A Whiter Shade of Murder
A love affair with anti-humanists leads to one conclusion: fairness is for fairytales.
You couldn’t miss him. He looked like David Prowse in his prime. Prowse? Here’s a reminder…he was the crippled writer’s manservant in the Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. A 6’6” bodybuilder, the neatly coiffed Prowse set off alarms with all of that normal sitting on top of all of that crazy crushing physical power.
But my dude was not really very different. By which I mean he was almost totally different. Bespectacled and with dark, close cut hair his attempt at normalcy was completely undercut by how failed it was.
Look, in 1979, there’s no way that gym wear was what gym wear has become post-the spandex revolution, but none of that has any bearing on the fact that what he wore then, like one of nature’s great warning signs, had him being as much of an outlier as you could be.
Happiness is Killing Someone.
That’s what his t-shirt said. Written, or scrawled, more precisely, across a torn white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. In black magic marker.
No one talked to him.
Which meant I had to.
To say his affect was blunted was an understatement. Terse and not especially fond of eye contact, he pushed his horn-rimmed glasses back up his nose, where they had been taped down the center, and he considered me. It was a prison-style rendering, all threat assessment and target value.
[T]he guy, in a struggle to keep his blood inside of his body, fell to the pavement where my dude rendered “aid”.
Is a size 11 shoe across the throat, applied repeatedly, aid?
But I was 17, a competitive bodybuilder, and at 170 pounds not a threat to anyone not also in high school. So muster was passed and eventually I got what I came for.
Happiness is Killing Someone?
He had been a sparring partner for none other than very possibly the best heavyweight boxer ever: Sonny Liston. Sonny Liston was a motherfucker and if you believe he was either genuinely beaten by Ali or died accidentally, you’re a mark. (Don’t be a mark.)
And a white cat sparring with Liston back when Liston was sparring had to have some juice and was there not just because he was a heavyweight, and whatever he was and meant to Liston, he still carried it with him. You could feel it.
Very possibly why no one asked him about his sweatshirt, which he wore all of the time.
Which meant I had to.
He smiled. Then he spilled.
One day when he was training, in front of the gym a guy was sitting in a parked car “and got kind of salty with some broad walking by. I never countenanced that kind of talk to a woman so I set him straight and told him where he could take it.”
With the woman still too close for the seated man to consider the better part of valor at this point, he took a 100-foot cliff dive into total stupidity and tried to save face by opening his mouth.
My dude took off his gloves, unwrapped his hands, all while being watched by the salty talker, and walked out to the car. At this point Mr. Salty Talker’s instinct for self-preservation kicked in and he rolled up the window. My dude punched him through the closed window and when his head bounced back it bounced back against the now-broken glass and his throat was cut across the length of his throat.
At this point the story stumbles. In dude’s telling. He either pulled the guy from the car or the guy, in a struggle to keep his blood inside of his body, fell to the pavement where my dude rendered “aid”.
Is a size 11 shoe across the throat, applied repeatedly, aid?
The court, the cops, with testimony from everyone in the gym thought so. Especially since everyone in the gym knew what was good for them.
“So I didn’t go to the joint. For that.” And a hearty laugh, a slap on my back, and him entering the annals of my personal lore.
“You know Gina’s neighbor is a serial killer.”
My oldest daughter pointed out the apartment where her friend lived. Apparently next door to a serial killer.
“Is?!?”
“Well, I think they got him.”
“Think?!?”
Now I don’t know, but I know, before I even look, that this cat will be a cat I can put in the file where I informally gather media info under the heading of Because He Was White. Because if a serial killer is not in prison and is known to be a serial killer, the judicial system is only showing that kind of forbearance to white cats.
This is not me pulling the race card. This is me reporting on John Getreu who killed his first person, Margaret Williams, when he was 17 and living in Germany, on a military base. They went for a walk after a dance. He wanted to have sex. She didn’t. He beat her to death and had sex with her either right before she died or right after.
I do know of a guy who, while being mugged in broad daylight, managed to murder both of his attackers. They sent him to Soledad Prison for seven years.
He was caught, criminally convicted and handed a 10-year sentence. He was let out after five years. Reports conflict as to why and how. Even if my file knows why and how.
Approximately 12 years later, in the mid-1970s, the now-married Getreu was a youth group leader in Palo Alto, California, which led to him raping one of the girls in his charge. He pled guilty in the ensuing criminal trial. He was fined $200 and sentenced to six months in jail. Time to be served on the weekends.
During the weekdays he used his time well, serial killer well, by raping and killing a number of women, the most noted being the daughter of Chuck Taylor, he of the Converse sneaker.
Getreu was convicted of all of these 1970’s crimes. This past week. That is: September 2021. Prior to that he was just…walking around.
“He seemed like a nice guy, is what Gina said.” We looked at the nondescript apartment complex where the former Stanford worker lived with his wife and family. I think of what I like to call The Barabbas Effect, so named after Jesus Barabbas. The crowd at the crucifixion was given the choice as to whether Pontius Pilate should release Jesus Christ or Jesus Barabbas. They resoundingly chose Barabbas.
The thing is, Barabbas was a motherfucker. Killing, raping, robbing people. I always envision him buoyed by the excitement of the crowd and shocked at narrowly avoiding death kind of snapping back to reality and planning his next moves. Moves that almost immediately I would hope, would involve killing, raping and robbing the people who had set him free.
In any case I place Getreu in my file. Right next to a guy who just stabbed three strangers in Redwood City, California and was released on probation on the condition, set out by the judge, that when he was at home that he stay away from sharp objects.
In the file is also the guy everyone used to call Green River Gary, Gary Ridgway. Also known as the Green River Killer, Ridgway killed 48 people over a two-year period. It took 20 years to catch him. Even with everyone he worked with and neighbors calling him Green River Gary.
Eddie Murphy famously did a skit on Saturday Night Live where he donned white face only to discover that “when white people are alone…they give each other things.” Free bank loans, newspapers, champagne. It was Murphy at his sharpest, meanest and most subversive.
However, based on the pushback I got on the Brock Turner piece of a few weeks back, there’s some small doubt that this also applies to the judicial system.
And yet…from the Golden State Killer, who was a former police officer, to Ted Bundy who people steadfastly refused to believe had killed anyone even after he had been convicted for it, there seems to be a pecking order when it comes to addressing crime and punishment. Both who commits them (and against whom) and who gets punished for them.
[Aside: you do realize when I say “victims” or “people” to describe the murdered that I am really talking almost exclusively about women, yes? Outside of John Wayne Gacy and Dean Corll, most of these killers are men killing women.]
Now I’m not saying the system is rigged. But I had a friend go to prison for six years when the boyfriend of his girlfriend’s sister got stabbed during a scuffle when he was trying to stop him from killing her.
He’s not in that Because He Was White file. Maybe because he wasn’t white.
I do know of a guy who, while being mugged in broad daylight, managed to murder both of his attackers. They sent him to Soledad Prison for seven years. He was white but was walking down the street holding hands with his boyfriend and seemed an easy mark by guys who didn’t realize that Navy SEALS come in all sexual preferences. The othering that marked him as a gay white man though wasn’t enough to let him slide apparently.
I know I’ll be told that I’m being paranoid and that anecdotal is not always actual. And if truth be told, no matter what Chris Rock thinks about the supposed undesirability of Black skin, I’ve never ever, not even once, wanted to be white.
I have, however, been angry enough to wish I was, for just the shortest bit of time, so that maybe a passing cop who might have stumbled upon me digging a hole in the middle of the night would wave and yell, “getting an early start on your planting?” like a passing cop actually said one night to Gacy. Gacy who killed 33 teenagers.
Or the cops who, over the wishes of two Black women who stood there with a panicked, naked and handcuffed 14-year-old Asian teenager, returned the soon-to-be victim to his “boyfriend” Jeffrey Dahmer. These cops were later given awards.
I wish there was a point to this.
As the father of four daughters and the brother to four sisters I wish to g-d there was a point to this that favored all of us living long, long lives. But I’m leery and it lingers: Black killers of Black women are likely to be ignored as well. One of the most “successful” serial killers is Black, Samuel Little, and preyed almost exclusively on Black women.
Almost exclusively. The noose tightened on him, however, when through tireless police work they tied him to the murder of the one white woman he killed.
I really wish there was a point to this but all I’m left with is this: the world’s a dangerous place. Plan accordingly.