The End of Evil

By Tom Owen

Spreading death wherever he goes, a psychotic killer leaves body parts scattered across five states, changing modus operandi in a diabolical attempt to throw the police off his trail. In Texas, Detective Dave Alison believes the "Trash Bag Killer," now sitting on death row for those crimes, could be innocent. What follows is a dramatic twist in a five-year-old serial murder case that could seal the fate of the real killer. Can a police dragnet finally put an end to a "copycat" killer whose body count stands at 17?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491845516

Tom Owen

The author is a retired military officer and former educator who holds advanced degrees in education and public administration. While on active duty, he flew the HC-130 combat rescue/special operations aircraft. As an educator, he spent 19 years teaching military science to high school students. In his spare time, he enjoys writing murder mysteries and visiting military battlefields He and his wife currently live in central Virginia.

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2014 Tom Owen. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/30/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4547-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4546-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-4551-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013923305

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Afterword

Evil is pervasive. It’s like water. It washes over everything.

—Lt. Joe Kenda

Preface

This book is the last in a series of two books about serial killers. They’re works of fiction. The author’s purpose in writing both books is three-fold. First, the author believes serial killers are made, not born. Second, someone like Samuel Robert Kimball could live among us and we don’t even know it. And third, some people like Samuel Robert Kimball simply choose to do bad things because they’re inherently evil. As you will see, an unhappy childhood doesn’t excuse his actions.

In order for Sam Kimball to kill, he had to dehumanize his victims. This lack of empathy played out when he murdered his victims and then dismembered them. From beating them to death to strangulation, Sam Kimball only cared about himself and his own sexual gratification. He was a malignant narcissist of the first order and this helped make him a serial killer.

In this book, the author picks up Kimball’s story in Atlanta. There he commits several murders that show a willful disregard for human life. Escaping, he drove to Miami, and this time, murdered two gay men. It was during this time that Kimball began to examine his own sexuality. What he found was disturbing.

In Miami, Kimball cruised gay bars looking for the weak and the vulnerable. In the bright lights of Miami’s bar scene he found them. He took them home to his apartment and brutally murdered them to satiate his own lust-filled hatred of homosexuals. From Miami, he goes to Detroit where his barbarity and cruel actions now include new perversions designed to shock the police and the public.

When his work was finished in Detroit, Kimball heads southeast to Ohio and a major university where he begins to stalk beautiful coeds. There he finds a sorority house filled with young women and commits his most heinous and brutal murder spree.

While he still worships women’s feet, Kimball now finds excitement in sexually mutilating his victims in bizarre ways. Continuously changing his modus operandi to throw off the police, one homicide detective in Piedmont, Alabama, begins piecing a puzzle together. To his surprise, he discovers that Kimball has become a copycat killer who mimics other serial killers.

Back in Texas, Detectives Rick Miller, Dave Alison, and now Tom Ambrose, believe they have the right man responsible for the gruesome Trash Bag Killer crimes. What follows is five years of investigative work that leads to a dramatic finish.

The author wishes to again express his sincere appreciation to Dr. Robert F. Kirk, for his steady encouragement and friendship. While we sometimes disagreed on direction, he remains a trusted mentor and valued friend.

While this book is a work of fiction, people like Sam Kimball do walk among us every day. They could be your friend, a relative, or your next door neighbor. We just don’t know who they are. They exist for one purpose: To satisfy their own sadomasochistic blood lust.

Introduction

Today’s culture has popularized many of history’s most prolific serial murderers. People like Ted Bundy, Jeffry Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Gary Ridgeway are well-known to American readers and their crimes well documented in books and on screen. Collectively they’ve murdered over 125 men and women.

The FBI defines a serial murderer as someone who murders two or more people, in two or more different events, in two or more separate locations, with each kill separated by a cooling off period. Experts believe that on any given day over 200 serial murderers walk among us. They look and act just like us, but they’re not.

Typically they’re white, male, in their mid to late twenties, with average to above average intelligence. They generally come from unstable homes that lack a loving or nurturing relationship. In many cases they have physical ailments, or disabilities, and often experience bed-wetting, fire starting, and animal torture. Serial killers are often sexually, physically, or psychologically abused as children.

The book you’re about to read is a fictional account of a serial killer. His name is Samuel Robert Kimball and he could be someone you might know. His mother systematically beat him as a child and this abuse manifested itself in bizarre behaviors, which ultimately drove him to kill.

By day, Kimball roams America’s cities. By night, he is a sadistic killer who murders his victims in the privacy of his apartment. He is also a sadomasochist-fetishist, who is motivated by lust, power, and control over his victims.

The purpose of this book is not to glorify serial killers, but to alert the reader to people like Samuel Robert Kimball. Although he is a fictional character, real serial murderers just like him live among us and go about their daily lives. They employ different strategies to entice or lure their victims into their webs of deceit and death. They hide in plain sight and often wear a mantle of authority or respectability. They go to church, raise families, and serve in the military. Yet they’re as different from you and me as night is from day.

While the majority of serial killers are male, they can also be female. And while they may be white, they can also be black, Hispanic, or Asian. Because they look like us, they go unnoticed until some unknown stimulus triggers their desire to kill. Their methods vary and are diverse as their numbers. They use bombs like Ted Kaczynski, deception like Ted Bundy, or use sexual favors like Jeffry Dahmer and Herb Baumeister.

It is not the author’s intent to glorify gratuitous sex, which some readers may find objectionable. Rather, it is his intent to use sex as a vehicle to illustrate Kimball’s depravity and utter lack of humanity. Readers will perhaps react negatively to the book’s violence, and for that the author apologizes. Serial killers are depraved and sexually motivated to commit horrific crimes. In the end, the author will leave it to the reader to best judge his motives.

Chapter One

T HE MEDIA WOULD LATER DUB him the Copycat Killer. But to those who knew him, Samuel Robert Kimball seemed like an ordinary, average guy. He blends in with the crowd and nothing triggers an alarm. The world wouldn’t know his true name or the nature of his crimes until much later. After all, another man had been found guilty of murdering five women. Kimball didn’t know the man; all he knew was that someone else was on death row for his crimes.

The authorities had their man, the case of five butchered women closed, and the police in Adkins, Texas, satisfied that their killer was going to die by lethal injection. Kimball was now free to kill again.

Kimball left Adkins out of fear; the cold dark fear a serial murderer experiences when he thinks the police are getting too close. In hindsight, Kimball didn’t have to worry because his arrogance served him well. He made only three mistakes, but they were crucial and to some degree fortuitous. They led to the arrest of someone named Jack Leon Purdy who was now sitting on death row at Huntsville State Prison. Good luck came in many forms.

Kimball left Adkins when he retired from his job as head of the largest bank in the region. As president, he was able to cash out his stock for millions and that gave him the freedom to roam the country looking for fresh kills.

He knew he couldn’t help himself. He figured that out a long time ago. The art of killing he’d long ago perfected. He was cunning, utterly ruthless, and devoid of human emotion. He enjoyed killing because his victims were surrogates for striking back at his mother. He hated that woman who showed no mercy, so why should he show mercy? Killing was fun and he enjoyed it.

Kimball didn’t know the Atlanta bar scene. In fact, Kimball hardly drank at all. But this time he had to if he was going to find his next kill. His modus had changed significantly since his first victim. Instead of bringing his victims to his basement workroom, where he could slowly and methodically torture them to death, Kimball now enjoyed driving the interstate system looking for fresh kills. Atlanta was now his town and in it were hundreds, if not thousands, of potential victims. It was a cornucopia of women ripe for picking.

Kimball’s first victim was a blonde-haired woman who frequented the Blue Moon bar on west 27th Street. Her name was Ashley Mills, a 37-year-old who worked for All-Star Towing during the day and bar hopped at night. Mills had been twice married and twice divorced. With her luck running out as well as her looks, Mills had no choice but to work the bar scene in hopes of finding a man who would love her.

Kimball didn’t care about love. Quite the contrary, he despised women. The only things he loved were the hunt, the deception, and the kill. Nothing else mattered. When he found Ashley Mills, phase one of his plan was complete. He would now stalk the girl, which he knew would terminate in yet another murder.

Kimball chose his victims carefully. They had to be blonde and sexy. The sexier the better because it stimulated Kimball’s libido, and once his blood was up, bad things happened. Kimball wasn’t ashamed of who he was, a cold-blooded narcissist who fed on the weakness and naïveté of others. He manipulated, cajoled, and conned his way into the lives of his victims, even before they were aware of his presence. He was very skillful and his victims paid for it with their lives.

Kimball was a psychopath. No one told him this; he instinctively knew it early on. The fantasies, the fetishes, the dismemberment all fit a perfect pattern of psychopathy, yet on the surface he appeared to be perfectly normal. He knew this because he’d fooled many others to include his colleagues, bank customers, and the women he murdered. On the surface, his victims saw him as just another interesting man, not a serial murderer. In fact, Sandra Walsh even liked the masculine and handsome bank president, the man who once loaned her $20,000. How ironic. The only woman who survived his brutal attack now became the only woman he desperately wanted to kill.

For Sandra Walsh, Samuel Kimball was the consummate professional. Yet there was something about him that told her to be cautious. She had no idea what that was. She was only able to put the pieces together when Kimball finally surfaced as one of the nation’s most prolific serial killers.

Ashley Mills worked at All-Star Towing for 11 years. During that time, she had many lovers, but nothing serious. What she looked for in men, only she could answer, and not very well. Her reputation wasn’t good and men took advantage of her loneliness. She dated often, but nothing long-term. Most of the men who showed interest were either married, cheating on their wives, or users. She made no excuses for the men in her shattered life; they helped pass the time until something better came along. Yet nothing better ever seemed to come along.

Ashley Mills was predictable and the men around her knew that. She would come to work; always five minutes late, stay until closing, lock the business, and then go to her favorite watering hole hoping to meet a different type of man than the night before. That would never happen after she met Samuel Kimball.

Kimball staked out the Blue Moon soon after his arrival in Atlanta. The bar was located in a lower class, blue-collar working neighborhood. It was a perfect place for the aimless and the down-and-out, the type of people whose dreams often came from an open beer bottle. They would start drinking early, play pool, or shoot darts, aimlessly going from one story to the next.

These types of people intrigued Kimball because they were different. They lived in another world and because of that, Kimball never thought about widening his search for victims beyond people like Ann Rogers and Michelle Murphy. The act of shooting and decapitating his victims remained long after the event and the thrill of strangling and fire setting only served to assuage what little guilt he carried from childhood.

Hey, Joe, how about another?

Okay, Ash, the usual?

Yeah, and give me a shot of tequila this time, too.

Coming right up.

Kimball, now a bar regular, had observed the ritual between Joe, the Blue Moon bartender, and Ashley Mills many times. She always ordered the same drink, told the same stories, and in the end, seemed terribly lonely and afraid. Kimball, however, wasn’t interested in her tales of woe: He wanted blood.

For what it was worth, he did try to curb his sadomasochistic fantasies, but to no avail. They were too strong, so concentrated in his brain’s cortex that he couldn’t forget, not that he wanted to anymore. The mere thought of blood, the rivers of blood that ran from his victims onto the basement floor of his old workroom, now consumed his subconscious.

These fantasies kept him alive. He needed his victim’s blood as much as he needed oxygen. Without it, he knew he would perish.

Kimball made the first move and introduced himself. Hi, my name is Mitch Daniels. What’s yours?

Hi, Mitch. I’m ‘Ash,’ Ashley Mills.

Nice to meet you. Can I buy you another drink?

Sure. I’ve seen you around. I’ve even seen you looking at me and I like it. You live around here.

Yes, I have an apartment over on Richland Street. And yes, I’ve been checking you out, and I like what I see. Hey, you want to play some pool?

Sure, Mitch.

Kimball and Mills got up from the bar and found an empty pool table. He carefully racked the balls and gave Mills the first shot. She said she was a novice at the game; something Kimball thought strange. She doesn’t know how to play pool? Bullshit.

The choice of method was still up in the air, but Kimball didn’t have to decide right away. One of his favorites was manual strangulation to the point of unconsciousness, followed