Stalking the Bogeyman

The next death I plotted was the Bogeyman's.

Soon after I moved to Denver three years ago, I learned from my parents that the son of their good friends now also lived in the area. I became fixated on the idea that he was raping children nearby and that it was up to me to stop him by any means necessary. According to a 1998 Colorado Bureau of Investigation polygraph study of convicted child molesters, the mean number of victims per molester, at least in this state, is 184, and that's only for the molesters who've been arrested and stopped, at least for a little while. My guy has never been caught. Eighty percent of convicted child molesters in Colorado keep a clean criminal record right up until they're caught for molesting kids, and his is spotless.

The science has gotten a lot better since I read those studies twenty years ago. Now authorities agree that most pedophiles begin molesting children when the perpetrators are in their middle teens, and most of them never stop, not even after they're caught -- if they're caught -- and my Bogeyman has never been caught. All my adult life, I'd been aware that he was, in all likelihood, still raping children, but as long as he was doing it far away, I'd felt no compulsion to do anything about it. Once I found out he was here, though, I began to agonize over my failure to stop him. I considered going to the police, but I had no evidence except my memories. I thought about placing subtle advertisements in Alaskan newspapers; I thought about sending letters to everyone he knows, his ex-wives and everyone in his new neighborhood in Colorado, warning them and begging them to please come forward if they knew anything or suspected anything. But I was afraid such measures would somehow lead to my parents' finding out, and the cold, hard truth is that I wanted to protect them more than I wanted to protect children I'd never met.

The more I obsessed on it, the more I came to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the best way to make sure he never raped another child, to make sure I had my revenge, was to kill him, to just walk right up to him in a secluded place and scrape him from this world like a piece of dog shit off my shoe.

I bought the gun last April. I had a few firearms in my closet already, but they'd all been purchased legally, in my name, from a licensed firearms dealer. So I flew to Phoenix and went to a gang barrio, where I bought a Beretta 9mm with a homemade silencer and the serial number removed. I took this gun to the local garage gunsmith and had him put dozens of deep nicks and grooves in the Beretta's barrel to corrupt ballistics tests. The gunsmith warned me that this would ruin the gun's accuracy beyond a few feet, but I didn't care. I intended to get up-close and personal.

After testing the gun and silencer in the desert, I stored them in Phoenix and flew home to keep scheming. It seems a little insane to me now that I was actually going to kill a man instead of just bringing what he had done to me out in the open. But that's how kiddie rapers get away with it. They depend upon shame and fear and embarrassment to keep their victims quiet. And there are so many victims. The commonly accepted estimate among law enforcement and sexual-abuse treatment specialists in Colorado is that one in four women and one in six men who live in this state were either molested or raped before the age of eighteen, most of them by a man or teenage boy they knew.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, fewer than one in ten sexual assaults on children in this country are committed by a stranger. About a third of the perpetrators are family members, including stepfathers. The rest -- 60 percent -- are acquaintances of the child. They are coaches, scoutmasters, priests, family friends, sons of family friends. The Bogeyman walks among us, masked with charm, tricking us into liking him because he's so good with children.

The summer when I was eleven, Jim, my Little League coach, told my parents that the whole team was getting together at a batting cage for practice and that he would come by to pick me up. He came and got me, all right, but there was no team trip to the batting cage. He took me out for pizza and gave me money to play video games. He didn't try anything, but he was working up to it. A few days later, he called and asked if I wanted to go see the movie Annie with him -- a grown man, asking a boy out on a date. I recognized the Bogeyman, and I made sure I was never alone with Jim, either.

Two years later, Billy, my youth-league basketball coach, held a team sleepover after the last game of the season. He ordered pizzas and put a gay-porn video in his VCR, inviting us to watch it while he took the two shyest boys on our team into his bedroom and locked the door. So I took a case of soda out on his balcony and launched a pop-can artillery barrage on the cars in the parking lot of his condo complex. I shattered windshields and dented hoods until the neighbors poured outside, screaming bloody murder, and Billy had to go down to pacify them by agreeing to pay the damages. After that, he turned off the porn and stayed in his bedroom, the door open, for the rest of the slumber party. I sat up with my back against a wall all night long. He didn't tell my parents about the pop cans.