Even the Wicked

2

One newspaper column started the whole thing. It was Marty McGraw’s, of course, and it ran in the Daily News on a Thursday in early June. McGraw’s column, “Since You Asked,” appeared in that newspaper every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. It had been a fixture in New York tabloid journalism for ten years or more, always with the same title, though not always on the same days, or even with the same paper. McGraw had jumped ship a few times over the years, moving from the News to the Post and back again, with an intermediate stop at Newsday.

“An Open Letter to Richard Vollmer” was what McGraw called this particular column, and that’s what it was. Vollmer was an Albany native in his early forties with a long sheet of arrests for minor sex offenses. Then a few years back he’d been sent away for child molestation. He did well in therapy and his counselor wrote a favorable report for his parole board, and Vollmer returned to society, sworn to behave himself and devote his life to helping others.

He’d been corresponding with a woman on the outside. She’d answered a personal ad of his. I don’t know what kind of woman thinks it’s a good idea to exchange letters with a convict, but God seems to have made a lot of them. Elaine says they combine low self-esteem with a messiah complex; also, she says, it’s a way for them to feel sexy without ever having to put out, because the guy’s locked away where he can’t get at them.

Frances Neagley’s pen pal did get out, however, and there was nothing in Albany he wanted to get back to, so he came to New York and looked her up. Franny was a thirtyish nurse’s aide who’d been living alone on Haven Avenue in Washington Heights since her mother died. She walked to work at Columbia Presbyterian, volunteered her services at church and block-association fund-raisers, fed and fussed over three cats, and wrote love letters to upstanding citizens like Richie Vollmer.

She abandoned her correspondence when Vollmer moved in with her. He insisted on being the only felon in her life. Before long she didn’t have much time for the church or the block association. She still took good care of the cats. Richie liked the cats, and all three of them were crazy about him. Franny said as much to a co-worker who’d been alarmed at her friendship with an ex-prisoner. “You know cats,” she crowed, “and what a good judge of character they are. And they absolutely love him.”

So did Franny, who was about as good a judge of character as her cats. Remarkably enough, jail-house therapy hadn’t changed her man’s sexual orientation, and he went right back to the seduction of the innocent. He started by luring teenage boys to the Haven Avenue apartment with the promise of sex with Franny, showing them nude Polaroids of her as an enticement. (There was a slump to her shoulders and a bovine cast to her features, but otherwise she was a not-unattractive woman, with large breasts and generous hips.)

She gave the boys what Richie had promised them, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically. Some of her guests were very likely enthusiastic themselves when Richie joined the party and sodomized them. Others were not, but what recourse did they have? Richie was a hulking, powerful man, physically capable of taking what he wanted, and afterward the boys were compromised by having been eager participants in the first stage of the proceedings.

Things escalated. Franny emptied her savings account and bought a van. The neighbors grew used to the sight of Richie washing and polishing it on the street in front of the apartment house, clearly proud of his new toy. They didn’t see how he’d tricked it out on the inside, with a mattress on the floor and restraints attached to the side panels. They would drive around town, and when they got to a likely spot, Franny would drive while Richie lurked in the back. Then Franny would find a child and persuade him (or her, it didn’t matter) to get into the van.

They would let the kids go when they were finished. Until one day there was a little girl who wouldn’t stop crying. Richie found a way to stop her, and they left the body in a thickly wooded section of Inwood Hill Park.

“That was the best ever,” he told her. “That rounds it out, it’s like dessert after a meal. We should have been finishing them off all along.”

“Well, from now on,” she said.

“The look in her eyes right at the end,” he said. “Jesus.”

“Poor little kid.”

“Yeah, poor little kid. You know what I wish? I wish she was alive so we could do her all over again.”

Enough. They were animals — a label we affix, curiously enough, to those members of our own species who behave in a manner unimaginable in any of the lower animals. They found a second victim, a boy this time, and dumped his corpse within a half mile of the first one, and they were caught.

There was no question of their guilt, and the case should have been solid, but piece by piece it fell apart. There was a ton of evidence the jury didn’t get to see, testimony they couldn’t hear, because the judge threw it out for one reason or another. That might not have mattered because Franny was set to confess and testify against Richie — they weren’t married, there was no cloak of privilege to preclude her doing so.

When she killed herself, that ended that.

The case against Richie did go to the jury, but there wasn’t much to it and his lawyer, Adrian Whitfield, was good enough to punch holes in it big enough for him to walk through. The judge’s charge was the nearest thing to an order of dismissal, and the jury took a scant hour and a half to come back with an acquittal.

“It was awful,” one juror told a reporter, “because we were all dead certain he did it, but the prosecution didn’t prove it. We had to find him not guilty, but there should have been a way to lock him up anyway. How can someone like that be released back into society?”

That’s what Marty McGraw wanted to know. “You may not be guilty in the eyes of the law,” he thundered, “but you’re as guilty as sin in my eyes, and the eyes of everybody I know, outside of twelve men and women forced by the system to be as blind as Justice herself...

“There are too many like you,” he went on, “falling through the cracks of the system and making the world a bad place to live. And I’ve got to tell you, I wish to God there were a way to get rid of you. Lynch law was a hell of a way to run things, and only a fool would want to go back to vigilante times. But you’re a powerful argument for it. We can’t touch you, and we’ve got to let you live among us like an ineradicable virus. You’re not going to change. You’re not going to get help, and guys like you are beyond help anyway. You nod and shuffle and con therapists and counselors and parole boards, and you slither out onto the streets of our cities and go back to preying on our kids.

“I’d kill you myself, but it’s not my style and I haven’t got the guts. Maybe you’ll step off the pavement and get hit by a bus. If you do, I’ll gladly kick in for the bus driver’s defense fund, if they’re crazy enough to charge him with anything. They ought to give him a medal — and I’d kick in for that, too, with pleasure.

“Or maybe, for once in your awful life, you’ll be a man and do the right thing. You could pick up a cue from Franny and put yourself out of everybody’s misery. I don’t suppose you’ve got the guts, either, but maybe you’ll summon up the courage, or maybe somebody’ll give you a hand. Because no matter what the nuns at St. Ignatius taught me, I can’t help it: I’d give a lot to see you with a rope around your neck, hanging from a tree limb, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.”

It was classic McGraw, and very much the sort of thing that kept the tabloids hiring him away from one another at ever-higher salaries. His column was, as somebody had said, one of the things that made New York New York.

He’d tried his hand at other tasks over the years, and not without some success. He had published several books of nonfiction over the years, and while none had been a big seller they’d all been respectfully received. A couple of years back he’d hosted a talk program on a local cable channel, giving it up after a six-month run and a series of arguments with the station management. A while before that he’d written a play and actually had it produced on Broadway.

But it was with his column that he made his mark on the city. He had a way of articulating the anger and impatience of his readers, putting better words to it than they would have chosen yet sacrificing nothing in the way of plain-spoken blue-collar fury. I remember reading the column he wrote about Richie Vollmer, and I remember more or less agreeing with it. I didn’t much care for frontier justice, but there were times it seemed better than no justice at all. I’d hate to see a lynch mob marching down the street, but if they stopped in front of Richie Vollmer’s house I wouldn’t have run out there and tried to talk them out of it.

Not that I gave a lot of thought to the column. Like everybody else, I nodded from time to time in agreement, frowned now and then at this oversimplification or that infelicitous turn of phrase, thought to myself that it would not be a bad thing at all if Richie was found dangling from a limb or a lamppost. And, like everybody else, I turned the page.

Almost everybody else.

The column ran on Thursday, with the paper’s bulldog edition on the street late Wednesday night. In addition to eight or ten letters to the editor, two of which were later excerpted in “The Voice of the People,” five letters came in Friday and Saturday addressed to McGraw personally. One, from a Catholic layman in Riverdale, reminded McGraw that suicide was a mortal sin and urging another to commit such an act was sinful as well. The others all expressed agreement with the column, to one degree or another.

McGraw had a stack of printed postcards: “Dear _________, Thanks for taking the time to write. Whether you did or didn’t care for what I had to say, I’m grateful to you for writing, and pleased and proud to have you as a reader. I hope you’ll keep reading my stuff Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday in the Daily News.” Not everyone who wrote would include a return address — some didn’t even sign their names — but those who did got postcards in reply, with their first names written in after “Dear” and a handwritten comment at the end — “Thanks!” or “You said it!” or “Good point!” He’d sign the cards and mail them off and forget the whole thing.

One of the five letters gave him a moment’s pause. “Your open letter to Richard Vollmer is sharply provocative,” it began. “What are we to do when the system fails? It is not enough to walk away, congratulating ourselves on our commitment to due process even as we wring our hands at the incident’s unfortunate outcome. Our criminal justice system requires a backup, a fail-safe device to correct those mistakes that are an inevitable outcome of a flawed system.

“When we send a rocket into space, we build it with components designed to back up other components which might fail. We allow for the possibility that some unforeseen factor will nudge it off course, and build in devices to correct any such deviations as occur. If we routinely take such precautions in outer space, can we do less on the streets of our cities?

“I submit that a backup system for our criminal justice system exists already in the hearts and souls of our citizens, if we have the will to activate it. And I believe we do. You are a manifestation of that collective will, writing the column you wrote. And I, too, am very much a manifestation of that will, the will of the people.

“Richard Vollmer will be hanging from that tree soon. It is the people’s will.”

The letter was more literate than most, and it was typed. McGraw’s readers were not all clowns and morons, scrawling their approval in crayon on brown paper bags, and he had received typed and well-phrased letters before, but they were invariably signed and almost always bore return addresses. This one was unsigned and there was no return address, not on the letter itself, not on the envelope it had come in, either. He made a point of checking, and the envelope bore his own name and the newspaper’s address. Nothing else.

He filed it and forgot about it.

The following weekend, two Dominican kids on mountain bikes came tearing down a steep path in Inwood Hill Park. One of them cried out to his friend, and they both braked to a stop as soon as they got to a spot that was level enough. “Joo see that?” “See what?” “On that tree.” “What tree?” “Was a guy hanging from that tree back there.” “You crazy, man. You seeing things, you crazy.” “We got to go back.” “Uphill? So we can see some guy hanging?” “Come on!”

They went back, and the boy had not been seeing things. A man was indeed hanging from the stout limb of a pin oak ten or fifteen yards off the bike path. They stopped their bikes and took a good look at him, and one of the kids promptly vomited. The hanging man was not a pretty sight. His head was the size of a basketball and his neck was a foot long, stretched by the weight of him. He wasn’t twisting slowly in the wind. There wasn’t any wind.

It was Richard Vollmer, of course, and he’d been found hanging not far from where both of his victims had been found, and McGraw’s first thought was that the misbegotten son of a bitch had actually done what he’d told him to do. He felt a curious sense of unsought power, at once unsettling and exciting.

But Richie had had help. Asphyxiation had caused his death, so he’d been alive when the rope went around his neck, but he’d probably been unconscious. An autopsy disclosed that he’d been beaten severely about the head, and had in fact sustained cranial injuries that might have proven fatal if someone hadn’t taken the trouble to string him up.

McGraw didn’t know how he felt about that. It certainly appeared as though a column of his had led some impressionable yahoo to commit murder; at the very least, the killer had looked to McGraw for the murder method. That disgusted him, and yet he could hardly bring himself to mourn the death of Richie Vollmer. So he did what he had grown in the habit of doing over the years. He talked out his thoughts and feelings in a column.

“I can’t say I’m sorry Richie Vollmer is no longer with us,” he wrote. “There are, after all, a lot of us left to soldier on, eight million and counting, and I’d be hard put to argue that the quality of life will be a whole lot worse with Richie in the cold cold ground. But I’d hate to think that I, or any reader of this column, had a part in putting him there.

“In a sense, whoever killed Richie Vollmer did us all a favor. Vollmer was a monster. Is there anyone who seriously doubts he’d have killed again? And aren’t we all justified now in feeling relieved that he won’t?

“And yet his killer did us a disservice at the same time. When we take the law into our own hands, when we snatch up in our own hands the power of life and death, we’re no different from Richie. Oh, we’re a bunch of kinder, gentler Richie Vollmers. Our victims deserve what they get, and we can tell ourselves we’ve got God on our side.

“But how different are we?

“For wishing publicly for his death, I owe the world an apology. I’m not apologizing to Richie, I’m not for one moment sorry he’s gone. My apology is to all the rest of you.

“It’s possible, of course, that the person or persons who took Richie out never read this column, that they did what they did for reasons of their own, that they were old foes of his from his days in prison. That’s what I’d like to believe. I’d sleep better.”

McGraw had a visit from the cops, predictably enough. He told them he’d had a batch of letters agreeing and disagreeing with his column, but that no one had specifically offered to see that his wishes were carried out. The cops didn’t ask to see the letters. His column ran, and the next day’s mail brought a second letter.

“Don’t blame yourself,” McGraw read. “It might be interesting to discuss the extent to which your column prompted my action, but a search for the ultimate cause of any phenomenon is ultimately fruitless. Can we not say with more assurance that Richard Vollmer, by his monstrous actions, caused you to write what you wrote even as it caused me to do what I did? Each of us responded — promptly, directly, properly — to an insupportable state of affairs, i.e., the continuing capacity of a child-murderer to walk free among us.

“Or, to put it another way, each of us embodied for a moment in time the collective will of the people of New York. It is the ability of the public to work its will that is, when all is said and done, the genuine essence of democracy. It is not the right to vote, or the several freedoms provided by the Bill of Rights, so much as it is that we are governed — or govern ourselves — according to our collective will. So don’t hold yourself accountable for the timely execution of Richard Vollmer. Blame Vollmer himself, if you wish. Or blame or credit me — but when you do, you are only blaming or crediting

One of the cops had left his card, and McGraw dug it out and reached for the phone. He had the number half dialed when he broke the connection and started over.

First he called the City Desk. Then he called the cops.

“RICHIE’S KILLER GOES PUBLIC” the next day’s headline screamed. The lead story, under McGraw’s byline, reproduced Will’s letter in full, along with excerpts from the first letter and a report on the progress of the police investigation. Sidebar stories included interviews with psychologists and criminologists. McGraw’s column ran on page four, with the title “An Open Letter to Will.” The gist of it was that Will may have been justified in what he’d done, but all the same he had to turn himself in.

But that didn’t happen. Instead Will was silent, while the police investigation proceeded and got nowhere. Then, about a week later, McGraw’s mail included another letter from Will.

He’d been expecting more from Will, and had been keeping an eye out for a long envelope with a typed address and no return address, but this time the envelope was small and the address handprinted in ballpoint, and there was a return address as well. So he went ahead and opened it. He unfolded the single sheet of paper, saw the typeface and the signature in script type, and dropped the letter like a hot rock.

“An Open Letter to Patrizzio Salerno,” it began, and McGraw went on to read a virtual parody of his own open letter to Richie Vollmer. Patsy Salerno was a local mafioso, the head of one of the five families, and the elusive target of a RICO investigation who had survived innumerable attempts to put him behind bars. Will detailed Patsy’s various offenses against society. “Your own cohorts have tried repeatedly to rid us of you,” he wrote, referring to the several attempts on Patsy’s life over the years. He went on to suggest that Patsy perform the first public-spirited act of his life by killing himself; failing that, the letter’s author would be forced to act.

“In a sense,” he concluded, “I have no choice in the matter. I am, after all, only

The story sold a lot of papers. Nobody managed to get an interview with Salerno, but his attorney made good copy, describing his client as an innocent businessman who’d been persecuted by the government for years. He saw this latest outrage as further persecution; either Will had been launched on his crackpot crusade by the lies the government had spread about Patrizzio Salerno, or in fact there was no Will, and this was an elaborate federal effort to uncover or fabricate new evidence against Patsy. He advanced the latter possibility while declining on his client’s behalf an NYPD offer of police protection.

“Imagine the cops protecting Patsy,” the Post quoted an anonymous wise guy as saying. “Make more sense to have Patsy protecting the cops.”

The story got a lot of play locally, in the papers and on TV, but after a few days it began to die down because there was nothing to keep it going. Then on a Sunday Patsy had dinner at a restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. I don’t remember what he ate, although the tabloids reported the meal course by course. Eventually he went to the men’s room, and eventually someone went in after him to find out what was taking him so long.

Patsy was sprawled out on the floor with a couple of feet of piano wire around his neck. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth, double its usual size, and his eyes were bulging.

Of course the media went crazy. The national talk shows had their experts on, discussing the ethics of vigilantism and the particular psychology of Will. Someone recalled the number from The Mikado, “I’ve Got a Little List,” and it turned out that everybody had his own list of “society offenders who might well be under ground,” as the Gilbert and Sullivan song had it. David Letterman was on hand with a Top Ten list for Will’s consideration, most of the entries overexposed show biz personalities. (Rumor had it that there was a good deal of backstage debate about the propriety of putting Jay Leno at the top of the list; in any event, Letterman’s late-night rival went unmentioned.)

There were more than a few people who claimed to be Will, and tried to take credit for his acts. The police set up a special phone number for calls relating to the case, and they got the predictable glut of false claimants and confessors. Open letters to various citizens, purportedly by Will, flowed to the News offices in a great stream. McGraw got a couple of death threats: “An Open Letter to Marty McGraw... You started this, you son of a bitch, and now it’s your turn...” A lot of people, in public and private, were moved to guess who Will’s next target might be, and offered their recommended candidates.

Everyone was sure of one thing. There would be a third. Nobody stopped at two. One maybe, three maybe. But nobody stopped at two.

Will didn’t disappoint, although his next pick may have surprised a lot of people. “An Open Letter to Roswell Berry” was his heading, and he went on to identify the city’s leading anti-abortion activist as an unindicted murderer. “Your rhetoric has provoked violent action on the part of your followers time and time again,” Will asserted, “and on at least two occasions death has been the direct result. The bombing at the 137th Street clinic, the assassinations of the nurse and physician on Ralph Avenue, were wanton acts of murder. Both times you have talked out of both sides of your mouth, disassociating yourself from the act but all but applauding it as a means to an end, and a far lesser evil than abortion... You champion the unborn, but your interest in a fetus ends at birth. You oppose birth control, oppose sex education, oppose any social program that might lessen the demand for abortion. You are a despicable human being, and seemingly unpunishable. But no one can hold out for long against

Berry was out of town when the letter landed on Marty McGraw’s desk. He was in Omaha, leading a massive protest against an abortion clinic. “I am doing God’s work,” he told the TV cameras. “It’s His will that I continue, and I’ll stack that up against the so-called will of the people any day.” He told another interviewer that whatever business Will had with him would have to wait until he returned to New York, and he expected to be in Omaha for some time to come.

God’s will. In AA, we’re advised to pray only for knowledge of His will, and the power to carry it out. My sponsor, Jim Faber, has said that it’s the easiest thing in the world to know God’s will. You just wait and see what happens, and that’s it.

It may indeed have been God’s work that Roswell Berry was doing, but it evidently wasn’t God’s will that he continue. He stayed in Omaha, just as he said he would, but when he returned to New York it was in a box.

The maid found him in his room at the Omaha Hilton. His killer, not without a sense of humor, had left him with a coat hanger wrapped around his neck.

It was the Omaha Police Department’s case, of course, but they welcomed the two NYPD detectives who flew out to consult with them and exchange information. There was no evidence to link Berry’s murder with the killings of Vollmer and Salerno, none aside from Will’s having singled him out in his open letter, and this left room for speculation that some native Omahan, spurred perhaps by Will’s suggestion, had handled the matter on a local level.

Will’s next communication — sent, like all the others, to Marty McGraw — addressed that notion. “Did I go off to Omaha to settle accounts with Mr. Berry? Or did some citizen of Omaha, outraged at having to put up with Roswell Berry’s disruption of that fair city’s urban equilibrium, take matters into his own hands?

“My friend, what on earth does it matter? What difference can it possibly make? I myself am nothing, as someone is purported to have said in a slightly different context. It is the will of the people that acts through me. If indeed another pair of hands than mine stuck the knife in Roswell Berry’s pitiless heart before girdling his neck with a coat hanger, it is as moot to ponder my own responsibility in the matter as it is to wonder how much your own writing gave rise to my actions. Each of us, alone or in concert, helps to express

It was cleverly done. Will wouldn’t say whether he’d gone to Omaha, arguing that it didn’t matter one way or another. At the same time, he pretty much settled the matter by alluding to the fact that Berry had been stabbed. The Omaha authorities had suppressed this. (They would have liked to suppress the coat hanger as well, but it leaked, and the symbolism was just too good to expect the press to keep it under wraps. It was easier to hold back the knife work, because it hadn’t shown up until they had Roswell Berry on the autopsy table. He’d been killed with a single stab wound to the heart, inflicted with one stroke of a narrow-bladed knife or dagger. Death was virtually instantaneous and there was no bleeding to speak of, which is why the stabbing wasn’t noticed at first, and why it managed to stay out of the papers.)

Roswell Berry had looked like a difficult target. He’d been more than halfway across the country, staying in a hotel with a good security setup, and escorted at all times by a cadre of loyal bodyguards, broad-shouldered young men in chinos and short-sleeved white shirts, with buzz haircuts and unsmiling faces. (“Thugs for Jesus,” one commentator had styled them.) There was plenty of speculation as to how Will had managed to slip through their ranks and get in and out of their leader’s hotel room.

“WILL-O’-THE-WISP?” the Post wondered on its front page.

But if Berry was a hard man to kill, Will’s next pick was clearly impossible.

“An Open Letter to Julian Rashid” was the heading on his next letter to McGraw, mailed some ten days after his ambiguous response to Berry’s death. In it, he charged the black supremacist with fomenting racial hatred for purposes of self-aggrandizement. “You have created a fiefdom of a people’s discontent,” he wrote. “Your power feeds upon the hatred and bitterness you create. You have called out for violence, and the society you vilify is at last prepared to turn that violence upon you.”

Rashid first landed in the spotlight as a tenured professor of economics at Queens College. His name back then was Wilbur Julian, but he dropped the Wilbur and tacked on the Rashid around the time he began formulating his theories. The name change was not part of a conversion to Islam, but merely represented his admiration for the legendary Haroun-al-Rashid.

His theories, which he expounded in the classroom in spite of the fact that they had little demonstrable connection to economics, contended that the black race was the original human race, that blacks had founded the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, that it was this race of black men who were the elders revered in the prehistory of societies throughout the world. They were the builders of Stonehenge, of the heads on Easter Island.

Then white men had arisen as some sort of genetic sport, a mutation of the pure black race. Just as their skins lacked melanin, so were their spirits lacking in true humanity. Their bodies were similarly stunted; they could not run as fast or as far, could not jump as high, and lacked that primal connection to the very pulse of the earth, which is to say that they didn’t have rhythm. Perversely, however, they were able to prevail because of their inhuman nature, which led them to overwhelm and betray and subvert the black man whenever the two races met. In particular, it was a late offshoot of the white subrace whose special role it was to serve as architects of the white subjugation of the black race. These mongrel dogs at the heart of it all were, surprisingly enough, the Jews.

“If it turns out there’s life on Saturn,” Elaine said, “and we go there, we’ll find out that they’ve got three sets of eyes, and five sexes, and something against the Jews.”

Whenever he was given the opportunity, according to Rashid, the black man showed his natural superiority — in track and field, in baseball and football and basketball, and even in what he labeled “Jewish” sports — golf and tennis and bowling. (There were few great black equestrians, he explained, because that too involved subjugation and domination, of the horse by the rider.) Chess, for which he apparently had a passion, provided further proof of black superiority; a game of the intellect, it was studied out of books by the Jews and their followers, while black children took to it naturally and played it well without having to study it.

It was now the black man’s burden — his phrase — to separate himself entirely from white society, and to establish his innate supremacy in every area of human endeavor, exerting dominion over and, yes, enslaving whites if need be, in order to usher in the new millennium with the black-run human civilization that was essential if the planet itself was to survive.

Predictably enough, there was a strong move to oust him from his sinecure at Queens College. (Ray Gruliow represented him in his successful battle to hang on to his academic tenure, and insisted that he liked Rashid personally. “I don’t know how much of that horseshit he believes,” he once told me. “It hasn’t kept him from hiring a Jewish lawyer.”) He won in court, then resigned dramatically and announced he was starting his own academic institution. His supporters had managed to get title to a full square block in the St. Albans section of Queens, and there they constructed a walled compound to house the new black university and the greater portion of its students and faculty.

Julian Rashid lived there, with his two wives and several children. (Although the inevitable rumors had circulated of a passion for white women, both wives were dark-skinned, with African features. They looked enough alike, in fact, to give rise to another rumor to the effect that they were sisters, or even twins.) A guard was posted around the clock outside of Rashid’s living quarters, and a phalanx of armed men in khaki uniforms accompanied him whenever he left the compound, which in turn was fortified and guarded twenty-four hours a day.

At a press conference shortly after the news broke of Will’s latest open letter, Rashid announced that he welcomed the challenge. “Let him come. It is true that he embodies the will of his people. They have always hated us, and now that they can no longer dominate us they wish to annihilate us. So let him come to me, and let the will of the white race break itself upon the rock of black will. We shall see whose will is stronger.”

Nothing happened for a week. Then the police were summoned to the St. Albans compound, where they had never previously dared attempt entry. A group of his followers, some of them members of the uniformed bodyguard, others weeping youths and children, led the way to Rashid’s private quarters and into his bedroom. Rashid was in his bed, or rather his body was. His head had been placed upon a small devotional altar he had built at the far end of the room, and stared out from among a group of wooden carvings and strings of trading beads. He had been beheaded, a medical examination determined, with a single stroke of a ceremonial ax, itself a highly prized artifact of the Senufo tribe of the Ivory Coast.

How could Will have managed it? How could he penetrate the compound’s airtight security, slipping in and out like a ghost? Theories abounded. Will was black himself, one contingent maintained, and a comparative linguistics graduate student at Columbia was quick to buttress that argument with an analysis of Will’s letters, purportedly proving an African origin for their author. Someone else suggested that Will had disguised himself as a black man, darkening his face like a player in a minstrel show. The political rectitude of each position was held up to scrutiny. Was it racist to assume the killer was white? Was it more racist to assume he was black? The Senufo ax was not the only one around; everybody, it seemed, had an ax of his own to grind.

The debate was just warming up when the police announced the arrest of Marion Scipio, a trusted associate of Rashid’s and a member of his inner circle. Scipio (né Marion Simmons; Rashid had suggested the change with a nod to Scipio Africanus) had broken down under police interrogation and admitted he’d seized the opportunity of Will’s open letter to right a longstanding injury. Apparently Rashid’s libido had not been slaked by his two official wives, sisters or twins or whatever they were, and he’d had a fling with Scipio’s wife. Scipio only had one wife, and he’d taken this the wrong way. When his chance came around, he took the Senufo ax down from the wall and made Rashid a head shorter.

Will was so pleased you’d have thought he did it himself. His next letter, posted hours after Scipio’s arrest and confession became public knowledge, restated the theme of his letter upon the death of Roswell Berry. The people’s will had found expression. What did it matter who swung the ax?

And there he’d let it lie for the ten days or so since. There were other voices — letters and phone calls purporting to be from Will, but clearly not, a couple of anonymous bomb threats, one of which cleared a midtown office building. McGraw got a handwritten letter, “An Open Letter to the So-called Marry McGraw,” whose semi-literate author blamed him for Will’s reign of terror. “You’ll pay for this in your own blood, asshole,” the letter concluded, and it was signed with a large red X that covered half the page. (A lab analysis quickly established that the X was not in fact blood, but red Magic Marker.)

It took the cops just two days to pick up Mr. X, who turned out to be an unemployed construction worker who’d written the letter on a dare and then boasted about it in a saloon. “He thinks he’s hot shit,” he said of McGraw, but outside of that he didn’t really have anything against him, and certainly planned him no harm. The poor son of a bitch was charged with menacing and coercion in the first degree, the latter a Class D felony. They’d probably let him plead to a misdemeanor and my guess was he’d get off with probation, but in the meantime he was out on bail and not feeling terribly proud of himself.

And the city went on speculating about Will. There was a new joke about him every day. (Publicist to client: “I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news is you’re the subject of a column in tomorrow’s Daily News. The bad news is Marty McGraw’s writing it.”) He kept winding up in your conversation, as had happened at least once that very evening, when TJ assured me that computers would ultimately reveal Will’s true identity. There was, of course, no end of guesswork about the sort of person he was and the sort of life he was likely to be leading. There was guesswork, too, as to who would next draw his attention. One shock jock had invited his listeners to submit names for Will’s consideration. “We’ll see who gets the most votes,” he told his unseen drive-time audience, “and I’ll announce your top choices over the air. I mean, who knows? Maybe he’s a listener. Maybe he’s a big fan.”

“If he’s listening,” purred the fellow’s female sidekick, “you better hope he’s a fan.”

That was on a Friday. When he returned to the air on Monday morning, he’d had a change of heart. “We got lots of letters,” he said, “but you know what? I’m not announcing the results. In fact I’m not even tabulating them. I decided the whole thing’s sick, not just the poll but the whole Will fever that’s gripping the city. Talk about everybody’s baser instincts. You wouldn’t believe some of the jokes that are going around, they are truly sick and disgusting.” And, to prove the point, he told four of them, one right after the other.

The police, of course, were under enormous pressure to find the guy and close the case. But the sense of urgency was very different from that surrounding Son of Sam, or any of the other serial killers who had cropped up over the years. You weren’t afraid to walk the streets, not for fear of Will stalking you and gunning you down. The average person had nothing to fear, because Will didn’t target average people. On the contrary, he took aim only at the prominent, and more specifically at the notorious. Look at his list of victims — Richie Vollmer, Patsy Salerno, Roswell Berry, and, if indirectly, Julian Rashid. Wherever you stood in the social and political spectrum, your response to each of Will’s executions was apt to be that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

And now he’d set his sights on Adrian Whitfield.