Stalking the Bogeyman

This time last year I was plotting to kill a man, and I was telling myself that like with Billy, I was doing it to protect the children. But really, more than anything else, I think I just wanted to shoot the son of a bitch. And I believe I would have, taking a second deep and dirty secret with me to the grave. I was going to kill a man rather than simply tell what he'd done -- because I was still ashamed, and because I didn't want my parents to know, even 25 years later. But then they found out, just in time to prevent me from committing first-degree murder.

If you have a secret you want to keep, never write it down. I know that now, but I didn't when I was ten, the summer between fourth and fifth grade, when I sat down with a pen and my Garfield the Cat diary. The entry is dated June 1981, and while I have no memory of writing it, the penmanship is unmistakably my own. There, between accounts of my grandfather dying and a game-winning double I hit in Little League, is an account of my being raped three years before. I concluded the entry by wondering what I would do if I ever met the man who'd raped me on the street once I myself was a grown man. "Will I smile and shake his hand and pretend nothing happened?" I wrote. "Or will I punch him in the face?"

Last September, my mom and dad decided to spend part of Labor Day weekend going through the cabinets in my old bedroom and box up all of my childhood stuff for attic storage. My mom found the diary and read it. I received a frantic message from her on my voice mail, saying I needed to call home right away. I called back immediately, my first thought that my dad was seriously ill. No, she said, it was nothing like that, but we needed to talk as a family. She got my dad on the phone and they told me about finding the diary, and my mom asked me in a shaking voice if it was true.

Had I had any warning, I would have lied, told my parents no, that the diary entry was just some twisted childhood musing I put down on paper for reasons long forgotten. My parents are both retired and in their sixties, and they didn't need this. But I was not prepared, and so I told the truth. My mom started crying, and I said I'd fly home as soon as I could.

I'd scheduled the murder by then, giving myself a 72-hour window immediately before I was to leave on a two-week trip to Mexico in late December. My plan was to shoot him, ditch the gun, then fly out of the country and keep my ear to the ground from afar, just in case. There's an ill-kept baseball field near his house where I was going to stalk him on a late-night walk. It's a good place for a killing in the suburbs, quiet, usually empty, and hundreds of yards from the closest house on its far side.

But by the time I met with my parents, I'd called off my plan. The truth was now out. It was my mother who'd pulled the trigger: She'd already sent an anonymous letter to his parents, informing them that their son was a child molester and imploring them to do everything in their power to prevent him from being alone with children.

In March my mom called his parents, who now live in Michigan. She'd written down exactly what she wanted to say on a sheet of yellow note paper, used it as a script and then mailed it to me. She started off by saying that what she was about to tell them would be difficult for them to hear, but for the sake of their grandchildren, they should listen. (He has children of his own now, as well as stepchildren.) She told them that their son had violently raped me in the fall of 1978. She told them that he had used a knife. She told them that the typical number of victims for a pedophile his age is well over a hundred. She told them that she regretted finding out what their son had done to me, but now that she had, she felt that they had to know as well. She told them she wished them to have good lives, but to never contact her or my father again -- no Christmas cards, nothing. She told them she hoped their son eventually got caught and spent the rest of his life getting raped in prison. Then she hung up.

By then, I'd begun writing about how I was sexually assaulted as a child, all the while knowing that my story would be incomplete, a failure, if I did not at least try to confront the Bogeyman. Strangely, I was a lot more comfortable with the concept of shooting him in the head than I was with talking to him on the phone, let alone in person.