I (33 page)

Everything went the same for three or four months—same scene in the chow hall, same cracks in the yard, same rumors. I got goddamn sick and tired of being coffeed, so one night I skipped my evening meal and waited in my cell. The guy was starting to toss the coffee when he spotted me. He turned six shades of white when I jumped up and told him he was a dead man.

Talk about me being a freak—
this guy was the freak!
A longhaired hippie, a castoff of the sixties and seventies. To me all drug users were freaks. Dad taught us that the worst thing a kid could do was to take drugs like those longhaired hippies. The freak gave me a wide berth after that, and the coffeeing stopped.

 

Weeks went by and I still couldn't figure out how to be accepted in the chow hall. There were forty tables. The drug dealers ate together, and so did the blacks, Hispanics, Aryan Brotherhood and other cliques. Back when I drove truck I refused to join up in our company caravans, and I kept the same attitude in prison.

Mostly I ate by myself. When I'd start to sit with others, some guy would always get up and leave. He thought he was better than me because he was in for cocaine or pot or thievery and I was in for killing women. I'd wave and say “Bye-bye,” and dig in. Otherwise I avoided all eye contact.

One guy said, “How many girls did you kill?” I said eight. He said, “Me, I only killed one.”

I said, “
What?
You didn't have the balls to do it again?” That kind of comment didn't help my popularity.

Another guy says, “I don't want you sitting next to me.”

I said, “You're a Christian, right? Aren't you supposed to forgive?”

He says, “What's your problem?”

I said, “I don't have a problem, man. I forgive you for being upset that I'm in the same joint with you.”

He sat there stewing. Then he says, “Yeah, I'm a Christian. But you're a stone killer. Jesus would never forgive a guy like you.”

I said, “Are you a jailhouse Christian or a real Christian? If you're a real Christian, when are you gonna start learning the Bible?” I showed him up as a hypocrite and he went to another table.

 

If you did make friends in the chow hall, they'd give you heartburn with their stories. It's like they were all turned out on the same printing press. Every one of those guys was misunderstood. Somebody else fired the shot. It wasn't meth, it was aspirin. The cops planted the coke.
It wasn't my gun
…. Two thousand men, and they were all railroaded.

Well, I wasn't. A man couldn't possibly be
more
guilty. I was caught fair, tried fair, convicted fair, and sentenced fair. I was a self-admitted degenerate killer. The other guys couldn't handle that kind of talk. It was too hard on their hypocrisy level.

I knew that sooner or later I'd have to defend myself in a real fight, and it happened in April 1996, two months after I arrived. I was watching a volleyball game in the yard when a guy sucker-punched me in the nose. I didn't go down, only bent over a little. He was another longhaired freak, and he was running away. At least twenty men saw what happened. But when I looked up, they were all looking elsewhere.

I sat on a bench till the bleeding stopped. Somebody asked who hit me, and I told them to mind their own fucking business. I waited by the gate where everybody had to pass. The longhaired freak showed up and I hit him flush in the left eye—lifted his ass right off of the ground. Then I body-slammed him. Before I could finish him off, a guard tackled me and I was cuffed and led away.

 

For the next three weeks I learned to deal with life in Cell 105 of the Disciplinary Segregation Unit. I liked the hole. We were locked down twenty-three hours a day, but at least they supplied reading matter. With no distractions I could read a book a day. Breakfast was served on trays in our cells—a lot better than having to go to the dining hall and worry about getting a shiv up your ass.

My stomach started to balloon up on the veggie trays they served, so I just ate breakfast. It was a nice, quiet life—nobody to bother me, nobody to argue with. We could shower every day. On the way I'd hear the other guys yelling at me—how I was a piece of shit and they would fuck me up good when they caught me out in the yard. It was all talk.

 

General population seemed more peaceful when I got back. I'd proved that if somebody challenges me, I will put him down. A friend said that when I swung at that hippie, prisoners ran in all directions. They knew I had nothing to lose by killing again.

From then on nobody challenged me directly. But they kept on circulating rumors. I got a cushy kitchen job as “linebacker,” keeping the food boxes filled up and the line moving. I was the best linebacker they ever had—did the work of two men. But somebody put out word that I intended to poison the population. From then on I was barred from the kitchen jobs. Too bad. I liked that job.

After a while they let me have my own TV and AM-FM radio. That meant I didn't have to go to the card room to watch the big-screen TV and take the chance that some punk would try to make a name for himself. I would do my assigned work and take my shower, and the rest of the time I'd stay in my cell.

 

In prison danger comes from all directions, especially if you're high-profile. You can never prepare for it. You have no privacy. My whole world revolved around what went on in front of my cell. My view was of a walkway enclosed in wire mesh. When I was sitting on my toilet, anyone could watch. Sometimes it would be a female guard trying to make me uncomfortable. I tried to put on a good show.

 

One day an inmate came up to me in the yard and started asking a long list of questions. Some of my answers were true and some not. The next day I was called into the security offices. The dude had put a hit on me. He thought he could sell my answers to a crime author, and if I was dead, the information would be worth more. That's the way their pea-brains worked! This taught me not to give out personal information. And it reminded me to watch my mouth.

The next threat came from cigarettes, which I never touched. OSP was a nonsmoking joint, but that didn't mean there was no smoking. The guards would break a cigarette into three and sell each section for three bucks. For your money you got a couple of drags. I was happy that I didn't smoke.

One numbnuts sent a kite to the security unit saying that he would start killing guards if they didn't restore our smoking rights. He signed my name and added a Happy Face. Lucky for me that he left his greasy fingerprints on the kite. Like I said, they wouldn't be in prison if they were smart. He wound up in the hole. I wondered if this kind of crap would ever end. It never did. That's the price of fame.

Now that I was all alone in Keith's World again, I began to have anxiety attacks. I couldn't explain them and I didn't know what brought them on. When they hit, I wanted to smash things, even my own. I would get this overwhelming contempt for personal property, hate it, be repulsed by it. If something of mine was too nice, it made me anxious and had to be destroyed.

I tried to fight off the attacks so I wouldn't end up wrecking everything I owned. The pattern went back to my earliest years. When a puzzle was too hard, I trashed it. If something malfunctioned, I got rid of it. When I got bored with my toys, I wouldn't put them aside or give them away, I'd smash them. I never figured this out.

For a long time I couldn't keep pictures of myself and my family. I knew I would never see my kids again, and the pictures panicked me. I'd cut them up or send them off in the mail. Memories were not for me. My brothers apparently felt the same way. My kids wrote once in a while, and Sharon and Jill kept in touch, but Bruce and Brad cut me dead. Never visited, never wrote.

 

Dad became my only regular visitor, twice a year, rain or shine. At first I didn't know whether to be mad, glad or sad. It was nice to have one last little contact with my family, but most of the time he seemed to be trying to aggravate me. He couldn't wait to tell me that Brad and Bruce ripped up my letters without reading them. He said I'd made their lives too hard and they never wanted to hear my name again.

I laughed when he said that. He said, “What's so funny, Son?”

I said, “Aw, gee whiz, Dad, Bruce and Brad tormented me all my life. Now they're getting payback, and they don't like it. You don't think that's funny?”

He didn't. He said that old friends in the Yakima Valley had stopped talking to my brothers, and their kids got taunted in school—“Happy Face! Happy Face!” I knew damn well that if my nephews grew up to be serial killers, I'd get the blame. That's the way it was in our family. Whatever went wrong, it was Keith's fault.

 

My sex life didn't change all that much when I first went to prison. I'd always had to masturbate, and I just picked up my schedule a little. I tried to relive those special moments I shared with my victims and some moments I wished we'd shared. My penis remembered every detail of the Death Game and what each woman did to try to make me stop.

Most of my fantasies were still about Taunja Bennett. I would dream of having her in the shower and then throwing her on the mattress and screwing and beating her to death all over again.

In my fantasies about Jean, the nursing mother in Corning, I'd throw her over the hood of my car and screw her hard instead of dicking around half the night and letting her get away.

I brought Julie Winningham back to mind so vividly that she might as well be have been in my cell while I masturbated. She was almost a living presence. Made me almost sorry I'd killed her.

After my first year inside some of my sex fantasies began to fade. I could still see aspects of my victims—Taunja's black eyebrows, Claudia's round little ass, Angela's Tweety Bird tattoo bobbing up and down as she rode my cock. But I couldn't revive the feeling of killing them. I guess you have to keep up on the Death Game, or your mind drifts off to other things.

 

I started seeing myself in my dreams, like watching home movies. I'd see Dad stand over me and take off his belt. I'd try to say it wasn't my fault—and no words would come out. I'd yell, “I didn't do it.
I didn't do it!
STOP!” Then I'd wake up. I could never challenge my dad, not even in dreams. Other inmates cut out their parents' hearts at night.

One night I escaped from prison, bought a lottery ticket, and cashed in $100 million before I woke up. I think they call that wish fulfillment.

All my life I used to get teary eyed when I read about personal tragedies, survival stories, rescues. I liked to read about heroes in the
Reader's Digest
or see them on TV. In my dreams I became the hero who saved lives instead of taking them. Those were the sweetest dreams of all.