A Killer of Serial Women: A True Story

By William Marten

Philosophers maintain that the goal of life is to gain wisdom, and the unexamined life is not worth living. And with aging comes the ability to accept ourselves as who we are. This book tests the truth of these precepts by posing the challenge of a life lived at the edge. William Marten gives us the rare opportunity to experience a side of life few of us know. His sexual development from his earliest years to the present has been as a sadomasochist, which has been the source of soul-searing shame. The only cure he could envision was suicide.

A Killer of Serial Women, alternately painful and hilarious, traces Williams path through life, from the child who became fixated on a drawing of Prometheus tortured by an eagle, through the young adult tortured by desires for sexual release based on physical suffering, to an almost mythical ordeal through which he learns compassion and acceptance. With extraordinary honesty, intelligence, clarity, and humor, his life shows us that even people we think of as other, as alien, share our common humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 29, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462805334

Book preview

1.

Trauma has a way of permanently embedding the memory of an event, probably through some quirk of brain chemistry, and certainly for some evolutionary advantage. Imagine a proto-hominid prepubescent brat thinking: gee, it would be fun to bounce a rock off the head of that sleeping saber-toothed tiger. Afterward: well, I won’t do that again!—and the adaptive value of the memory is clear.

Jump ahead twenty-five million years to a Chicago tenement in 1949. A two-year old boy is gnawing lead-based paint off a window sill. His mother screams and slaps his mouth. The lesson was clear.

That is my earliest memory. The next memory occurred in that same year when my testicles descended. One day I found a couple of marbles in my scrotum. It was fun pushing them from side to side, one visiting the other. My mother saw this, screamed, and slapped my hands away. That lesson was anything but clear. I’ve since stopped chewing on lead-based paint, but my testicles remain, and are still causing mischief.

So I became a sex pervert because my mother slapped my hands for playing with myself when I was two. Or was it at eight days when they bound me naked to a board, pinched off the end of my tiny dick and let it bleed? Or was it the neighbor lady who spanked me when I was three? The reason I became a pervert was because of a story in a detective magazine, and my first lover, and because I was extruded through everything I’ve ever seen, read, and done. I became a sex pervert because I was born and had to become something.

My prehistoric relative knew what to do with his testicles, or I wouldn’t be here. The whole point is to deposit as much genetic goo into as many females as you can, he says in a single grunt. Every cell in the body is organized and programmed to that end. Even the dick works automatically. What could be simpler?

So why is nothing more difficult? All sexual life forms subscribe to a simple, primordial directive: I fuck therefore I am. But having evolved into a nerd, sulking at the bottom of the sexual food pyramid, means I don’t fuck.

Therefore what am I?

Females have the answer, somewhere. That much I knew. Maybe they are the answer. Either way, I was determined to get it from them. I began my quest at age six, chasing the girls around the school playground, squeaking like a crazed rat, and feasting on their excited screams. It was big fun. I scare the girls, therefore I am.

I was given two younger sisters to practice on. Without warning, and inspired by television’s Science Fiction Theater, they’d get chased by a giant ant, tarantula, crab, and up through the phyla to killer robot, killer eyeball, killer brain, and so on. We all knew it was a silly game, so no harm done. But what really got their gizzard came from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the monsters looked just like us. I got so good at it, just a hint of a glaze in my eyes would send the girls fleeing in terror. Ah, perhaps some harm done there. Today, one will not speak to me; the other is my best friend.

The real target, of course, was my mother. Being my chief jailer, she deserved it and still had to feed me. She was afraid of poverty, funny smelling tuna, cars, people, spiders, her own mother, microbes, loud noises, and every conceivable item that could possible harm her children. But she was especially afraid of me, because I knew about all the things she feared.

I don’t know why I enjoyed scaring my mother, but I did. It didn’t take much. Picking up a book of matches. Riding my bicycle at night. Faking illness. Coming home ten minutes late from school. Refusing to eat vegetables. It seemed everything I did was fraught with potential danger, so why not pull a real prank or two? But I was not without mercy. I withheld the really dangerous stuff. Like scavenging abandoned construction sites, playing chicken on the railroad tracks with locomotives, and almost drowning on a dare at scout camp.

Neither my mother nor I knew that all of this would have stopped, if her nagging and hysteria had stopped. I did not understand that her monster son was part of it. I did pay for my mischief dearly. Some afternoons, after going a few rounds with me, she’d collapse on the sofa, sniffling, clutching her tear-and snot-drenched Kleenex. I watched, guilt-drenched, from my bedroom door.

My father did not like being a father, or a husband. My mother didn’t like him either. Six months into their marriage she left him because she realized she didn’t love him and never would. My father wore her down with begging and wheedling until she moved back in.

A baby would solve their dilemma—me. But I made it far worse, and right from the start. Just prior to my birth, to prevent post-natal infections, my mother was given large doses of penicillin, the new rage in medicine. The drug got into her breast milk, and down into me. My guts turned to fire when I nursed; I couldn’t digest the milk. I was a non-stop siren. After three days I was taken off breast milk and its toxicity. It would be nineteen years before I got to suck on a nipple again. After many trials, my parents finally found a goat’s milk and soy concoction that would stay down. Still, I was so ravaged by a parade of intestinal infections that I almost died at age six months.

I was very afraid of my father. I did not know him, or understand him. He was rarely home, preferring his engineering lab to our house. He was known as the mean old man of the neighborhood; my friends didn’t like coming to our house to play. He had little patience or interest in family life. Evenings and weekends he’d retreat into his den, reading or watching golf and football on television. When he did emerge, he’d prowl the house like a grouchy badger looking for a fight. Unpredictably, he’d see something amiss, lose his temper, and lash out with a doubled-over belt. I would flee for my life.

He caught me once, almost asphyxiating me. With one hand clamped over my mouth to stifle my screams, the other thrashed my ass with the belt while the neighbors watched. Thank you, trauma, for allowing me to remember that lesson, but what was it? Be quicker?

I finally figured it out. My crime was always the same: Do Not Piss Off Thy Mother. Which came to me as naturally as breathing. My father was not thinking of her well-being. It was for his own survival. When my mother was unhappy and depressed, which was most of the time, he was her punching bag.

My childhood was really not the hell-hole I’ve thus far described. I got really cool presents at Christmas, there were those great summer family vacations, and I thrived in the suburban abundance my parents provided. But I warped anyway. It’s complicated. For example, when I was five, my folks bought an encyclopedia. I’m sure the door-to-door salesman did not pitch:

Good morning, ma’am. Buy this entire set today, and a particular drawing in volume thirteen will totally screw up your son for life.

But he must have said the right thing, and soon I eagerly marched through the entire set, A to Z, page by page. There was a world out there, and I couldn’t wait to get at it. The encyclopedia was a gift to my soul.

That particular drawing in volume thirteen was a stunner. It depicted the punishment of the mythic Titan, Prometheus. One day Zeus sent Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus down to earth, bearing gifts for all the creatures to help them get by. The lion got teeth, the turtle got a shell, and so forth. But they ran out of gifts when they got to humans. Prometheus took pity on the naked, cold, and defenseless people, and showed them fire. This angered Zeus. Prometheus tried to appease him by claiming fire would allow humans to burn their sacrificial meat to his greater glory. Zeus bought it, but discovered Prometheus told the humans to burn only the grade Z meat, and keep the best for themselves. This was too much for Zeus. Prometheus was chained to a rock atop a mountain, where Zeus, as an eagle, would each day fly to the rock and rip out Prometheus’ liver. Each night the liver grew back, and each day the eagle returned. Finally Heracles happened by, shot the eagle with an arrow, and freed long-suffering Prometheus.

The myth itself was irrelevant. I could not peel my eyes from the semi-naked body of Prometheus, chained, writhing in pain, eyes to Olympus for pity. I wondered why the eagle didn’t go for Prometheus’ balls. There was a bigger eye peeler in another volume. The Norse god Loki is chained to a rock, naked, while a serpent overhead drips venom onto his face. Loki’s mother sits lovingly over Loki with an outstretched cup, catching the venom.

That picture got to me even worse. I returned to those pages many times in secret, and would sink into a proto-erotic trance, envying Prometheus and Loki in their ecstatic torments. Before going to sleep, I imagined being each of them, naked and helpless, deep in rapture of surrender. With one hero, a woman is witnessing his suffering. Curiously, that’s also the goal of a good s/m scene. The encyclopedia, a gift to the soul.

A curious pre-wank fantasy at age five: I’ve been captured by a tribe of beautiful feral women. They strip me naked, stake me out on my back, and slice away the meat of my arms and legs to the bone, leaving me utterly helpless, like Prometheus and Loki. There is no pain. Only the sweet relief that now life is over and I can go home. I would bliss out and drift into sleep.

2.

The title of the story was direct and unapologetic: Torture of the Bound Nudes. The story was in a detective magazine. The cover showed a buxom woman in an open blouse, terrified by a shadowy creep behind her. The detective magazine was in a drugstore in Chelsea, Massachusetts. I was ten, hanging out with my pal, Jimmy, also ten. Jimmy and I knew about the magazines in the drug store, but both of us were too chicken to do anything about it. Jimmy lived down the street; I was staying the summer with my grandparents. No one else in town knew me, so what the heck. I finally snatched the magazine from the rack, and dove right in. Jimmy fled to the post card rack. Mercifully the druggist ignored us.

The plot of The Torture of the Bound Nudes was the title. Nude women were tied up and tortured. The opening illustration showed a bound nude, her shredded clothing revealing her large breasts, nipples and all. Her arms were pinioned behind her back by, of all things, goblins with leering, bulging eyes and slobbering maws. The nude stared in horror as one goblin withdrew a red hot needle from the glowing coals before her. The needles would be plunged into her huge breasts.

I quickly devoured the story, entranced by this unholy mix of excitement and cruelty. With every paragraph her tortures escalated. She was stretched tight on a rack, her cunt was sliced with razor blades, the skin of her breasts was peeled away, and salt was rubbed into the bleeding wounds. She couldn’t take it anymore, and finally died. End of story. I did not know what a cunt was.

I also didn’t understand that this was fiction. I truly believed that somewhere goblins were torturing bound nudes, and I absolutely had to see it. I didn’t understand sex, or power, or even that my crotch was yet to be a player. I also didn’t understood why the women were being tortured to death by goblins in the first place. It didn’t really matter. They were women.

Junior high school was fraught with potential and peril. There were all these new kids, and from other neighborhoods. Also new was something called choice. I could choose between swimming or gym. Or between learning Spanish or French. How the hell would I know from Spanish or French? I took Spanish because the French got their butts kicked in the war. I learned the ropes of school fairly quickly. I excelled in sports, rigorously followed all the fads, and avoided appearing too intelligent in class.

I kept after the girls, but they were no longer little girls, and not as easy to scare. They were also growing breasts, and I couldn’t keep my eyes away. They didn’t seem to mind. The girls were in on something special here, and I wanted in too.

I had suspected something weird was up with the girls anyway. It began with that special movie they had to watch in sixth grade. They were herded into another room, while we boys were treated to a safety patrol recruitment film. The subject of the girls’ movie was a source of endless speculation. We knew it had something to do with their bodies, but we hadn’t a clue, and the girls weren’t talking. It smelled of conspiracy.

The girls had something else that was new: boyfriends, guys usually a grade or two ahead of me. Boyfriends were like an occupying army, denying me my former lady classmates. Boyfriends also knew something I didn’t, or they wouldn’t be boyfriends, right? I could no longer pull my kid pranks on the girls, or I’d get pounded by a boyfriend. I was easily poundable. I was the smallest and youngest boy in my class, having been stupid enough to be bright enough to be kicked up a grade.

My mother was in on the Conspiracy, too. I uncovered it the day I learned a song in the boy’s locker room. It went:

"Walking down Canal Street, knocking on every door.

Goddamn, son of a bitch, couldn’t find a whore.

When I finally found a whore, she was tall and thin.

Goddamn, son of a bitch, couldn’t get it in.

When I finally got it in, and wiggled it all about,

Goddamn, son of a bitch, couldn’t get it out.

When I finally got it out, it was red and sore.

The moral to this story is: Never fuck a whore."

Mom, I asked—when I got home, What does fuck a whore mean?

She slapped me and said, "Never, ever say that again."

Say what? Fuck? Whore? I was truly baffled.

She slapped me again. I knew I was on to Something Big. She knew it, too.

I heard this song only once, in the locker room, forty-five years ago, and as demonstrated above, thanks to the evolutionary benefits of trauma, can still repeat the verse verbatim. If only my memory had served me so well with academics.

I once asked my mother where babies came from. I was maybe seven or eight at the time. I didn’t understand her hesitation or alarm, and I briefly wondered if she was even sure herself. She told me that after a man and a woman get married, and only after, she emphasized, does a baby appear.

So how does the baby know they’re married?

Well, it just does, she assured me.

I found this concept utterly bewildering, and pressed for details. She finally admitted to more: the man places a seed in the woman’s belly and nine months later out pops a baby. From where? Where was the seed hole? Doesn’t the man’s hand get all bloody from jamming it through the woman’s belly? Again I was stonewalled, but she said I’d learn about it later. When’s later? Later, she said.

Later happened in the boy’s locker room. I learned all the names for my dick-cock-boner-pecker-rod-pickle-johnson-whanger-wiener-meat. And girls had tits-boobs-jugs-knockers-melons, and down below was their pussy-twat-cunt-muff, whatever those were. And you were supposed to fuck-hump-lay-pork-screw and stiff them. Whatever that meant.

A ninth-grader, and a certified boyfriend, hinted about sure-fire strategies for snaring sex out of a girl. I couldn’t get through the sweaty mob to hear exactly how, but I nodded and smirked like I did. He said the girls had been warned about us boys wanting to lay them, and their job was not to let that happen. Well, why not? That’s just how it is, he said.

The Conspiracy also got Cindy. Cindy was my best friend since second grade. We best friends would frequently sleep over at each other’s houses. I liked Cindy’s mother, a lot more than my own. One day Cindy said no to a sleepover. I said why not? She said her mother said it wouldn’t be right. I said why not, thinking it to be another stupid and arbitrary parental dictate.

Cindy said she didn’t know either, but I suspected she and her mother were in on something very hot, and I was out of the loop. In a few months Cindy got a boyfriend, a greaser from another school, no less. My best bud swept past me into the Conspiracy.

So what. I had my English teacher, Miss Miller. Miss Miller was a petite, pretty, auburn-haired belle, who, unlike Cindy, had large, full-grown adult tits, and wore a tight skirt. I liked the way Miss Miller perched on the edge of her desk. I liked everything about her. She had a wide, slightly asymmetric smile that melted my bones. Actually she smiled at all of us, but I knew she especially liked me. I wanted her to like me in a slightly different way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

One day my friend Benny showed me where to put my finger. It happened in his bedroom. Look, Benny said, if you rub your weenie a certain way it feels really good, and white stuff shoots out. Benny flopped back on his bed, hauled out his dick, and demonstrated. Sure enough, milky pee shot out the tip, and Benny moaned with pleasure. I thought he was faking going insane. I tried it. Nothing happened. Maybe it’s your grip, said Benny, and he folded his fingers around my shaft and jerked. Nothing happened. I went home to watch TV.

I tried it later after peeing. Nothing happened. I tried it the next day after peeing. Zilch. I tried it that night in bed, and it blew my skull bones apart.

You’re supposed to think about girls while you’re doing it, Benny said. You think about putting your dick into her crack.

A crack?

Yeah, Benny said. Girls have a crack in the front, stupid.

Girls and cracks? It made no sense. Benny suggested we do a kind of wanking Olympics. Who could shoot the quickest, the farthest, and the most often. I practiced several times a night, and eventually won the sprint in under 20 seconds. We tried sticking our dicks into everything imaginable, including each other’s butt cracks, and rating the results. Hands, Jell-O, knot holes, butt cracks, whatever. It was mammoth fun. Girl cracks, Benny said, is what feels absolutely the best. Like he would know.

This was very bad news. It seemed that my new-found sticky playground was nothing compared to a girl’s crack. Chasing the girls now held a desperation and urgency I didn’t understand, or appreciate. The protocols for getting a girlfriend, let alone her crack, were either nonexistent or unfathomable at best. I stood on Benny’s soggy bedroom carpet and despaired.

Bedtime wanking was no longer Beat the Clock. Now I thought about girls, and their mysterious cracks, and what their naked bodies would feel like. I liked thinking of Cindy, dressed in a black strapless gown, her pert little tits bulging above the bodice, with her arms behind her back, and spush I went. I plugged in a few other girls, but it was always Cindy who turned my crank.

But what about Miss Miller? Didn’t she have a crack, too? I dared to try her out one night. And there she was, pretty Miss Miller, her large breasts swaying over me, gently stroking my cheeks and chest, and then wanking me silly. I was in love.

There was little hope of ever seeing Miss Miller’s crack. I had little to offer in the way of a boyfriend. I was short, geeky, pimply, underage, still lived with my parents, had no experience, no money, and being a seventh-grader was not an impressive career.

But I could draw. That would make me special, and win her heart.

3.

I started drawing at age five and never stopped. I drew trains, jet airplanes, race cars, battleships, and rocket ships, each drawing striving to be cooler than the last. My school notebooks soon contained far more artwork than notes. Comic books provided my inspiration and formal art instruction. Super-, Bat-, and Aqua-man were studs all right, but just being heroic and studly soon got boring. I needed more visceral oomph. Tales of Horror was more my cup of meat.

At age eleven, my art became more violent. Done with sanitized heroes, I turned to the villains: monsters, killer robots, and mutant predators, all armed with unreasonably vicious military ordnance. The most fun was adding the victims. Folks got decapitated, dismembered, asphyxiated, incinerated, skinned and perforated. Eviscerated was my favorite, because all the guts exploding outward allowed me to show off my gruesome grasp of anatomy, courtesy of my old friend, the encyclopedia.

With each drawing I struck deeper into the heart of decency. I acquired and relished the reputation as the class ghoul, and acquired a modest following of boys who couldn’t wait to see what kind of atrocity I could cook up next, and I always delivered. After all, ghoul was better than nothing.

The girls were not scared by my gory drawings. They were repulsed and derisive. Good. I couldn’t get them to like me, but at least I could make them gag. What really gagged them were my drawings of naked girls. For what it’s worth, showing girls crude pornography is not recommended for success on a boyfriend track. But no one told me, and I didn’t care. Girls were unattainable anyway.

Except for Miss Miller. She had to see my art and love me for it. In truth, I found her class work boring, but my staggering crush on her more than compensated. I began to act out, and ate her curt reprimands like candy. I drew secretly in her classroom, mostly naked girls in suggestive poses. I took great care in hiding this stuff from Miss Miller, but a few of the kids knew what I was up to.

One day I drew Miss Miller in a skimpy bikini, arms and legs wide, her large bosoms blooming into a capital Y on her chest. I shielded the drawing, slavering and snickering. Miss Miller decided to see what I was up to. She approached my desk, pert and curious. Oh no. I moved my hand aside.

Miss Miller didn’t gasp. Nor was she angry, disgusted, or scornful. She didn’t do a thing, or say a word, but simply returned to the front of the classroom and continued with the lesson. Something had gone terribly wrong.

What did you expect, fool? Did you think she’d say, ‘Why Billy, I’m so thrilled by your drawing that I’m going to take you to my house, feed you cookies, and yank your little weenie afterward?’

Miss Miller must see something else, a true masterpiece. I targeted the innocent The Night Before Christmas for desecration. It became a slasher tale, where Santa slides down the chimney into a boiling cauldron. He’s cooked just right and eaten by the family on Christmas day. The crowning glory was the illustration: a cooked, decapitated Santa head on a dinner platter with all the trimmings. Father carved off slices of head meat, and scooped out the brains like stuffing. It was brilliant. Miss Miller will adore it.

I really didn’t have a problem with this gory effluvia, but some of the adults apparently did. The prime suspect was Miss Miller, because I simply left the damned Christmas tale on her desk while she was out of the room. That night I knew something was up with my parents. The next week they told me I’d be seeing someone special in the principal’s office. I thought it was an award for my talent.

It was Miss Finch. She was a child psychologist summoned to our school to evaluate me. It was about my artwork, and it wasn’t any award. Miss Finch was old, perhaps in her fifties. She had gray hair wrapped in a tight bun, wore her glasses on a chain around her neck, and smelled like my grandmother’s closet.

The whole thing smelled funny, a stranger suddenly interested in me and my artwork. I couldn’t figure out Miss Finch, or what her problem was. She was all business and cold. She asked me to draw something for her. I grew anxious. I didn’t like her, and especially didn’t like her watching me as I drew. I finally gave her a robot with a death ray. It was lifeless and lame. Miss Finch just nodded without comment, and told me to continue. I added a few mangled victims, but Miss Finch remained unruffled. I began to worry.

Miss Finch was a weekly thing, for about a month. The appointment was, of course, during Miss Miller’s class. At half past the hour I’d stand up and leave, and everyone knew it wasn’t for an awards ceremony. It was just comeuppance for the class ghoul. I could not look at Miss Miller as I left.

Miss Finch asked me to draw some more for her. Okay, I think it’s time to play hardball with Miss Finch. I drew a torture: a guy hanging upside-down, prickly with arrows, being lowered head first, screaming, into a vat of boiling oil. Miss Finch just nodded without comment. I drew a skull puppy: a floppy-eared death’s head perched on a cute doggie body, begging morsels from an autopsy table. Miss Finch just nodded without comment.

I finally let Miss Finch really have it: a skull with ruptured eyeballs, a guy’s guts exploding, and my big gun, the reliably horrifying Santa head. Miss Finch just nodded without comment. I stared at my artwork, dumbfounded by its impotence.

My visits with Miss Finch stopped; no explanations were ever given, nor was this spoken of again by anyone, teachers or parents. I was remanded back to Miss Miller’s class for the full hour. I felt as welcome as a fart. Thereafter Miss Miller and I rarely looked at each other. It was over between me and her. At night it was back to Cindy.

After my rehabilitation with Miss Finch, I learned one thing: don’t pass around your art. But if