Serial Killer's Soul (5 page)

He propositioned me for oral sex.

At the time, I was carrying a .38-caliber automatic pistol. I told him to pull his car over, trying to trick him into thinking I was interested. He did. I got out of my car and immediately flashed my pistol in his face. The guy seemed legitimately scared; he should be, I was really mad. I wasn’t gay and I
definitely
wasn’t cool with him following me, hitting my bumper, and wasting my time. I
wasn’t really going to shoot him, even though I have to admit the thought crossed my mind. I threatened him and tried to make him think I was serious about killing him, but then I saw a bag sitting on the back seat of his car. Seeing an opportunity, I snatched the bag and told him to get lost.

I threw the bag in the front seat of my car and drove off. When I opened the bag later, I found a couple of guns and a badge. I had just waved a gun at and robbed a Mobile Reserve Unit officer! I figured–or at least hoped–he was off duty and a homosexual just looking for some fun. But now I had his guns and badge. It didn’t seem fair. I was just minding my own business. He was the one causing trouble.

I drove to Anita’s house to spend the night and she met me at the door. I asked her to let me in and she adamantly refused. “You can’t come in here. The police were just here looking for you,” she hissed.

So I did what came naturally, I stayed with Homey for a couple days. Finally, I just left the guns in my car and took the bus back to Milwaukee. I had to get away. I was a wanted man and I couldn’t go back to St. Louis. I was nervous about my warrant so, when I got to Milwaukee, I started using the name Calvin Earl Martin.

I stayed with some friends in Milwaukee, guys who were usually drunk or high. I started selling drugs and taking speed.

I needed to find more ways to make money in addition to dealing and hustling. A friend told me about welfare. In those days, it meant a free check in the mail. I didn’t have to do any work so I could focus my attention on dealing. After I realized just how easy it was to get welfare in Wisconsin, I signed up under my new name. Then I used another name, “Curtis McGraw,” to get a
second
monthly welfare check and food stamps. I also registered with two different addresses for the welfare checks.

About that time, I started drinking cough syrup. I was desperate, doing anything I could to get a buzz. In my head, it was the only way to escape all my troubles.

By 1981, I had a fairly profitable racket going. In addition to the two monthly welfare checks and food stamps, I stole raw materials such as copper,
aluminum, brass, stainless steel, and lead from factories, foundries, and various businesses and sold my misbegotten wares to recycling companies. Some days it took me fewer than fifteen minutes to steal the stuff and, on most days, I made four hundred or five hundred dollars.

It was a pretty good chunk of money and I spent most of the it on drugs and booze. But somehow I always needed more. I went back to stealing clothing from stores. On March 18, 1982, I went to a store called the Wooden Nickel in the Capitol Court Shopping Center on the north side of Milwaukee. I paid the store guard to go in the back and turn his head. When he was clear, I robbed the store with a broken pistol. I took off and was nearly home free, but a cop chased me down.

I landed in the Milwaukee County Jail.

Going to jail that day was the new low point in my life. There I was, so strung out on drugs that I couldn’t eat
and
I was facing jail time. I didn’t want this life. I had no reason to live. Spontaneous and unthinking, as usual, I decided it wasn’t worth it anymore and tried to commit suicide. I tore my pillowcase into strips and tied them around my neck. I wasn’t even scared about doing it; I just wanted everything to be over.

In my cell, with the cloth around my neck, I tried to get as high off the ground as possible so I would have a good chance of breaking my neck. I didn’t even stop to think about it or take a deep breath, I just let my whole body drop. The cloth got tight, but my neck didn’t snap. I was just dangling there, slowly choking myself. Slow isn’t the way it was supposed to be. I wanted it to be over, but over quickly. I tried flopping my body and jerking around, hoping my neck would break, but instead all my movement caught a guard’s attention. He banged on my door and yelled something. I didn’t hear him but I think he was telling me to knock it off. The guard realized I couldn’t or
wouldn’t
stop, so he opened my cell door and quickly cut me down. I fell to the floor and laid on my back, nearly blacking out and gasping for air.

After my vision returned, I stared at the ceiling and tried not to make eye contact with the guard.

I certainly never thanked him.

After my unsuccessful suicide attempt, I went to the Winnebago State Institution for “observation” for a short time. When the powers-that-be decided I was no longer a suicide risk, I was sent back to the Milwaukee County Jail, where I spent most of 1982. I was released on February 8, 1983, and received five years’ probation plus a requirement to go to a Residential Drug Treatment Program in Milwaukee from February to August of 1983.

The six months I spent in that drug and alcohol rehabilitation program taught me something important: that something else was controlling my life, my addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Trouble was, the lessons I learned there didn’t stay with me for long. As soon as I got out, I went right back to drugs. I couldn’t help it–it was the only life I knew. For the most part, selling drugs was easy money and being high gave me a way to escape reality. Not to mention, I was still hanging out with all the same people. My old lifestyle caught right back up with me and it wasn’t long before I moved in with old friends and again started hustling on the side.

My life was chaos all over again.

About that time I met Janice. We weren’t together for long before she told me she was pregnant with my child. I said I was happy and promised to help out. I don’t think she believed me. I don’t think I believed myself, either. Janice gave birth to my baby boy.

I might have been around to help her and keep my promise, but in April 1984, I was jailed for another robbery. I managed to get out on bail. From all my run-ins with the law, I was getting good at finding ways to get around the law. When I was arrested, I used a different name, a friend’s name, so they wouldn’t discover I was on probation. I just happened to have a duplicate driver’s license. I plea-bargained and was out of jail in thirty days. Nothing fazed me anymore. I lived a life of constant motion. I just kept moving and never looking back.

I soon met a young woman named Annie. Annie had two sons and a good job as a dispatcher with the police department. Annie was good for me at first. We moved in together and she tried to keep me straight. Keeping me straight wasn’t something someone else could do though and, in 1985, I began snorting cocaine.
I knew I had let her down.

When I needed to get away from the stress of the home, I escaped to the harness horse races at the Maywood track in Cicero, Illinois, just north of Chicago. I found my escape about four times a week. I wasn’t home often and, when I was home, I was usually messed up.

One day when I was on a high, I told Annie that she wasn’t good for me and I wasn’t good for her. I asked her and her sons to move out. She agreed. Right after they moved out, I brought in Homey’s girlfriend’s sister, Barbara, to live with me. Barbara taught me how to sell
big
drugs like cocaine and heroin.

In 1986, I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a month. From there I went back to Milwaukee and discovered that someone stole my disability welfare check. I pulled a pistol on the people living downstairs from Homey and his girlfriend because I thought they stole the check. They swore they didn’t; I didn’t believe them.

The downstairs neighbors called the cops, who arrested me for carrying a concealed weapon. Because I was a convicted felon on parole, I was sent back to the Milwaukee County Jail, then to the Milwaukee County Psychiatric Ward, and finally to the House of Corrections in Franklin for one month. Judge Frank Crivello gave me two years’ probation. I found out later that Homey and his girlfriend had actually stolen my check.

When I got out, I moved back in with Barbara. That only lasted for a week because I started back on my path of destruction. My parole officer put me in DePaul Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Milwaukee, for rehabilitation for thirty days. Rehab gave me hope that I could change my ways. I promised myself that as soon as I got out, I would be a new man.

When I got out of DePaul, I was in a car accident and the insurance company paid me $3,000. That’s a lot of money to a guy like me. I moved back in with my old girlfriend, Annie. I felt bad about letting her down before so I gave her most of the money to pay the rent, buy food, and help with her kids. It felt good. It made
me
feel good. I was happy to be helping her.

To use the cliché, old habits are hard to break. Not long after, my lifestyle began repeating itself and I found myself yet again in the House of Corrections. I
stayed there from November 1986 to February 1987. After release, I landed in the DePaul/Bellevue Halfway House on the east side of Milwaukee until May 1987. No matter what I resolved to do when I was incarcerated, I just couldn’t seem to keep my life under control. I was all over the place.

Annie came to visit me at the halfway house and dropped a bomb: she’d quit her job as a police dispatcher the previous year. Now, without any money coming in, her utilities had been turned off. Somehow, I felt I owed her. I really wanted to help her out. I didn’t know what to do so I made a decision. I simply walked out of the halfway house.

The next month, because I had violated parole, my parole officer had me jailed. About the same time, I found out Annie was pregnant
again
. On February 16, 1988, Annie gave birth to my third child, my daughter Shan’elle.

I wanted to help Annie and the baby. I wanted to be a father and help my baby’s mother. After my release, I found a job working for the company that put food in the airplanes at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee. My job was to clean out the trays that kept the food warm. I got that job under my real name, Herman Martin. Working there was really tough on me; I had co-workers who were blatantly racist. After two months, I walked out. Racism is one thing I have a hard time tolerating, and I couldn’t handle it at work. Racism and intolerance aren’t things a person just accepts over time. The frustration and the anger never leave, and you can’t just start a fistfight with every person who says something disrespectful. I left mid-shift. Sure, I could have knocked some guy out on my way out the door or told the woman in the hall what I thought of her and her opinions just to prove a point, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. I think, looking back, that I just felt tired–tired of fighting for
everything
all the time.

A few weeks later, I met a woman named Myra. Myra gets credit for being the person who turned me on to smoking cocaine. My profession, yet again, was stealing and reselling scrap materials to recycling companies. Ironically, during all this time (from 1985 to 1990), I collected Social Security checks because doctors trying to find
some
reason for why I couldn’t be straight, said I was manic-depressive and schizophrenic.

Some people might say a good hustler learns to fake all kinds of mental illnesses to get Social Security disability diagnoses. Honestly, if you aren’t what society dictates you’re
supposed
to be, they are usually willing to diagnose you with anything to help “explain it.” Not to mention, when you’re taking any drug that comes your way, it’s easy to seem schizophrenic, or act like you’ve lost contact with reality, having hallucinations, or a split personality.

Regardless of my Social Security or my reselling scrap, my lifestyle was more than I could afford. My cocaine habit was costing me four to five hundred dollars a
day
. I was quickly coming to the end of my rope…

…I just didn’t know it yet.

Once again, I went back to a hospital, this time Northwest General Hospital in Milwaukee, for a month for drug and alcohol treatment. A few days after I was finished with the treatment, I went to the Fashionation women’s clothing store in Greenfield, Wisconsin, at eleven in the morning, snatched ten women’s suits, and ran out the door. The clerk got my license plate and told police that I had robbed her at gunpoint, which, for the record, was not true. I don’t mind taking responsibility for things I’ve done wrong, but I didn’t even have a gun.

The cops caught me that same day and charged me with armed robbery. Because I was still on probation, I was sent to the county jail and then transferred to Dodge Correctional facility in Waupun, where I remained from August 1988 until February 14, 1989. After that, I transferred to the Milwaukee County Jail to await hearing until March 1989.

I got out on bail in March and started a home-improvement business in June. It was great while it lasted, but in February 1990, I went to trial and was found guilty for the armed-robbery charge. On February 16, 1990, Judge Laurence C. Gram Jr. sentenced me to ten years in the Wisconsin state prison system for armed robbery. Coincidentally, this same judge later sentenced Jeffrey Dahmer to sixteen consecutive life sentences.

On February 19, 1990, officials drove me to the Dodge Correctional Institution and put me in the “SMURF” unit. “SMURF” stands for Special Management Unit.

I had never experienced anything like this. I had been to
jail
countless times, but
prison
was different. Prison meant no freedom and no easy way out. My lifestyle had finally cost me everything.

When someone becomes a Christian, he becomes a brand new person inside. He is not the same any more. A new life has begun! (II Corinthians 5:17
, TLB)

During the ten days where I sat at the Milwaukee County Jail to await my sentencing, I met another prisoner named Levy. Meeting him changed my life.