The Serial Killer's Wife (15 page)

“But what if I’d been more observant? What if I noticed the signs right away? I could have done something.”
 

“Like what?”
 

“I could have called the FBI myself. Had him taken away.”
 

Todd started to say something but shook his head instead.
 

Elizabeth said, “When these books first came out, I wanted nothing to do with them. But my curiosity got the better of me. Every time I went into a bookstore, I managed to find at least one of them. I’d flip through a dozen other books on the shelf before picking up that one. And then I’d read a page and get angry and want to tear the book in half.”
 

“Did you read the one by Clarence Applegate?”
 

“Unfortunately.”
 

Todd hesitated again in speaking.
 

“What is it?”
 

“Before, after we left the bar and Cain had called, you called him Clarence. What did he say to that?”
 

“He didn’t say anything.”
 

“So he didn’t deny it?”
 

She looked at him. “Go ahead and say it.”
 

“You think Cain is really Clarence Applegate.”
 

“At this point, I’m not ruling anybody out.”
 

“But ... he was a husband of one of the victims, right? I mean, I know he wrote that book and everything, but why would he do this?”
 

Elizabeth stared back out her window. She hadn’t been back to this part of the country in five years. She’d forgotten just how beautiful this region was, especially during the fall. The fields and the mountains and the trees with their yellow and orange and red leaves.
 

“Do you really want to know about Clarence Applegate?” she asked.
 

“Yes.”
 

“Okay. Then the first thing you need to know—the only thing, really—is the guy is a complete psychopath.”

CHAPTER 30

C
LARENCE
APPLEGATE
HADN
’
T
always been a psychopath. Not in his formative years, those in middle school and high school and even college. He was bright, confident, and, despite his unfortunate name, surprisingly good-looking. He married his high school sweetheart, though they had broken up after school and had gone their separate ways during college, both attending different universities. It was by chance that they ran into each other two years after graduation, both having just dealt with recent breakups, that they decided to get together for dinner and reminisce about old times. A year later they married. Three years after that Elizabeth’s husband raped and murdered Clarence’s wife.
 

“How do you know all that stuff?” Todd asked. “You know, about high school and college and when they got married.”
 

“It was in his book.”
 

“He wrote every single detail like that?”
 

“Well, yeah. What do you expect? The man’s not only an opportunist, he’s a narcissist.”
 

That’s not all Clarence Applegate was. He worked as a loan officer at a prestigious banking firm in Atlanta. That was his day job, but what he really wanted to do—his ultimate goal in life—was to become a published author.
 

Ever since middle school he had been writing stories. He kept sending them to magazines—places ranging from
The New Yorker
to
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
to small literary journals that paid only in copies—but nobody would take his work. Mostly all he received were form rejections, though sometimes a generous editor would scratch out a short note with words of encouragement. He knew the road to publication was not an easy one. Some people got lucky. Mostly everyone else had to work their asses off and even then they weren’t guaranteed a spot in what he regarded as Publication Heaven.
 

But that didn’t keep Clarence Applegate from dreaming.
 

Every morning he would wake up early and write for an hour, and every evening, before bed, he would sit at the computer and write for another hour. He was relentless, and kept more consistent hours than most professional writers (a claim he had no basis to make but one he liked to use to break the ice at social gatherings), but despite all that, he still was never able to sell any of his work.
 

And then his wife was murdered, and all media attention was focused on him—Clarence Applegate, Grieving Husband Extraordinaire—and something in the back of his mind (this part Elizabeth admitted was her own speculation) whispered a helpful reminder:
All publicity is good publicity
.
 

Within a week he had come up with a book proposal about life seen through the eyes of a husband whose wife was murdered by a serial killer. A week later he had managed to secure an agent for the project. At first there wasn’t much interest from publishers, but then months later a team of FBI agents arrived one Saturday morning to the home of Edward and Elizabeth Piccioni, and suddenly the idea of Clarence Applegate’s book wasn’t so uninteresting. Within days a small bidding war took place between a handful of publishers for a book not even written yet.
 

Todd said, “So how much of his book has to do with your husband?”
 

“Very little. Clarence mostly talks about himself, giving anecdotes from high school and college, and how his dream was to become a writer. About halfway through he actually starts talking about the murder. How his wife was away on a business trip. How she didn’t call him one night and when he called her she didn’t answer and he got worried. After a day when he didn’t hear anything he became extremely worried and started making calls. Eventually he got the police involved.”
 

“So what,” Todd said, “he also thought of himself as a detective?”
 

“The book makes you think that. He goes into a lot of detail about the initial investigation. But I remember reading online from some of the real detectives involved how he played a very minor role. Actually, if I remember this right, one of the detectives said Clarence acted more like an annoying gnat than anything else.”
 

“I still don’t get it.”
 

“Get what?”
 

“How you become involved. I mean, to the point where he would do ...
this
.”
 

Elizabeth produced a mirthless grin. “This is the part of the story where the psychopathic nature of Clarence Applegate really begins to shine.”
 

As expected, once the FBI had come for Edward Piccioni, the media began its circus. This was when Clarence’s agent began shopping around the proposal again. Clarence by that point began studying serial killers. He knew not all of them had to have nicknames—in fact, the only ones who seemed to have nicknames were those never captured—but he thought the public loved a good villain, one with a good moniker, and so he came up with The Widower Maker.
 

It wasn’t a good nickname. Many thought it was stupid. But Clarence fought to have it brought into the mainstream. He argued that Edward Piccioni had raped and killed only young married women. And by doing that, he left only widowers behind—children, too, but as he wasn’t a father he didn’t seem to harp on that aspect.
 

This was just days after Eddie’s arrest. Clarence had already started his own website, had created a sort of following. Some of his short stories—the ones he considered his best—he posted on the site for people to read. Again, any publicity was good publicity.
 

And then Elizabeth Piccioni and her son disappeared, and all eyes, for some reason, turned toward Clarence Applegate. It did not take him long to come up with the theory, no matter how outrageous it was. Clarence may not have been a very good writer, but he certainly knew the market, understood what sold, and commercial success—the very thing he craved—mostly hinged on the idea of sensationalism. That’s what got people going, what made them start frothing at the mouth, and so he was the very first to put it out there on his website:
 

Elizabeth Piccioni was obviously her husband’s partner in murder.
 

Todd shifted in his seat. “And people went with it, just like that?”
 

They were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike now, about two hours away from Harrisburg.
 

Elizabeth said, “What do you expect? Most people are sheep.”
 

Whether or not Clarence Applegate actually believed his claim to be true, nobody could say for sure, but he suddenly made it a priority. He created another website, one called
Where In The World Is Elizabeth Piccioni
, and he offered a reward for any information leading to her capture. The police and FBI did not quite agree with the idea, though they did note they were very interested in getting in contact with Elizabeth. Was she a person of interest? They never said one way or another, but they did acknowledge that she was a witness.
 

Very quickly Clarence Applegate began to understand the media. He learned that the more outrageous he became, the more publicity was pushed his way. He began making more claims about Elizabeth. How she was really the brains behind the whole killing operation (that’s what he called it, too:
the killing operation
). How if anything, Edward Piccioni was a helpless puppet in Elizabeth’s diabolical game of murder (again, that’s how he put it:
diabolical game of murder
). What’s more, he claimed their newly born son was a demon seed, that Edward and Elizabeth’s plan was to groom him into the family business to become the ultimate serial killer.
 

It was at that point the media began distancing themselves from Clarence Applegate. His fifteen minutes of fame was finished, as far as anyone was concerned. But he still had the book contract and he still had his websites and he still had his stories. And as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, people began to forget all about Elizabeth Piccioni.
 

But not Clarence.
 

He posted on his website how he was making it his mission to see that the evil bitch (again, his phrase) be brought to justice. He speculated on the different ways Elizabeth was raising her son to become another serial killer. He even played with the idea that Elizabeth fed her son human blood.
 

Elizabeth—at this point already living on the third floor of Riley’s Pub—began seeing the awful things Clarence Applegate was posting about her and her son. Having just run away from a life where her husband had raped and murdered six women (if not more) to find that now she was being accused of not just participating but also being the brains behind the entire thing ... it was just way too much for her to handle.
 

Todd said, “So he shifted the entire focus off your husband and placed it on you.”
 

“He didn’t have much of a choice. The other book—one written by an actual true crime writer—was already given a release date. Clarence had barely written one hundred pages of his. He knew he had to stay with the idea he had proposed, about life through the eyes of a husband whose wife was murdered by a serial killer, but he was a lazy researcher, even lazier than the other guy. He didn’t want to look into my husband’s history. Besides, he figured the other book would show that stuff, so he wanted to do something different.”
 

“Let me guess—he said you were the main cause.”
 

“That’s right. He even tried to take the nickname he had given Eddie and give it to me, tried calling me The Widower Maker. He speculated about what had driven me to want to kill. He did very little research into my own life. Mostly, he contacted people who had known me—close friends, past students—asking them for their opinion. Most of them told him he was crazy. Some though ... some actually went along with the idea.”
 

“What about your family?”
 

“My mother was never mentioned. She had probably died by the time he started writing the book.”
 

“What about your brother?”
 

“He was still over in Africa at the time. And I’m sure if Clarence had managed to track him down, Jim would have told him to go shove it up his ass.”
 

“So this guy, he has this book published, and then what?”
 

“His overextended fifteen minutes of fame was over. It had taken him too long to write the book, and by the time he completed the thing nobody cared anymore. The publisher canceled the contract. Clarence’s agent parted ways with him. Desperate, he published the book himself and sold copies off his website. He continued what he claimed was his rightful duty to bring the true Widower Maker to justice. He began offering a reward on his website to anyone with any information leading to my eventual capture and arrest. The amount started small, like one thousand dollars, and grew over time.”
 

“How much?”
 

“A lot. Last I saw, it was over one hundred thousand dollars.”
 

“
What
? How was he able to raise that much money?”
 

“By his followers, people who believed what he said about me. He accepted donations. All the money went to the reward.”
 

There was a brief silence, and then Todd said, “How many followers does he have?”
 

“I don’t know the exact number. But the reward”—she shook her head—“over the years it became less of a reward for my capture than it became something else.”