Haunted Mind, Confused Heart

By Jason Maurer

-Unbeknownst to everyone except his victims, Jeremiah Bernhardt has become one of the world’s most notorious serial killers. His drive stems from the misguided belief that the cosmos is directing him to rid the world of the unworthy so he can fulfill his ultimate destiny of immortality and become Supreme Chancellor of the World.

-Close on the trail of blood are two detectives who have suddenly become suspicious of the untimely death of Jeremiah’s mother after she was found in an alley with a blood-alcohol level over three times the legal limit, a bit high for a woman who supposedly didn’t drink. The discovery of Eileen Bernhardt’s diary proves a mother’s misguided belief in the goodness of her only child.

-Sitting in prison is Eric Marshall, charged with the murder of his girlfriend. All of the evidence suggests his guilt, but the accused has remained mute on the subject even though he was caught with blood on his hands. After many months of a self-imposed silence, he has finally agreed to speak on his presumed crime.

-Following her newly-developed intuition is eleven-year-old Olivia DeMers, who was diagnosed with mild autism at a young age. She has never spoken a word during her entire life, up until the moment she demanded her parents drive west. Her sole reason? “Murder”, she says to her parents, as if the answer should have been obvious to all involved.

How many victims must suffer at the hands of the peculiar Jeremiah Bernhardt?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Maurer
• Release date: Jul 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476206844

Jason Maurer

I started writing when I was eleven or twelve, when my mother bought me one of those cheap toy knockoffs of a laptop, but the good thing about it was the kid-friendly version of a word processor. Basic as basic could get, but I made my first attempt at writing a story, something cheesy about friends getting lost in the forest. The things I write range from the tongue-in-cheek to the very serious. My goal is to write at least one story in each major genre.

Book preview

Chapter One

Diary of A Loving Mother, Part One

It’s 4 am.

An hour ago, I almost committed suicide.

I took a bunch of sleeping pills, then chickened out and made myself vomit them up.

I can hear my mother’s shrilled, high-pitched voice, berating me for something inane, a meaningless excuse to yell at my so-called inadequacies. It’s not my fault she’s a booze-loving, pot-smoking single mother. She’s the one who left my father when she found out she was pregnant, and has never spoken with him since. It’s her fault we’re living here in this dump of a place called home. This is not a home, this is hell. MY hell. I blame her.

Maybe I should have just left the pills inside me, allowed them the freedom to wreak havoc on my body. Wouldn’t be long now until the pain would be fading away, my eyes would be getting heavy, her incessant screaming about so-called important stuff that no one else could care two cents about... all that, gone.

Three days. That’s how long I think it would take for her to realize there’s something wrong, that I’m not arguing with her anymore, that I’ve stopped trying to speak with her, or that I’ve stopped acknowledging her existence. She rarely speaks to me, and when she does she’s usually so high and drunk that no one can have a decent conversation with her. Maybe a week. I guess it depends on what kind of drugs she’s been doing.

I could always go live with my father. Yea, because that would ever happen, the joke that he is. I met him once, on a camping trip east to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ironic, that it happened the way it did. I had gone there for a week-long vacation with some friends, and was supposed to have an amazing time away from home. I met this hot-looking older guy at a bar we snuck into, and the first moment he saw me, told me I was beautiful, that I reminded him of someone he’d loved long ago. He was drunk, of course. Kept hitting on me, trying to get me to sleep with him. I was only 16 at the time, and the instant I saw the birthmark on his left wrist, I knew who he was. It was all mom talked about when she mentioned him, my father. This ugly black birthmark that was kind of shaped like a butterfly. She said it was the ugliest thing ever. And indeed, it was.

The moment I saw the birthmark, I hated him. I wanted to punch him, kick him, and scratch his eyes out for getting my mother pregnant in the first place. Instead I just sat there, subdued, stunned from the astronomical odds it must be to see the very man who gave me his chromosomes, who lived half a country away from me.

This disgusting man, for that’s all he was- just a ridiculous old man who thought he was brilliant at teasing and tempting my senses, trying to seduce a teenager he didn’t even know was his own flesh and blood. Disgusting. He finally gave up and moved on to someone else. I never told him I was his daughter. Never told my mother about the incident, either, not that it would have mattered. It would just have given her one more thing to rattle on about, her drug-fried brain attempting to make sense of this crazy world.

My parents messed up, royally. Does that mean I will too? What kind of parent would I be if I let a child live in this state of disgust? No, my life will not end tonight. I could easily have ended my life, but now I have to think of my unborn baby, too. I can imagine him, all curled up inside my womb, waiting to be born into this world. I love you, my beautiful baby, and I will never allow such horrible people to color your beautiful world.

My baby’s father is a lowlife no-good piece of trash, and he will never know of this child we’ve created together. I was stupid to think that he truly loved me the night I lost my virginity. We were stupid, and irresponsible. My life is worth more than that.

I am certain the baby is a boy, I can feel it. Call it mother’s intuition. I’m going to name him Jeremiah.

--- From the diary of Eileen Bernhardt, dated July 5, 1980.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Two

The Interview

James Farwhel, a rising journalist for the New York Times for over a year now, has seen and heard it all, or so he thought. Living in New York City has allowed him the opportunity to glimpse a wide array of things, from the most horrific to merely minor misdemeanors and everything in between.

The unwanted assignment currently sitting on his desk, a single sheet, double-spaced order from the head honchos at the paper, had filtered down through the ranks until by some coincidence, or hard luck, it landed on his desk. No one wanted to undertake the daunting task, because few, if any, believed in the cause.

The name associated with the cause is that of Eric Marshall. Last fall, Eric had been caught red-handed, literally, with the blood of a twenty-year-old girl covering his hands and clothes. In fact, there was blood covering much of the rest of the room in which they had been discovered; one alive and breathing, the other, not so much.

At the moment he and the victim were discovered, Eric Marshall said nothing. Photos of the first few moments following the discovery showed Eric staring at the camera with wide eyes that spoke of fear and potential anger at being discovered.

The responding police officers on the scene, Detective Harvey Mills and his partner Peter McNeil, quickly assessed the situation following a 911 call from a neighbor of the girl who claimed to have heard screaming, then suspicious noises coming from the apartment upstairs.

Detectives Mills and McNeil quickly called for backup and the medical examiner, as well as forensics, all of whom arrived in record time. Eric Marshall continued to say nothing while he was subsequently handcuffed and locked in the backseat of the police cruiser. He just stared numbly into space, immobile, almost catatonic. Was it guilt that had driven him into a silent reverie? Or perhaps remorse at being caught at his own sadistic game.

In what seemed like the one of the most basic open-and-shut case in the history of the world, Harvey Mills and Peter McNeil drove their guilty-as-charged perpetrator to the precinct, where he was booked and thrown into a jail cell to await the evidence that would surely convict him. Still Eric remained silent.

Not a peep issued forth from his mouth during the three hours sitting in an interrogation room, patiently awaiting the wrath of detectives who were trying in vain to piece together the how’s and why’s of the harrowing, bloody crime.

Eric remained mute during the two-hour attempt by the detectives who discovered him as they made the effort to coax out the truth. He was threatened with a swift issue of the death penalty, regardless of whether or not the state agreed with it. A lawyer was brought in to attempt talking some sense into the wordless, naïve twenty-three year-old. He refused to utter a single sound, and only opened his mouth long enough to sip his water.

A psychologist was brought in to help determine a profile of the killer, to see what else might be brewing in the young man’s mind as a result of some harrowing tragedy or molestation or something of the sort that typically occurs in the lives of those who turn out to be serial killers. That isn’t always the case though, nor is it an excuse for the horrific inflictions brought upon innocent people. Sometimes evil men and women exist, with no discernible justification of their actions. A depressing, poisonous thought, but nonetheless true.

The psychologist threw up his hands after a futile thirty-minute attempt at getting the accused to answer one single question, with no success.

Eric remained mute even with a promise, no longer just a threat, of a swift guilty verdict and subsequent death penalty. Detectives Mills and McNeil were by now practically banging their heads against the wall, trying every trick in the book to make the mute murder talk. All of these attempts, to no avail.

A judge was called during his off-duty hours to arraign the young man, who by now had been formally charged with the murder of the young woman. Eric had the evidence stacked against him, the victim’s blood all over him, his fingerprints all over the weapon and the room where they had been discovered. Her body contained his hair samples, skin residue, and the most damning piece of evidence- his sperm inside her. Eric Marshall was most assuredly going to be found guilty and sentenced to death. His silence was as condemning as if he had actually confessed to the horrible assault.

All of this was just year-old news, at least in the opinion of James Farwhel, our novice journalist.

The fact that this was now a current-events story was brought on three weeks ago. After all these long months of being held in a jail cell awaiting trial, Eric, who had still not yet uttered a single word to anyone, not even his visitors, suddenly, and without preamble, said to a guard one Friday morning, I didn’t do it.

The guard, so shocked by Eric’s sudden vocalization, fainted on the spot and needed to be doused with a bucket of water to be awakened. Even the guard himself, who wasn’t quite up to par with the necessary appearance and position of a tough-as-nails security guard at the state’s top prison for murderous inmates, was stunned by his own actions.

Eric’s lawyer was hastily called in for a conference, during which the defendant only said, I want a television and newspaper interview. I didn’t do it. And refused to say another word, except to his interviewer, whomsoever that would turn out to be.

The country was suddenly ablaze with the news that Eric Marshall, almost caught in the act of murdering that poor, sad, defenseless girl, was now, without warning, claiming innocence!

Hence the reason for James Farwhel’s trepidation at taking the story. Since he was low-man on the totem pole at the newspaper, it was his lucky/unlucky [take your pick] duty of completing it or face termination. There was no one he could pass it onto.

With plenty of reluctance and little hope, James and his camera crew, the crew being one man who worked both camera and sound, headed to the state prison to interview Mr. Eric Marshall. Not being particularly thrilled about the idea in the first place, James decided just to wing the interview in the hopes that the inmate was just another deluded psychopath on the verge of breakdown from all the stress of an upcoming trial. Besides, the bastard was caught with his pants down, not quite literally but close enough, so that every piece of evidence pointed directly, and succinctly, to the guilty party.

This way please, said the burly prison guard, the same one who had fainted after Eric’s expression of innocence, not that he would ever admit it to anyone. The guard guided James and the camera/sound guy into a waiting room, containing one small stainless steel table and two uncomfortable steel chairs, all of which were bolted to the floor. Wait here, was the simple command before the door was closed and locked from the outside. As if there was any other choice in the matter. Where was there to go? The windows were barred, the only door was bolted closed and held in place by electronic control.

Are you nervous? the camera/sound guy asked, whose name is not important. His initials, should anyone care to know, are M.A.N., which make him feel terribly conscious at times. None of that matters though, as he is not an important person. Simply there to record the interview and make sure everything sounds up to par.

A moment later, the door opened and in shuffled the