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“Agreed. No one’s that good of an actor.”
“I’m not convinced he didn’t kill Cheryl though. You know how pushy guys like that can be.”
“Come on, Ripley, he’s been honest with us. If he’d have killed her, he wouldn’t have told us what he did.”
Ripley shrugged. “We’ll take a DNA sample and check it against the body.”
Ella became a little suspicious of Eric’s silence. “Eric, are you okay?”
Suddenly he burst back into the room, tissues held to his eyes. “Sorry, needed to clean myself up.”
“Sure. What have you got?”
Eric passed his phone to the agents. The screen showed his conversation history with Eliza Matthews. In the text box, she’d sent him a URL link to a webpage.
Ella’s jaw nearly hit the floor.
“You gotta be kidding me,” she said.
Ripley leaned closer and squinted. “The hell is that?”
“That, Ripley, is what we call a true crime podcast.”
But what astounded Ella the most was the little paragraph of text below the image of a bloody knife.
Welcome to Life Sentence, the Internet’s number one true crime show. Today, we’re taking a look at the tragic, mystifying case of the Black Dahlia.
CHAPTER TEN
The man had spent 45 minutes in the shower, scrubbing away all traces of blood, oil, dirt, grime – anything that could link him to the scene. All it would take was a chance meeting with Carole across the street. If she saw something out of the ordinary, she’d tell everyone, then it was only a matter of time before they developed suspicions. After all, he wasn’t the kind of man who got his hands dirty very often.
He dressed himself, went into his office, and opened up the day’s local news. Right on the front page, the most interesting thing that had happened to this town in decades: HICKSBERG SLASHER CLAIMS SECOND.
No photos. No testimonies from officers. Journalists probably couldn’t get out here quickly enough to grab some pictures of the body or the crime scene. More concerning, as he skimmed the article, he found no mention of the original crime that he was so obviously imitating.
How hard was it for these fools to make connections? A quick online search would have given them the information they needed. How many bisected girls had there ever been in history? Very few, at least by his own research. But once again, these lazy oafs couldn’t even be bothered to put in the minimum amount of effort. He even spelled it out for them as plain as day. The first girl? Okay, so only the most hardened true crime buffs might have pieced that one together. But the second one? He’d left all the clues they needed. What did he have to do? Etch it into her forehead?
For decades now, he’d been a figure of ridicule. His early life had been a mess. He’d been the product of an affair, and when his mother’s husband found about this deceit, the old man had taken it out on his only son. That broken home had planted the seeds for what came later: a delinquent who burglarized homes and stalked women and, eventually, killed them. His only reprieve had been reading about the monsters he came to idolize, the murderers that carried out heinous crimes and lived to tell the tale.
Now he needed to make amends for what went wrong all those years ago. He wasn’t the juvenile pest they believed him to be: he was a real murderer like his heroes. It wasn’t his fault that the police and the media were too stupid to make the connections.
He looked through the day’s news for any other mentions of himself. Maybe an enthusiastic reporter had taken the reins and knocked up an opinion piece or something. Maybe one of the victims’ family members had tried to speak out. This story was big news and if any reporters were worth their salt, they’d get the most out of this development.
Nothing.
Apparently one news piece was all he was worth.
But there were more than enough articles about that old bastard Tobias Campbell. He escaped from prison weeks ago now and the press were still milking every last drop of it. Apparently someone had spotted him last night, but the details were minimal. Why did Tobias capture the public’s interest but these murders didn’t? The public seemed to romanticize him, like they did with Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy. Some killers got lucky and permeated public consciousness. Others were doomed to obscurity, footnotes in dusty old books and forgotten newspapers articles. He was one of the latter types, but he wasn’t going to stop until he became the Ripper of his generation. Recognition was the aim, even if he had to spell it out in cold blood.
Then an idea came to him. Cheri Jo Bates. Elizabeth Short. There was another dead woman that matched the theme perfectly. Why hadn’t he thought of that one earlier? He closed down the news tabs and did a little searching, familiarizing himself with the details although he actually remembered this case when it happened because he had nothing to do in prison but read the papers and consume every last word.
The young woman had been found dead in a field, and the police assumed it was a suicide. Open and shut. But anyone with half a brain, anyone who knew the criminal mind as well as he did, knew that there was much more to the story. The woman hadn’t killed herself. She’d been roped into killing herself. Even today, thirty years on, authorities didn’t officially recognize that foul play had been involved, even though the evidence was staring them right in the face.
Within a couple of minutes, he’d made his decision.
If the news wanted something to report, he’d give them something alright.
Tonight, he was going to resurrect another unsolved murder from the depths.
