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PERSONALITY

❝life is for livin’, baby.❞

Eddie is a thrill-seeker; an adrenaline junkie. Eager to push his luck, he loves to take risks just for the sake of taking them—especially after spending over half a decade evading police capture. To put it simply, Eddie seeks his own destruction because nothing has convinced him of its possibility. He seeks fear, real fear. He wishes to be face-to-face with death, and he wants it to scare him.Eddie, numb since birth, chases after emotional highs to fill the space left by the physical pain he cannot feel. Prior to his near-death experience at the hands of Thomas Brown Hewitt, Eddie hadn’t ever truly feared for his life. He hadn’t ever felt that rush, and not a single soul had been able to bring him that close to death before. Thomas’ ability to evoke that sense of fear is what initially catches Eddie’s attention, and that attraction’s only further fueled by learning that Thomas, like Eddie, is a murderer. Eddie’s infatuation with Thomas can better be described as an obsession, one that grows more and more intense the longer they stay together. Eddie’s relationship with Thomas is the only one in which he’s been able to be himself, to be “real”. He fears losing that connection, and as such, would do anything to maintain it.Eddie, both in his adulthood and in adolescence, has constantly chased after the idea of finding his “soulmate”, being something of a hopeless romantic. Upon forming a connection with someone, something deeper than a mere sexual connection, he becomes dependent on them. Their feelings dictate his; if they’re having a bad day, Eddie has a bad day. If they’re happy, Eddie’s happy. If they’re angry with him, Eddie does all he can to correct the issue—even if it means making promises he can’t keep. He becomes desperate for his partners to like him. He wishes for them to see him for who he truly is and still love him despite all the darkness that consumes him and his life. This would, in theory, prove his self-loathing incorrect. It would prove that he can be loved, and that he is deserving of it despite being a bad person. Eddie knows he is cruel and knows he is “evil”, and deep down, he would not have it any other way. Eddie does not want to change.Eddie often believes that he has to fight for his lovers to stay so they do not leave him. It’s difficult for him to accept that someone can love him just because they say so, and this fear isn’t completely unsubstantiated. He’s a serial murderer, and although he feels no remorse for his actions, he is acutely aware of the fact that if his partners were to find out about his true nature, they would fear him. Leave him. Telling a lie (both to himself and to his partner) by trying to live a “normal life”, ignoring that itch, and trying to conceal an integral part of himself despite knowing he cannot, Eddie feeds into his paranoia. Small things—changes in one’s tone or body language—can often set him off, believing that they’ve somehow found out about his crimes and now despise him. This, each and every time, continues a cycle of self-sabotage. Several of his partners had distanced themselves from him due to his splitting and constant lying, only leading to more fears, doubts, and anger on Eddie’s end—and on even worse occasions, their deaths.Eddie cannot live a normal life. It’s not something that he wants, no matter how much he deludes himself into thinking so just because he wishes to hold on to the love given to him. To Eddie, killing is a part of him. It’s as integral to him as being queer is, and it’s equally something he cannot stand to be ashamed of. To kill is to embrace who he is; to kill is to be alive at all. Eddie is irredeemable, simply due to the fact that he doesn’t wish for redemption.

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DOSSIER

❝i am who i am. there’s no changin’ that.❞

I. INFANCY – AGE 08

Eddie Amar Reid was born on June 3rd, 1946 in Los Angeles, California, the second son of Josephine Lou (née Harper), a seamstress working from home, and George Edward Reid, the owner of a local auto-repair center.George was drafted into World War II in 1943 at the age of twenty-two, leaving his wife and first son, Louis Allen, on their own for the remainder of the war. Though he had only been gone for a little over two years, coming home less than half a year before Japan’s surrender, George had returned as a stranger to his family. He’d changed, having seen horrors he couldn’t unsee and experiencing loss he didn’t have the time to grieve—particularly that of his older brother, Harvey Lee Reid Jr. (better known as Junior). George had set foot in Europe as a proud, bright-eyed soldier and came home a shadow of who that boy used to be. Soldiers, after returning from war, were expected to be quiet, move on, and enjoy the rest of their lives to the best of their ability. There was no use in dwelling on the past or upsetting one’s wife and children with horrific war stories. So George, like many other men in his generation, refused to speak to his family about what he experienced. The only comfort he could find was at the bottom of a beer bottle, and his drinking eventually turned him into a cruel, mean man, who would only bring violence into their home.Josephine seemed to distance herself from her children once she had realized that she was losing her husband, especially when Eddie’s birth only seemed to worsen his temper. He’d never lay a hand on her—George was well aware that she’d leave him if she tried—but the children couldn’t fight back nor could they escape their father’s anger. Josephine chose herself.From the moment he was born, it was clear there was something wrong with Eddie. When he was a newborn, he didn’t cry out when he was hungry. When he was teething, he nearly gnawed off his own fingers. When he scraped his knees, he didn’t notice it until the blood had run halfway down his calf. When his father hit him, he didn’t cry because he felt it; instead, he simply mirrored Louis’ tears.Louis, four years Eddie’s senior, had always envied his younger brother for his inability to feel. Eddie was lucky and didn’t even know how so. His tears, his cries—they were all an act! Louis truly felt as if Eddie had been mocking him during their shared beatings. In his childish ignorance, he took his jealousy out on the boy.For most of Eddie’s early childhood, there were only two adults in his life who had treated him with any sort of care: his paternal grandparents, Frances Margaret (née Hampton) and Harvey Lee Reid Sr. Frances stood by a philosophy of “tough love”, and she made sure to keep the boys busy with chores and housework in the summer days they spent in her home. For each of the couple tasks they completed, they got rewarded in the form of chocolates. Eddie looked forward to leaving the house for the summer at the end of each school year for this fact alone. Once, when he was around seven years old, Eddie had even asked his grandmother if he could live with her full-time. Frances laughed, and once summer ended, she sent him back home.Harvey Sr., on the other hand, acted as Eddie’s stand-in father figure. He taught the boy how to fish, how to fight, how to shoot a gun—all the things his father didn’t care to teach him at home. They were never that emotionally close, however. There had always been this burning, yet very quiet kind of anger running under Harvey’s skin, though it was never directed at Eddie. It was always at George, or at Louis, or at life and death itself, that vicious cycle. Following Junior’s passing, that anger never left him.Eddie admired his grandfather much more than he ever did George. He respected him.When he started school, Eddie was immediately aware of how different he was from other children his age. He knew the others didn’t quite like him, whether it be in the looks they gave him or in the harsh words they spat when they thought he couldn’t hear them. The one saving grace he could find was on Sundays, when he’d sing in the church choir and no one could talk badly about him—not only because he was the best, but also because God was watching, after all.Most of the overt bullying stopped when Eddie was in the second-grade and began to physically defend himself. Due to his condition, it was much easier to get into more brutal fights, which gave him a sort of reputation. Other children began fearing him, some believing him to be the offspring of the Devil. Eddie tried to find comfort in loneliness, but being yet a child, that proved difficult.That was until one fateful day; the day he’d found someone who wasn’t afraid of him.Mateo Amorós. Sometime during July of 1954, Mateo had moved to Los Angeles from New Jersey and later became a part of Eddie’s third-grade class. The boy never feared him, nor did he tease him. In all truth, the both boys were desperate for friendship and quickly found it in each other. This being Eddie’s first real friend, he would grow deeply attached to Mateo—even codependent. They were inseparable, naively believing they’d be friends forever. Neither of them could’ve known that they’d become arguably the most important people in each other’s lives, for better and for worse.

II. AGE 08 – AGE 13

From then on, Eddie and Mateo did nearly everything together. If you were to come across one of the boys, you were sure to find the other following close behind. It wasn’t long before others only really knew them as “Mateo and Eddie”, as if they were a packaged pair. Eddie never minded it—in fact, he found that he rather loved it. Mateo wasn’t like Louis, or their parents, or all their classmates who had deemed him inferior. Mateo cared about him, or at least cared enough to be so closely associated with him. Mateo wouldn’t abandon him for the simple fact that neither of them had anyone else. They only had each other. That’s all Eddie needed.On November 16th, 1956, a few months after Eddie had turned ten years old, his mother gave birth to a baby girl named Eileen “Ellie” Aimée Reid. When Josephine initially fell pregnant, Eddie was scared; for the baby, for the home it’d grow up in. He couldn’t imagine a little girl enduring the treatment he and Louis had, especially with how young they’d been when it started. Eddie soon realized that his worries had been for nothing, however, as his father found the strength to get sober around his mother’s second trimester.He’d quit. He’d gotten better in what felt like no time at all—just in time for Eileen’s birth.Eddie and Louis were reasonably upset. They were furious, jealous. For what felt like the first time in their short lives, they were finally united in something: their anger. Why hadn’t they been enough for their father to get sober? What was so special about her? In some sort of protest, the boys initially refused to spend time with their sister. They didn’t hold her, feed her, or talk to her. It was as if she hadn’t been born at all. George pushed the boys to interact with Eileen, once even screaming that their behavior was childish and that they “knew better”, but he refused to lay a hand on either of them. Eddie, a small, bitter part of him, wished that he had. That he resorted to old habits, proving his sudden changes of heart hadn’t been permanent, but it was. George, after spending the past ten years of Eddie’s life as a monster, had become a man again. He’d redeemed himself.This protest couldn’t last forever, and eventually came time for one of the boys to babysit Eileen. George and Josephine chose to go out on a date, something they hadn’t done in a decade, and Louis had been out with his friends (and being a teenage boy, he hadn’t planned to come home until far past midnight). That left Eddie to care for his newborn sister alone, despite his pleading not to. When forced to finally acknowledge Eileen’s existence, rather than loathing the mere idea of her, Eddie found it harder and harder to stay angry. Eileen was small, fragile. She hadn’t asked to be brought into their family, nor could she answer for their father. None of them could. Nothing Louis or Eddie would’ve done could’ve made their father change; he just didn’t find it worth it to change for them. Eddie, not wanting to treat Eileen as Louis did him, made it a point from then on to be kind to her.Louis never put his hands on Eileen (as he had with Eddie on multiple occasions), but he was just as mean to her as he had been to Eddie in their youth. He couldn’t find the empathy for her that Eddie had, nor could he care to. That anger, that envy, would only grow into a temper that would later match their father’s. Louis, through his spite for his old man, would slowly turn into his mirror.Eddie’s close friendship with Mateo had kept him going for much of this time. Though he had initially just seen the boy as a way out, an escape from his solitude, his feelings had soon blossomed into something far deeper. He’d developed a crush, teetering on the edge of obsession. Of course he’d never call it that out loud—Mateo was merely a friend. One of the dearest (and only) friends Eddie had ever had, yes, but a friend nonetheless. In the 1950s, being a homosexual was enough to send one to the psych ward. It was seen as an illness, a deviation that had to be “cured”. Eddie refused to believe that he was sick, so he told himself that his feelings for Mateo were the same as they’d always been: friendly, brotherly. Others around them weren’t nearly as blind.Rumors spread like wildfire, and neither Eddie nor Mateo could do much to contain them. The former didn’t care much for the gossip; he’d been treated poorly all his life, so some talking behind his back wasn’t out of the ordinary. Mateo, however, being in the closet, felt that his worst fears were taking form right in front of him. He’d been so bothered by what others had to say that he, at times, became incredibly destructive and angry, something Eddie wasn’t used to seeing. It worried him, but he never brought it up in fear of agitating Mateo further. Eddie, perhaps foolishly, believed that he would get over it in time. That things would return to their version of “normal”.1958. For Eddie’s twelfth birthday, Harvey Sr. gifted him a hunting knife with a blade made of dark, Damascus steel. The boy cherished it deeply, carving his name into its handle and never from that day letting it out of his sight. It would be one of the last things Harvey Sr. ever gave him, as barely a year later, he passed from an unsuspected stroke. This absolutely devastated Eddie. Harvey Sr. had been one of the only people Eddie knew cared for him, and he’d been the only man to defend him against his father before Eileen was born. Frances left the house less and less often after the funeral, and her calls to her grandchildren were even more infrequent. Eddie hadn’t ever considered that his grandparents wouldn’t be around for him anymore. He hadn’t thought that he’d ever be left really, truly alone.In his grief, Eddie clung on even tighter to Mateo. He couldn’t stand to be without him for even a minute, fearing that if he let him go for just a moment, he’d lose him just as quickly as he had lost his grandparents. Blinded by this grief, Eddie couldn’t see that his dependence on Mateo was slowly driving him farther and farther away. The ill rumors surrounding their friendship hadn’t dissipated. “Mateo and Eddie” lost its fondness—soon enough, the boys’ names would always be followed by a hushed whisper. Rumors of a deeper, more intimate relationship between the two. Eddie’s clinginess had only added fuel to the fire, a flame Mateo wanted nothing more than to smother out. With his fourteenth birthday coming up in less than a year, he wanted nothing more than to be accepted by his peers. To stop being left out, to have more than one friend. In his eyes, his dependence on Eddie had been holding him back for far too long.So, a couple of weeks after Eddie’s thirteenth birthday, Mateo was approached by a group of their classmates during one of the rare instances that Eddie wasn’t by his side. They flattered him, telling him that they liked him, that he had potential. That they figured he wasn’t really a queer, and instead just held down by the ball and chain at his ankle. They told Mateo that the only way to make sure the rumors stopped spreading was to do one simple thing: abandon Eddie. He’d been the cause of the whole mess anyway, clinging so tight onto Mateo for so long. It was his fault, really (rather, that’s what Mateo told himself).The decision was a difficult one. Eddie was his best friend, his first since he moved. His only friend. His friend that was still actively grieving. To leave him, especially at a time like this? Mateo wasn’t sure if he could ever forgive himself.Despite his guilt, Mateo went through with it. In only to ensure he’d never have to face the truth.He tried to let Eddie down easy, but it was never going to end well. Initially, Eddie hadn’t even believed him. He thought it was a bad joke, some weird prank. When he realized it wasn’t, he fell apart all at once. He lashed out, asking Mateo what he did wrong. Why he had changed, why he wasn’t acting like he used to. Why he wanted to leave after all that they had been through—it was supposed them against the world. It had been up until that point, so why change it now?Eddie screamed but he didn’t cry. He wouldn’t cry, not in front of him. Mateo screamed right back, claiming that he’d essentially forced his hand.“I wouldn’t have to do this if you weren’t queer! It’s your fault people think of us like that! Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t!”“What? You really believe that? You know that ain’t true!”“Why do you act like you’re in love with me, then? You never leave me alone, you never let me go, you’re as desperate as a goddamn girl!”Eddie grabbed Mateo by his shirt, holding him up no more than half an inch off the ground and raising his fist as if he was going to hit him. He didn’t, though, even when Mateo dared him to. If they were to fight, and if Eddie didn’t hold himself back, Mateo would lose—they both knew that.Eddie still refused to hurt him. Eventually, he let Mateo go. The silence was uncomfortable, tense. Mateo left after he realized Eddie was giving him a chance to run, effectively sparing him. Once he was gone, Eddie still couldn’t find it in himself to break down. Instead, he raised his fist again and struck the wall he had held Mateo up against moments before. He struck it again, and again, and again, refusing to stop even when his knuckles bled and bruised.It didn’t hurt.

III. AGE 13 – AGE 18

Eddie’s mental state only worsened once Mateo had left him. He’d lost his grandfather, his grandmother had become a recluse after her husband’s death, and his only friend in the world thought of him as nothing more than a sniffling baby. His immediate family—all except Eileen, of course—didn’t offer any sympathy once Eddie had come home, fists bleeding and his body shaking with anger. Louis had taunted him, joking that he’d had a fight with his boyfriend.That was the first time Eddie had ever hit Louis first. He later lost the fight, but he found that the rush of adrenaline he’d gotten from it was enough to forget what Mateo had said, if only for a little while.In the following months, Eddie found that distracting himself from his problems was far easier than voicing them aloud. These “distractions” often came in the form of violence. Most instances involved some sort of self-injury, such as punching a wall or the trunk of a tree until the skin on his knuckles were bruised and bleeding. Unable to feel the pain brought on by his actions, Eddie took pleasure in the rush of endorphins that’d follow. It was a good rush, but after a while, Eddie found himself searching for ways to make it better. Bigger.Eddie had gone on a handful of hunting trips with Harvey Sr. before the old man’s passing, but the first animal that he had killed with malicious, sadistic intent was a dying bird. It had injured its wing and couldn’t fly anymore. In the moment, Eddie told himself that he was only putting the poor thing out of its misery. That simply wasn’t true, though. Crushing its bones, watching its blood splatter against his fists, was exhilarating in a way he didn’t know how to describe—he only knew that he liked it.He also found comfort in the church. He’d excuse his actions through the word of God, trusting that he was on the right path. He thought of hurting people, hurting them badly, but he’d never do it. That’d be going too far. That’d make him evil, wouldn’t it? Eddie didn’t believe himself to be evil. Just angry. His faith was all he really had. God couldn’t care that much if he allowed him to keep doing it, right? If it felt as good as it did? It didn’t matter.On the outside, it seemed as if Eddie had taken Mateo’s words to heart, as he had drastically changed during the summer before their freshman year of high school. From the ground up, he taught himself how to act. It was all a matter of watching others: what they did, what they said, and how they said it. He held little resemblance to the boy he had once been by the time his fifthteenth birthday had passed.Of course, this had only been a change in his behavior. His mind hadn’t improved much—if anything, he grew worse. His thoughts of hurting people, people larger than animals that couldn’t hurt him back, increased exponentially. Most of them were focused on people he didn’t know, just folks he passed by on his way home from school, though a growing portion of his thoughts became more and more focused on Mateo. Eddie wanted to make him hurt for leaving, for never saying sorry, for never looking him in the eye again. Still, he harbored a sort of obsession with him. Mateo had always been handsome. Even as boys, Eddie couldn’t help but stare when he thought no one was looking. Mateo’s attention had been all on Eddie back then, though that had been when he had no one else. Neither of them had. For a time, Eddie had no problem with that. Mateo, his only friend, his best, was all he needed in the world. Come to find out, Mateo didn’t seem to hold Eddie nearly as high.Eddie wanted to hurt Mateo for being right. He’d never been able to accept it before; he was a queer. Even more than that, he was smitten.Despite learning to “act right”, Eddie had never become popular. Not like Mateo had. Several people began to take notice of him, though. After all, Eddie had always been quite pretty. Soft-looking. This all led to his first sexual encounter being with a girl he met during church when he was merely sixteen years old. When she told her friends about their time together, Eddie assumed it was in an attempt to make fun of him. It ended up being far from that.Eddie never stayed in meaningful relationships with any of the women he slept with. Nothing had been wrong on their ends: they were good-looking, decently smart, and all generally kind girls. In truth, he only wanted Mateo. He wanted what they had before, that dedication to each other, that connection. Eddie wanted all of Mateo’s attention for just a little longer.Mateo, on the other hand, had gotten nearly everything he wanted. He joined the school’s football team, went to house parties, formed a circle of friends—and by the time he was seventeen he had a nice girl at his arm to prove to the world something he couldn’t to himself. It was picture-perfect. It was supposed to be.No matter how perfect Mateo tried to be, though, his girlfriend, Christine Davis, wasn’t stupid. She felt, deep in her heart, that Mateo simply didn’t like her. He wasn’t ever mean to her, far from it, but something just wasn’t there. He didn’t like to touch her all that often, and when he did, he treated it like a chore. Something to get done with. Initially, she assumed he thought she was ugly. Mateo assured her that wasn’t the case and Christine believed him. Her fears weren’t settled, though. It had to be something else.Just a month or so away from graduation, Christine found herself in Eddie’s bedroom. They had met at a house party that Mateo just-so-happened to miss, as he wanted to work on college scholarships the next morning and couldn’t afford to be hungover. Christine was desperate, hoping that Eddie could give her the connection she lacked with her boyfriend. Afterwards, she spilled her woes to him once he asked her why she approached him. “He just doesn’t love me! Well… he’s real nice, but he doesn’t like to touch me that much. It’s like I’m repulsive to him! It’s so boring—it’s not like a boy should, is all.”Eddie acted as if he felt nothing, but a stupid, hopeless part of him became convinced that he somehow still had a chance. He only needed to talk to Mateo, who he knew wouldn’t even look at him without a proper reason.So Eddie chose to provoke him. For better or for worse, it worked.

IV. JUNE 14th, 1964

In the handful of weeks leading up to their graduation, Eddie spoke openly about Mateo for the first time in years. Telling anyone who’d listen, he’d go on and on about how Mateo was a spineless coward, how he was a liar, and how he “couldn’t even satisfy his woman”.Mateo, though infuriated upon learning of what Eddie had been saying behind his back, couldn’t risk losing his opportunity to walk the stage over a fight—so he met with Eddie privately. Holding him by the collar of his shirt, he told him to meet him a week after school had ended. “To settle things”. Throughout it all, Eddie grinned like a fool.June 14th, 1964. Mateo had told Eddie to meet him in a secluded place where no one could stop or snitch on them. That was his second mistake. His first was coming to meet Eddie at all.Mateo was hesitant to throw the first punch. He hadn’t met with Eddie one-on-one in years, and the last time they had talked he knew Eddie could’ve beat him without much effort. Could he still, years later? Would he hesitate, as he had before? Even so, Mateo knew one thing: he couldn’t afford to lose. To come home black and blue, waving a white flag, like a pussy.Upon meeting, Mateo asked Eddie why he’d been dragging his name through the dirt when he hadn’t done anything to him in years. Eddie laughed in response, telling him it was all true. “You’re acting like I made it all up! I never lied about you, Mateo.”“I know what this is. You’re still mad that I moved on? That I got a life? You wanted my goddamn attention so bad that you went off and ran your mouth like a girl?”“Right on the money, baby, and what a life you have! I really envy your self-loathing, you know. You wouldn’t be so upset if I wasn’t telling the truth. I know you.”“That’s the thing: you don’t know me, Ed! You don’t know me anymore, no matter how much you want to! Where’d you hear all this shit anyway, huh? Why’s Christine’s name in your mouth?”“I only repeated what she told me,” Eddie stood casually, hands in his pockets and still smiling. Mateo hated it. “Oh! That was after I fucked her, of course. She was like a dog on a bone, y’know? So desperate, on her knees and almost begging for me to—”Mateo threw the first punch before another vulgar word could spill from Eddie’s lips. Anger burned through his chest just as much as fear had. If Christine talked to Eddie, she could have run her mouth off to anyone. What did she even tell him? What did she think? Didn’t he hide it well enough?Eddie’s nose began to bleed almost immediately, though it didn’t bother him. Instead he felt almost invigorated, as if he was given new life. The only way he knew to express himself was through violence—the only way he could be himself, really. Every day he wished for someone to pick a fight with him just so he’d have a reason to hit back.Mateo? His poor soul. He hit first.The next part in Eddie’s memory is relatively foggy. There was blood, swinging fists, words thrown. Curses, threats. Eddie was ecstatic. To fight Mateo, to hurt him, was to be finally honest with him. To expose his bleeding heart in a gift-wrapped box. This, in its unrestrained emotion, was raw. It was real. Eddie, for once in his life, felt real.Eventually, he got Mateo onto the ground. His hand gripped his throat, threatening to squeeze as he looked into angry eyes. Mateo was bleeding, his mouth painted red. It even got into his teeth. It was beautiful. He was beautiful, really, even as he scowled and cursed at him.“God, I love you.”Mateo stilled, his frown stiffening. He looked confused. “You… you what?”“I really do hate you, too. For leaving. You were right, I can’t get over it, but I love you. I love this. This is the first time I’ve ever told you that, right? Back then, I wasn’t sure. I tried to ignore it. Christine told me that she knew you didn’t like her. ‘Not like a boy should’. That’s when I knew it wasn’t just me.” Eddie’s grip tightened. [“I don’t care what they all say. You shouldn’t either! How great does it feel to be honest about it, huh? I felt sick for a while, but I love it! Hurting you, being with you, all of it! It’s all the same. It’s real. It’s me, Mateo, it’s—”]“What the hell is wrong with you?!”Eddie was quiet for a long time while Mateo cursed at him. He scratched up and down his arms, breaking skin and screaming for Eddie to just let him go. He couldn’t, though, even if he wanted to. All he could think of was the last time Mateo had screamed at him like that. When he left.He was doing it again. Leaving. Eddie couldn’t let him. It was a sick, sick cycle. Eddie couldn’t let him.So he beat Mateo. His fist came up and down over and over, and Eddie only wondered when it was supposed to start hurting. Mateo screamed at first. Then he cried. If he apologized, Eddie wasn’t in the right mind to hear it. Eventually there was nothing. Eddie kept hitting him.Eddie was angry. He was devastated. He wanted to light Mateo’s body ablaze and watch the world follow him.When that river of hate ran through him, an odd sense of acceptance followed. Sitting over Mateo’s body, the air quiet, Eddie was forced to come to terms with what he was. What he did. It didn’t bother him. It should’ve scared him, disgusted him, but Eddie felt undescribably free.Mateo was a coward and Eddie had killed him. Worst of all, he liked it. Goddamn, he liked it.He laid atop Mateo’s body for what felt like forever. In his shock, Eddie put his ear to Mateo’s chest a couple of times and waited to hear his heart beat. It didn’t make a sound.He later drove over an hour away just to throw Mateo’s body in a lake. On that drive, he half-realized the finality of what he did. It was as if he were on autopilot. His mind was fogged over, and for once, he couldn’t think.Life would never be the same again. If he was smart, he couldn’t stay home. Leaving was his only option.So he left. He gathered everything that he could fit in a bag he could carry, telling himself that he had nothing to miss at home anyway. That was half true. Eileen came to his door—she was seven at the time, turning eight in only a couple of months. She held the doorframe and asked him, in this quiet, little voice, “where are you going?”“Far, far away,” He told her. For the first time that day, he felt the closest thing he could to guilt. “Only for a while. Be good, okay?”He didn’t say goodbye to Louis, or his father, or his mother. With all he’d done, with what he knew he’d do later, he figured Eileen deserved something. Maybe that was only because he knew she’d done no wrong.Eddie left that night. He never quite looked back.

V. AGE 18 – AGE 24

Eddie’s last words to Eileen were only for her comfort, as after that day, he never again returned to his family home. Eighteen years, eighteen miserable years, spent in that house lost all their meaning over the course of only a couple hours. Eddie wasn’t just the “strange boy from a troubled home” anymore—he was a murderer. He was a criminal, and any hope of a normal life under his name had been lost due to one life-changing fight. For about a month after Mateo’s death, both boys were only considered missing. That was until Mateo’s body was found the following August by an unfortunate family just looking for a nice day by the lake. Eddie’s absence became more suspicious than worrying, though his family initially refused to believe he could commit such an act. Over the coming years, however, they would silently accept what they assumed to be true.Eddie didn’t go far, not at first. Only a couple towns over, staying in a motel under a different name and wearing star-shaped sunglasses he’d gotten from a gas station. He was acutely aware of his desire to kill again, the urge being an unbearable itch under his skin, but he couldn’t. Not so soon.He stayed at that dingy motel for a couple of weeks, wondering when he’d see Mateo’s picture on the news. He wondered what he would do, being met with his face again. Would he feel guilt? Sorrow? Would he miss him? Part of him still held anger towards Mateo. Part of him still held a deep, almost unbearable love. This was always going to be their end, or at least that’s what he told himself. Eddie never could have lived a normal life with a wife and children and house with a picket fence—he would’ve done it, but he’d never feel satisfied. Mateo wouldn’t have been able to keep up a lie for that long, not when his entire life had been built on them. From the moment they had met, their lives became forever intertwined.Even in death, Mateo could not untangle himself from him. He would always remain on Eddie’s mind, even in the background.Mateo’s picture never appeared on any news station or in any newspapers. Eddie had heard the news of the body being discovered through word of mouth, but there was never a big investigation. No policemen came to his door with a warrant for his arrest. Not enough people cared about his death, not really. Part of Eddie figured as much and thought it sick—Mateo deserved to be remembered, Eddie had loved him once after all—until he remembered that he was the one who killed him. It was his fault Mateo was gone. It had been an act committed by his hand.... but he got away with it. That’s what hit Eddie the hardest. He committed murder, a sin, and got away with it. Could he do it again? How long could he go without being caught? If this were supposed to be the rest of his life, how much longer would he be able to live?Eddie’s second murder came shortly after this realization. It was a man he had met at a bar—the first man he had ever laid in bed with. Mateo was the first that he had loved, but he was long gone.Eddie can’t remember the man’s face. No matter how hard he tries to, there's always a kind of fog distorting his features. He doesn’t even remember his name either, though it was something common. John, or William, or Stan. Eddie told him that his name was Jack, that was something he remembered. It was the first time he used that alias.He had strangled the man in his motel room in a moment of impulse, shortly after they’d slept together. He was vulnerable, laying next to a man he met only a couple hours prior—a man, despite insisting in his youth that he could never be queer. One of “them”. It was peaceful, if only for a moment.The man pulled Eddie over his body without asking, wanting a second round. Eddie hadn’t expected it—being forced to straddle him, that is. He didn’t want to. His hands, settled on the man’s collarbones in an attempt to balance himself, were dreadfully close to his neck. Eyes trailing from his chest to his throat to his face, Mateo’s mutilated, bloody body flashed in front of him for no more than a second. It was enough to startle him off of the man and enough to make him fall off the bed in what almost felt like fear—almost, because Eddie had no reason to fear Mateo’s corpse. It was a problem he solved, an action he believed had to take, one that he told himself he felt no guilt for. Still, it startled him. It could've been the position that had done it, or the shock, or the fact that the boy’s memory had been hanging over Eddie's head for weeks beforehand, the moment replaying over and over. That’s what they were each time before: memories, not hallucinations disorienting enough to make him jump. Not enough to make him scared.Eddie laid on the floor, naked and still so vulnerable, unsure of what was real. The memory had grown louder, each scream and curse Mateo had thrown at him echoing against the walls of his head and drowning out all other noise. When the man got out of bed and tried to touch him, Eddie attacked him out of both blind-rage and surprise. It did not take long to kill him.Disposing of the man’s body in a dumpster, he left the motel the morning after and left town for a second time. Mateo followed from a distance, only disappearing after a month. Though he did not have the words for it, that night in the motel room would trigger the beginning of Eddie’s psychosis.For the next three years, Eddie sunk deeper and deeper into his newfound career as a serial killer. He’d hardly go more than three months without a kill, the only exception being when he’d enter into a long-term relationship. “Long-term” was a stretch, though, as these relationships would hardly exceed over half a year before something went wrong. Eddie would kill again, leave town, and start over. It was a sick, sick cycle, and each time it would bring about another episode. Some long, some short. Some intense, some lingering in the background. Following one of these doomed relationships, Eddie experienced a delusion where he believed that Mateo was still alive and missing, and he had to be the one to find him. He nearly drowned after walking into a deep lake, digging through the sediment and trying to uncover Mateo’s body—alive, he believed, and waiting to be rescued. He would’ve died had he not been pulled out, kicking and screaming.1967, San Francisco. The “Summer of Love”. Eddie, still living under the radar, couldn’t help but return to his home state to get in on all the action that he’d seen on television. So, he moved to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, fitting in almost immediately. With the sexual revolution, free-spirited attitude of the time, and the rampant use of drugs like marijuana and LSD, Eddie was able to hide in plain sight and, for a time, ignore his violent urges. He wasn’t expected to “fit in” with normal society, and the general belief that sex was “no big deal” allowed him to engage in intimacy with men and women without much issue. Even if he couldn’t outwardly call himself “queer”, it was something. It was better, less pathetic, than lying to himself. Mateo had lied to himself for years, and that’d played a part in killing him. Eddie wouldn’t make the same mistake.For the first time in his life, Eddie had felt somewhat accepted by those around him. The beatnik, draft-dodging hippies were his people—in only some ways, because still, there was that itch. The longer he went without a kill, the more the desire to spill blood would plague his mind. Toward the end of the summer, in September of that same year, he would eventually give in.Eddie had been high when he did it. He’d been sloppy, leading some pretty, white, likely upper-middle-class girl away from her friends and into some bedroom in some commune he’d wormed his way into. He hadn’t even slept with her, he’d gotten too worked up far too fast. Seeing her undress, utterly unaware of what he’d soon do to her, talking to him as if she’d known him for years—Eddie struck her in the head with a lamp before she could finish her last sentence. It was impulsive, it was risky, and it was stupid, as he knew there’d be no way to dispose of the corpse in a house that was as full as the one he’d found himself in. He left the area with traces of her blood on his hands and clothing, walking through a crowd that knew his face and walking past the girl’s friends, who knew his voice and knew that she’d gone with him before she disappeared.It didn’t take long for someone to find the body, and shortly after that, the police had been called. Shortly after that, the girl’s parents. It was easy to get away with murder when his inital victims had been queer, poor, and estranged from family—but this girl had folks that wanted to fight for her. They wanted to find whoever had taken their daughter from them, and they wanted to find that out as soon as possible.Eddie was singled out as the main suspect in less than a month. Although he’d used an alias in San Francisco, multiple people had seen his face that night and the police were able connect the case to that of a pair of missing boys from Los Angeles—well, one missing. One dead. Eddie had already been suspected to have been the cause of Mateo’s death by that time, but another murder in the same state, with a suspect that many witnesses claimed to share his face? It wasn’t that hard to make the connection.Soon after, Eddie had been connected to more and more murders, until the LAPD had singled him out as the “Rockstar Killer”. To any other man, that would’ve been the end. They would’ve felt that they were caught, that they were going to be given the electric chair, and if they had any dignity, they would’ve killed themselves. Eddie, although annoyed at himself for being so reckless in the first place, had seen it as a challenge. Things got harder, but also so much more exciting. He took it all in stride, believing God, somehow, was watching over him because despite it all, he still hadn’t been caught yet. Until he either died or was captured by police, Eddie wouldn’t consider himself the loser. Perhaps He was curious to see how cruel His creations could truly become. Maybe He was building up to a grand finale, where Eddie would die a violent death, remorseful and alone, without anyone missing him.He’d have to wait and see.

VI. THE SUMMER OF 1970

May, 1970. Following a high-profile murder in Las Vegas, Nevada, Eddie fled the state, sleeping in his stolen Ford and eating take-out paid for with stolen cash while traveling east. He had no particular destination in mind, nor did he know when he’d kill again. He wanted to, of course he wanted to, but it’d pose far too much risk. Eddie’s ego wouldn’t allow him to get caught—by then, he’d been in the news for three years and still hadn’t faced capture. Part of him doubted that he could, and a small, small voice in the back of his head told him he was invincible. His pride allowed him to act non-chalant, to take it easy. He’d go to bars, have one-night stands, see the sights, all while being a wanted man. The life he’d built for himself, even though he knew others would sneer at it, was his and his alone.On June 19th, 1970, Eddie drove into the seemingly abandoned town of Fuller, Texas after an attempted robbery gone wrong—one that, for once, wasn’t his doing—utterly unaware that it would be years before he ever stepped foot out of Fuller again.