The most infamous serial killers all seem to have something in common — they’re from the Midwest
What is it about the Midwest that breeds so many serial killers?
What is in the soil that grows the sort of grisly murderers who launch a million headlines? Adam Rapp has wondered for a long time. He was born in Chicago and raised in Joliet in the 1970s, when Joliet was not the best place to grow up. Gangs proliferated. There were rumors of white vans whose drivers offered neighborhood boys a peek at a Playboy. You couldn’t escape to Chicago — killer clown John Wayne Gacy and nurse killer Richard Speck came out of there. Rapp’s father lived in Wilmette, but then John Carpenter’s “Halloween” came out when he was 10 and was based in Haddonfield, a fictional Illinois town “that looked like Wilmette, oak trees, porch swings. And that drove home the immediacy of my worries — I mean, how was I going to use my keys to get into my house and escape from a killer if my hands were shaking that bad?”
Rapp was closer to his fears than he knew.
When he was 5, his family was leaving the Kankakee area when “a driver pulled up next to us on I-57 brandishing a rifle, traveling in the oncoming lane.” Rapp was asleep beside his sister, who locked eyes with the gunman. Their mother, sitting in the passenger’s seat, looked over and clutched their baby brother (Anthony Rapp, who later became an acclaimed theater actor).
The gunman drove on.
That night, the mystery driver, a Chicagoan named Henry Brisbon, later dubbed, where Rapp’s mother worked as a nurse. (She would also serve as a material witness in Brisbon’s trial.) Stateville, a stone’s throw from their apartment, was home to Speck; Rapp’s mother was friends with the nurses that Speck killed. Stateville also briefly housed Gacy, and near the end of her career, Rapp’s mother attended to Gacy on the day of his execution.
