk shroud with the image of a
young man. Limp and lifeless, his earth colored skin was a pale,
flaccid replica of what he had been in life.
The demon pulled its hood back. In its face was a myriad of creatures, circling, swirling,always changing, the demon never revealing its own face to him. Yet, he
knew this demon, for throughout his existence, she was the greatest and
worst of all his demons.
“Come with me,” she bade him.
Trembling,unwillingly but impulsively rising to her call, he followed her as he
always did further into the recesses of the cave, as she eased him ever
closer to his destruction. Yet, he did not go rapidly. Like a jumper,
reluctantly but compulsively, seeking the edge of a cliff, knowing what
would happen the instant he stepped off, he moved only inches at a
time. Tentative, fearful, each step closer to the plunge, he cringed.
His arms wrapped around him, his hands clutching at his breast to hold
his heart still, he was suddenly sucked into a vacuum. Rolling and
twisting, turning and whirling, caught in a wind so strong if let go
would tear him apart, his eyes could not see, his mind could not think,
and his feet never touched the ground.
Time did not exist. Space was but a memory.
Then,suddenly the wind was gone. He was falling, and as he hit ground, found
himself in the midst of a thunder storm. Daylight obscured by dark,
billowy clouds with flat, black bottoms, he was atop a hill leaning
against a large, upright stake, two women at his side, wrapped in robes
of coarse wool. Heads down, cheeks tucked against their breasts, they
were crying.
Grateful to be still, to be, for a moment, free from her, he waited for the demon to reveal herself, but she did not come.
Back pressed hard against the stake, his awareness returning, he raised
his eyes to figures standing several feet away. Legs bared, calves and
feet wrapped in leather straps, their leather skirts bearing armor,
they were Roman Centurions.
Suddenly realizing his shoulders were damp, his head and body stained with blood, he looked up, into the
tormented face of a man being crucified.
Startled, powerful forces
of fear and adoration violently colliding inside him, he panicked and
scurried away. Hiding behind the very men who were crucifying his Lord,
he cowered in torment. Crumbling to the ground like rubble, he wept.
Coward
and fool, so close to Christ he could touch Him, he crawled in agony
between the legs of His persecutors and hid from Him. Afraid to look,
yet compelled to do so, he peered into the eyes of the man he
worshipped, and found within them strength enough to come forward.
Adoration the force that lifted him to his knees, he to left the
protection of evil and ventured to move toward God’s light.
Eyes
fixed on His, the light of eternity within them, he wrapped his arms
around the crucifix and held on, absorbing, for his very salvation, all
the hope and forgiveness inside. Mesmerized by his faith, imagining
forces never known to him before surging through his soul, he did not
see the two women beside him fade away or the ground beneath him move.
He did not sense the earth begin to liquefy as the viscosity of the
soil changed, turning fluid. He was not aware of any of this until the
crucifix moved.
Shaken into the reality of his nightmare, he was
suddenly in a tug-a-war with the earth as it began to swallow the
crucifix. His arms wrapped so tightly about the rough, chiseled stake
beneath Christ’s feet, they bled as slivers as big as nails drove into
his flesh. Struggling against the downward pull, he was fighting not
only for Christ but for His promise.
Getting to his feet, bearing
his entire weight against the forces absorbing Christ and His crucifix,
he was, at once, pulled, too. Quickly buried up to his waist, the body
of Christ in passage before him, he begged his Lord in heaven, “Help
us!”
While on the hill overlooking them, was the demon, quietly
watching and remembering, her senses gorged with the fresh scent and
taste of blood.

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
available:
www.pilchuckpublishing.com
amazon.com
books stores and libraries

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Satan's Scat: The Asylum

Squatting on the floor in a far corner of her dimmed, ten-by-ten foot room, her thin legs pedestals on which she balanced, Jane Doe Number Eight moved not a hair as Patrick and Jeff opened the heavy, steel door and came inside. There was a wild, sickly look about her. The bones of her jaw from ears to chin were so distinct beneath her skin they were skeletal. Her bright red hair was short and barbed-like. Her eyes, yellowed by jaundice, glared at them over unnaturally bulbous, red cheeks.
“What’s wrong with her?” Patrick asked, quite startled. The powerful, beautiful mother of all gods would never look like this. Or would she?
“Chronic hemolytic anemia caused by an inherent abnormality of her red blood cells and/or her environment,” Jeff told him. “She’s expressing severe anemia and jaundice because it’s in an acute stage. They discovered she had it when they found blood in her urine at the hospital.”
Trying to see what or whom was inside her, Patrick studied her. She seemed frightened and very alone in this place. Her cot was without sheets. The only half normal thing around her was a single unit, stainless steel toilet and sink against the back wall.
“Let me talk to her alone,” he asked Jeff. She seemed, after all, not so much different than he was when he was committed to an asylum. “Maybe I can calm her down.”
“Sure. Just let me know when your finished.”
As Jeff went into the hall and Patrick closed the steel door behind him, Patrick did not see or hear the stealth behind him, the animal-like quickness with which she sprung from the corner. Leaping through the air, she drove his head into the door.
He was dazed, trapped between floor and door so Jeff could not open it. Straddling his shoulders, her fists flailed against his temple, while in growling low pitch, she screamed obscenities.
Grabbing his hair, she smashed his face again and again into the floor then suddenly pulled his head back. Attaching her teeth to his ear, she ripped.

Excerpt from Satan's Scat, The Destiny's Damned Trilogy - Book 2

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
available:
www.pilchuckpublishing.com
amazon.com
books stores and libraries

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Serial Killers: Who Are They?

Serial killers often seem to be perfectly normal individuals. A truck painter. Law Student. Political insider. A renowned Poet. Shoe salesman. Husband. Father. A University drop out. Soldier. Alcoholic. Medical doctor. A photo technician. Someone physically challenged. A mild mannered, quiet, obedient employee. Migrant worker. Teacher. An ordinary, solitary and non-threatening individual. A street kid. Rape victim. A forestry student. Or, even the neighborhood’s favorite clown.

Collectively, these seemingly normal types, 14 men in all, murdered as many as 911 men, women and children. But, who are they?

The trunk painter was Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer who strangled 48 women and/or dismembered and molested their bodies. He was called the Green River Killer because he dumped their remains near the Green River in northwestern Washington.

The infamous Ted Bundy was a law student and political insider, absolutely charming to those who knew him socially and politically. He had a degree in psychology and, while he worked for the Republican Party in the State of Washington developed a close relationship with governor Dan Evans. Yet, with all his connections and advantages, he turned violent. Over about four years, he raped 30 women, murdered them by bludgeoning them to death or strangling them, and then molested their bodies.

Jack the Ripper, whose actual identity has not been established, murdered, cut open and removed organs from five women in London in 1888. According to Richard Patterson, Jack the Ripper may have been Francis Thompson, a renowned poet. He was also a cricket fan who impressed and made friends with other poets. His most famous poem was “The Hound of Heaven” in which he talks about God’s pursuit of a human soul. (See: “Francis Thompson” by Richard Patterson at http://www.casebook.org/suspects/ft.html)

John Wayne Gacy raped and murdered 33 boys and young men, most of whom he buried in the crawl space under his house. He was a husband and a father. He was a shoe salesman and later managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. He bought a house in Cook County, Illinois and became active in the local Democratic Party. Becoming a precinct captain, he was photographed with Rosalynn Carter, wife of the then presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. Most benignly of all, he frequently entertained the neighborhood children in costume as Pogo the Clown.

Yoo Young-Chul of South Korea was also a husband, but a troubled one, with a history of mental problems and rape. His wife divorced him in 2002, and from September 2003 to 2004, Yoo killed, horrifically dismembered, and cannibalized 21 men and women.

Jeffrey Dahmer was also a well-know cannibal. He might have appeared normal, but he wasn’t. He killed his first victim in his parent’s house after he graduated from high school. After that he drank to excess and dropped out of Ohio State University after just one term because his drinking was uncontrolled. He joined the army and two years later he was discharged for alcoholism. In all, he killed 17 boys and young men, most in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, often having sex with their bodies, dismembering them, and eating part of them.

William MacDonald murdered 4 derelicts in Sydney, Australia, stabbing each victim dozens of times then cutting off their genitals. He was a soldier, too, a member of the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was raped by one of his corporals.

One of the worst serial killers of all time was raped, too. Pedro Alonso López, known as the Monster of the Andes, was born in 1948 in Santa Isabel, Colombia. Abused and repeatedly raped as a youngster, he lived on the streets and became a rapist, then murderer. By 1978, by his own accounts, he had murdered 300.

Among those often above suspicion are medical doctors, yet they are in a position to murder scores of people if they so desire. Fred Shipman, for example, a general practitioner in England murdered as many as 250 women and men. He graduated from Leeds Medical School, married and had four children. Many of his victims were murdered by a lethal injection of heroin. Doctor Marcel Andre Henri Felix was less ambitious and murdered only 60, hiding the remains of 26 of them in his house in Paris. As a youngster he was often accused of delinquency and criminal activities and often expelled from school, yet he completed medical school in only eight months. He too, was in politics, becoming mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He was a husband and a father. He was also a thief.

Mild-mannered, ordinary, obedient men with quiet and solitary lives have also been serial killers. In Japan, Tsutomu Miyazaki was so described. He had a physical deformity and was often shunned when he was growing up, yet he attended Junior college and become a photo technician. In the late 1980’s, he murdered 4 girls, had sex with their corpses, gruesomely handled their remains, tormented their families, and ate portions of two of them.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, an ordinary, non-threatening, teacher in Russia murdered, tortured and mutilated as many as 70 boys and girls. He was also a husband.

Huang Yong of China was a migrant worker. He tied his victims to a noodle-processing contraption and suffocated them. He murdered 17 teenage boys and kept their belts as souvenirs.

In the late 1990’s a forestry student, Anatoly Onoprienko, murdered approximately 52, men, women and children. Selecting an isolated house, he would enter and shoot all of its occupants and anyone else who might have witnessed the crime. He then burned the house.

These serial killers have little in common with regard to their outward personas, except that, before they were caught, most of them appeared to be normal.

Any thoughts?

by Shawna Ryan

Resources:
http://www.answers.com/topic/gary-ridgway;
Excerpt from truTV CRIME LIBRARY; “Green River Killer: River of Death -- At Wits End” http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/greenriver/links_5.html;
CourtTVnews, Wednesday Feg. 27, 2008,The Green River Killer,
Gerald Boyle, Jeffrey Dahmer's lawyer, comments on the sentencing of Gary Ridgway, Dec. 18, 2003;
www.murdersdatabase.co.uk;
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ruth.buddell/bundy.htm;
http://www.answers.com/topic/ted-bundy;
“Investingating Jack the Ripper” at http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2005/09/15.html based on the investigations of retired British Police Detective Trevor Marriot;
“Francis Thompson” by Richard Patterson at http://www.casebook.org/suspects/ft.html;
http://www.answers.com/topic/john-wayne-gacy?cat=entertainment;
The Biography Channel; “Heidnik And Dahmer: Great Crimes And Trials;” http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_story/489:346/1/Jeffrey_Dahmer.htm;
http://www.answers.com/topic/harold-shipman;
http://www.answers.com/topic/harold-shipman;
truTV Crime Library: “WILLIAM "THE MUTILATOR" MACDONALD,” by Paul B. Kidd; Australia's Most Feared Serial Killer; http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/macdonald/index_1.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Miyazaki;
CNN Internationl.com at http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/12/09/china.killer.reut/;
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/chikatilo;
http://www.answers.com/topic/pedro-l-pez-serial-killer?cat=entertainment;
http://www.answers.com/topic/marcel-petiot;
http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/youngchul.htm.

© Shawna Ryan
Author: thrillers DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT
available:
www.pilchuckpublishing.com
amazon.com
books stores and libraries