A Tale from the Hills (31 page)

The dock manager agreed to let William fill out anapplication because he had a good feeling about him. The man thought that William had an honest looking face and he knew from experience that men from Virginia were usually very hard workers. The application form was very easy to fill out. After all, they were looking for men who could use their arms and backs and legs, not necessarily their brains. His interview was conducted before he filled out the application, and he knew that he had a job immediately after he signed his name on the dotted line. When he was asked if he had a preference about first, second, or third shift, he chose second. He would start work the very next day at three o’clock in the afternoon. The two men shook hands to seal the deal, and William left the docks with a big smile on his face. His next mission would be to find a room. He almost felt at home already.

Chapter Nine
 

Time passed even faster in Charleston than it did in Wilmington for William. Before he knew it 1939 was drawing to an end. William loved Charleston. He loved his job, and he even liked his expensive room at the boarding house. Working second shift had proven to be his very best choice too. He had the best of both worlds at work and after work. The city never went to sleep from the docks to the Battery to the downtown business district. He felt just like a kid with a new toy.

Not even two weeks passed before the first man disappeared from the Battery. He was very similar in appearance to the men in Wilmington whose lives ended so abruptly, but he died in a much different manner. When the authorities found his body, he had been beaten and strangled. His naked body had been in the water for at least three days prior to its discovery, but nothing about his disappearance or death led the police to even suspect that the waterfront killer had moved from Wilmington.

Meanwhile in Wilmington things were relatively back to normal. The extra night patrols had ceased since anescaped mental patient from Raleigh had been captured about two weeks after William left the city. Even though they never found a gun, the man’s actions and statements convinced the police that he was the waterfront killer. He admitted to everything that they asked him and he made a perfect scapegoat. He was never given a trial and hardly anything was printed in the newspapers. William never read anything at all about the captured man. He would have really enjoyed the story.

The editor of the Charlotte newspaper was not convinced that the killer had been found and the reward was never paid to anyone. But the killings had stopped and the people who made the decisions, made damned sure that the escaped mental patient never again saw the light of day. The case was closed on the Waterfront Killer in Wilmington, North Carolina. None of that really mattered to William Hill because he would never be back to their fair city again.

************

The holiday season of 1939 brought feelings out in William that he had kept hidden for years. He saw a poor family walking down the street, and the children were lined up like little stair steps behind their parents. He suddenly thought about his own family, and he felt sentimental about his childhood and adolescence in the mountains of Virginia. On a whim he purchased two Christmas cards with family themes on the covers, with the intention of mailing them to his own family. He sent one to Jewel Ridge Mountain, the other to Alleghany County.

He would have never sent the cards if he had known that his daddy and Eunice had been reunited. When Josh and Joseph visited their father over the holidays, they took the Christmas card to show him. Alan could not go because he was tied down at the general store. When that card was placed beside of the card that was received by Eunice and Samantha, everything down to the signatures and the notes were identical. It was a complete revelation to the entire family. Tom Hill wept tears of relief to know that his youngestson was alive and well. Josh and Joseph were surprised that William was not dead or in a mental institution. But Eunice was the most shocked of all the family. She discovered that the boy that she knew as William Blevins was actually her long lost nephew from Virginia. She could not understand why he would keep such an important fact from her, because she realized that he had to know that she was his aunt.

There was no return address on the envelopes, only a Charleston, South Carolina postmark. The family hoped that since he had finally made contact with them, that he continue to do so.

************

Another historic event took place in December of 1939. The movie
Gone With the Wind,
opened to packed houses in theaters all across the country. The lines outside of the theaters in Charleston were long for every showing. William had every intention of seeing the highly acclaimed movie on a lazy Saturday evening, but the highly suggestive behavior of a stranger that he met on the way to the theater, completely changed his plans. A walk to the Battery led to a walk under a lonely pier, which led to the violent death of an otherwise lonely stranger who was looking for companionship on a lazy Saturday evening.

William never saw the movie. It seemed that distractions or diversions of some sort or another always interfered with his plans. He did come up with an alternate title to his own little theatrical performance however, on that lazy Saturday evening. Instead of
Gone With the Wind,
his performance could be titled
Out With the Tides,
because the stranger’s body was not found for several days after his violent death.

It would take the discovery of a total of five bodies over a period of the same number of months before someone in the Charleston Police Department realized that a vicious killer was on the loose in their fair city. When an investigator finally lined up the morgue photos of the five dead men, he realized that all of the victims looked very much alike probably before, but definitely after they were killed. The patterns of their injuries were almost identical. Each of the men died approximately one month after the last victim, or one month before the next victim. The revelation sent shock waves throughout the police department. They wondered how long it would be before someone in the press figured out the patterns too.

It happened with the next appearance of a body. The badly beaten, nude man washed ashore just as a group of school children were visiting a city park. It was a sight that most of the children would never forget even after they grew to adulthood. The teacher of the class was the wife of a reporter with the Charleston Gazette newspaper, and when he did a little bit of digging around, he dug up a prize winning story.

The newspaper stressed the point that the police had to have known about the pattern of similar murders for months, but no effort was made to inform the public. Lives might have been saved according to the article, if the police had been more conscientious in their duties. The Mayor and the Police Commissioner were embarrassed and humiliated to have been kept in the dark by the police. Heads would surely roll if an arrest was not made in the near future.

Again, just as before, William was very flattered by the article. He wondered if they would give him a catchy name like the one that he earned in Wilmington. He began buying the newspaper everyday again to enjoy with his breakfast. It was just like old times, except in a better place.

When the authorities in Wilmington read about the killings in Charleston, they were sympathetic to the victims and their families. However, there was no possible way that they were going to reopen the case of the Waterfront Killer. They were completely satisfied that their killer was behind bars. They emphasized that even though the victims and circumstances were similar between the two cities, the killer’s methods were totally different. If there was a connection at all, it was because the killer in Charleston wasa copycat who got the idea from the stories out of Wilmington.

The newspaper editor in Charlotte seemed to have a sixth sense about the new series of murders. Somewhere in the deepest reaches of his soul, a voice told him that the very same man who was responsible for the killings in Charleston, was also the Waterfront Killer, and the killer from the train that left from Burlington. He had always followed his hunches and they were usually right on the money. He decided that the best thing for him to do was to go to Charleston and do some digging around for himself.

Unlike the Charleston police, he would have a head start on finding the illusive killer. He had all of the background information from Wilmington, plus profile data from the best psychiatrist in Charlotte. The doctor told him that the killer would strongly resemble his victims. He would be some type of laborer or blue collar worker, and more than likely, he worked not far from the area where the murders always took place. He would likely pose the biggest threat when he was on familiar ground, otherwise he would be shy and insecure. The killer would be convinced that he was not doing anything wrong. In fact, he would feel like he was performing a service to society. He would think that he was weeding out the bad to make way for the good. The only aspect of the murders that had the doctor confused was the reason why the killer had changed from using a gun to using his hands to murder the men. It was not that unusual for a killer to move from one city to another, but it was highly unusual for him to change his methods. The doctor warned the editor that he was dealing with a very dangerous man who felt like he had nothing to lose. He warned the editor to let the police do their job because the killer was obviously very deranged.

The editor was a tough old bird who was headstrong and stubborn to a fault. He felt responsible for his reporter’s death, and he wanted to find some closure not only for himself, but for his reporter’s family. He had been in the newspaper business for many years and he had the scars toprove it, but before he went out to pasture, he had to finish his job. He wished that he had gotten out of the business five years earlier when he turned sixty-five, but now he would not rest until the killer was captured either dead or alive.

How was a seventy year old man with the rugged looks of a mountain man, and the disposition of a mountain goat, supposed to go about finding a killer on the coast of South Carolina? Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, he was going to be in search of a grain of sand in the great sandbox called Charleston. He could narrow the search area to the waterfront, and more specifically the Battery section, and he had a general description of what the killer would look like. But the possibilities would still be endless, and his chance for success would be slim at best. But still he had to try before he could ever enjoy the years that were left in his life. He would always even if he lived to be a hundred, hear the sad cries of the children who lost their father to the sick man who was still on the loose in a genteel southern city.

The reporter in him naturally wanted to know the answers to many questions. Where did the killer come from? How did he ever grow up to be such a cruel and sadistic man? Was his childhood so bad that he grew up thinking that life was cheap and meaningless? Did he come from a family who did not love him, or did he grow up alone and friendless? Something devastating had to have occurred in his life to create the monster who preyed upon his own kind. Whether the newsman inside of him found out the answers to all or even any of the questions or not, the hard headed detective in him would do his damndist to put an end to the nightmare of the Waterfront Killer.

The editor placed a phone call to the railway station in Charlotte.

“I need a one way ticket to Charleston please, as soon as possible.”

The voice on the other end of the telephone line made him wait until the ticket was processed. In less than three minutes the voice came back on the line.

“Yes sir. The name on the ticket is Wilson, Jack Wilson. Tomorrow, nine a.m. to Charleston. Yes sir, I’ll be there by eight. Yes. No, thank you. Goodbye.”

All that he had to do now was to pack his bag for the trip. He would not be back in Charlotte until something wasresolved one way or the other with the killer.

**********

William woke up that same Friday morning well before daybreak, and with a terrible headache. It used to be very unusual for him to wake up like that, but in the last several months he had been waking up at least once a week with a grinding pain behind his eyes. It had gotten so bad and they were coming so frequently, that he bought the largest bottle of aspirin that the local drug store carried. He kept them on his bedside table with a glass of water close by. Thank goodness he could take three or four of them and then go back to sleep. Hopefully by the time that he had to get up to go to work, he would be feeling better.

For no good reason, he remembered Eunice talking about how dangerous that people used to think that aspirin were. When her family was so deathly sick with the flu back in 1918, the doctor warned them not to take an aspirin unless it was absolutely necessary. It would not have really mattered how many aspirin that they did or did not take, the results would have surely been the same. Aspirin would not have kept them from dying.

William wondered what it felt like to die? Did it feel like a great weight had been lifted? Did the spirit just float in the air? Or did the body simply go to sleep and never wake up again? He had watched people die from close up and it seemed like some of them just relaxed and stopped breathing. It was as if their struggle was over and they could rest in peace. He was glad that he could help them rest, even if they did not even know at first that they were tired of living. He watched other people’s faces and they gasped and struggled for their very last breath. He wanted to tell them to stop struggling and let the peaceful feelings just come over them. He was good at his craft, and he seemedto be able to pick out the people who needed to find peace through his magical touch. He hoped that it would be easy for him when the time came for him to go. He thought that surely it would be since he had helped so many others.

His biggest concern about dying was the old man who he had presumed in the last few years to be the Devil. Even though it had been a long time since he had dreamed about him, he was sure that he saw him on that last Sunday night that he was in Wilmington. Come to think of it, that was about the same time that the headaches started to become so severe and so frequently. He hoped that it was only a coincidence. He finally drifted back to sleep with an uneasy feeling in his gut, but he woke up several hours later feeling much better.