Monster (11 page)

When Luther arrived at the center in September 1983, he complained that while what he did to Mary Brown was “terrible,” he considered himself to be a victim of the criminal justice system. “The police and press made me out to be some kind of ogre and heinous person. The facts were not truly portrayed.”

The evaluators noted that Luther “tends to display an excessive amount of tact and skill at manipulation.” They agreed with the earlier psychological profiles that labeled him antisocial with other “borderline” personality disorders. “He is a neurotic person whose defense mechanisms interfere with his adjustment,” noted one report. “He has difficulty being himself. He’s a bullshitter, a brown-noser, and a braggart.

“He has a strong drive to avoid discomfort ... He feels the need to assert himself but behaves meekly and self-effacing around men.... Elements of bizarre thinking are also shown.”

Luther, they said, had above-average intelligence. They reported that he experienced intermittent crying spells and needed medicine to stabilize his moods. “His behavior undergoes rapid swings from passivity to loud threats of violence.”

Discrepancies in Luther’s various accounts of his drug use, particularly on the night of the assault, “suggests a tendency to overemphasize the effects of substance abuse on his behavior,” one report stated. “The lack of consistencies in stories given by Thomas suggest a poor prognosis at dealing honestly with substance abuse.”

The reports noted that Luther had said that the victim looked like his mother and that he had first established a position of trust—the Good Samaritan—with his victim before his sudden blitz attack. And that later he had attempted to have his victim killed so that she couldn’t testify against him in exchange for his murdering another woman. Not exactly the sort of thing to get him high points for remorse.

When Macdonald and the two detectives arrived to talk to him, Luther had been in the Department of Corrections system for nearly twenty months. He had put on twenty pounds of muscle since he’d raped Mary Brown, working out with other inmates on the prison weight room equipment. He was getting bigger, stronger, and if possible, more bitter and dangerous.

There was nothing physically intimidating about the young man who entered the interview room. He wasn’t huge, though he was muscular. He didn’t look dangerous.

In fact,
Macdonald thought,
he is a rather a nice-looking, if unremarkable, chap.
Clean shaven. Blue eyes. A mane of curly brown hair.

Then again, Macdonald knew that the worst of these men, the serial killers, often didn’t stand out in a crowd and went out of their way to appear normal. It was often this ability to be chameleons, changing to blend into the environment and appear non-threatening, that made them so dangerous. They were usually above average in intelligence, and generally described as good-looking and good-natured—the sort of guy whose friends, family, and neighbors were always quoted in newspapers as saying they had no idea he was capable of such heinous crimes or flatly denying the possibility.

Charming, intelligent Ted Bundy had been such a man. John Gacey, who dressed up like a clown for children’s parties and murdered boys, was another. Monsters in sheep’s clothing. A ladies’ man and a funny fat guy. But Macdonald and the detectives knew little about Luther, only that he had raped a young woman in Summit County two years earlier.

The room where the interviews took place was essentially empty except for the chairs they sat on. Luther perched on the edge of his seat across from his questioners with his back toward a wall of beige bricks. He was in a good mood. Joking with the cops, he nodded at Macdonald. “Hey, how you doing today, doc? He’s the one wants me to draw pictures of women.”

The detectives and Macdonald laughed; it was a good opening. “How long you in for?” a detective asked.

For some reason, Luther laughed again before answering. “Fourteen years on second degree sexual assault and fifteen years on first degree assault. I gotta serve half of the biggest number. I’ll be out in 1989.”

They began by talking about his childhood, his troubles with his mother and the loss of his father. As Luther spoke, he tended to cup his chin in one hand with a finger across his mouth or he clasped his hands in front on his lap as if he didn’t trust them not to betray him.

He said he’d been born and raised in Vermont, which is where he hoped to go when released from prison. Although he’d only been through the ninth grade, he proudly announced that he’d received his high school equivalency diploma in prison and had recently completed an accounting class.

One of the detectives asked, “What do you want to do when you get out besides go to Vermont?”

“I’d like to be a social worker. Work with abused children with noplace to go to vent their anger,” Luther said, looking at his questioners as if he expected them to laugh. “If that’s possible.”

The answer seemed to take the detectives by surprise. “This isn’t a sex thing with kids is it?” one asked suspiciously.

Luther smiled. Of course they’d ask that question. He shook his head and said, “I have no sexual preferences for children.”

Did he have any other convictions? “No,” Luther began, then changed his mind. “Well, when I was young, me and a friend stole pumpkins and smashed them on the road. We were arrested for criminal mischief and fined $50—which was a lot back then. My dad took it out on my rear end.”

What did he think of his father and mother?

His father was a fair man, sensible, Luther replied. His mom was another story. “She had a lot of ups and downs, a lot of problems growing up with us kids.

“She was real young when she got married and to be honest, I believe she was quite bitter about having to be a mother at such a young age and not be able to go out in the world and do what she wanted to do.”

Luther paused and looked down at his hands, his fingers interlaced, before continuing. “She took her frustrations out on her children.”

Macdonald noted the young man’s demeanor when talking about his mother. While trying to determine the root causes behind why a man rapes a woman, it was always important to find out who they were really attacking. Who was he truly mad at? It usually wasn’t the victim, but a former girlfriend, a mother, even a certain type of woman for a perceived slight years ago.

The detectives wanted to know if anybody else in Luther’s family had ever been in trouble with the law. “Well, my brother—there was an incident that happened to him,” Luther said. “He shot a girl. He was in a drunken stupor.

“I don’t really know what it was about, but obviously he was embittered about something and stepped out of a car and shot a girl pumpin’ gas into her car—” here Luther chuckled “—with a shotgun.”

The girl had survived and even gone to the judge to testify on behalf of his brother. “Me and a cousin went and talked to the girl, and she found it in her heart to have pity on him.”

“You threaten her?” a detective asked.

Luther was ready for that one, too. “No,” he said and smiled.

The conversation moved to the rape of Mary Brown. Luther said he didn’t want to talk about it but agreed to answer specific questions.

He remembered the night as being so cold that even with the heater running full blast in his pickup, he couldn’t get the windows to defrost. He saw the people at the bus depot and went over to ask if he could call a cab for them. “I wasn’t on duty, but I got commissions for finding customers.”

The family didn’t need help. The girl said she didn’t have the money and would just wait for her friends. “She had limited cash for her ski weekend,” he said. “I been there myself, hitchhiked across the country a half-dozen times. I offered to help if I could.”

Luther described how they drove around for forty-five minutes without being able to locate the residence. “She had no idea where she was going. I could feel myself getting aggressive and perturbed.”

“What kind of person was she?” a detective asked.

The question seemed to stump Luther. He had to think about it before he answered. “She was very friendly, saying how nice I was for driving her.” He laughed bitterly. “At least until I started getting perturbed and she backed off on the ego strokes.”

He grew angrier, his voice harder. “She was a little stuffy, acted like a princess type, a little rich girl pullin’ a game or somethin’.”

“She remind you of your mother?” a detective asked.

Luther laughed. “Yeah. She did remind me of my mom ... when she started screamin’.”

He began to mention a similarity in hair styles when it was time to switch videotapes. After the conversation picked up again, one of the detectives asked if Luther had any trouble getting along in prison. They all knew what he meant. The men in a penitentiary all had mothers or wives or sisters or girlfriends on the outside; rapists were often dealt with harshly.

“Other inmates mess with you,” Luther shrugged. “Oh, I might take a guy into the shower and punch him in the nose. Them’s the breaks. You have to do it every once in awhile.”

The detectives let Luther have his macho moment before turning the conversation back to the connection between his mother and the assault on Brown. “You were saying something about hairdos?”

“Yeah,” Luther nodded. “Mom had a streak of white or gray that she’d had since she was young, so she dyed her hair coal black. It was a lot like that girl’s. That and the way she parted her hair like my mom.”

Was he thinking about his mother when he attacked the girl? “No,” he said slowly, “but certain things do trigger me off. Things I’m tryin’ to get in touch with.”

For the first time, Luther grew more animated. He turned his hands loose to act out his descriptions. “For instance, a female that hollers or—” here he raised his fist and made a throwing motion “—slams something or throws something at me, my gut reaction is violent. I want to get hostile and violent.”

“What if it’s a man?”

Luther shook his head. “No, I deal with it.”

“And if it’s a woman?”

“For some reason, it pisses me off,” Luther responded. “Like the nurses here are not as patient with some people as they should be. They got some real good screamers here.” Suddenly, his voice grew high like a woman’s, pinched with anger, as he imitated the prison nurses. “ ‘Come out of there. What you doin’ in here?’

“I react to that ... I want ...” Luther, his face screwed into a mask of anger, stabbed at the air with a finger, “I want to turn around and say, ‘Hey, shut up you such and such.’ ”

Luther caught himself. His hands found each other again and he pulled them to his lap.

“Your dad ever hit your mom?” a detective asked.

“Yes.”

“Ever see him do it?”

“Yes.”

“He ever beat her up?”

Luther paused. “Noooo,” he said slowly, “but one slap from a man of his size was as much as beating her up, yeah.”

“You ever beat up a girlfriend?”

“No,” he said, this time quickly. Then he looked at his questioners; there was no telling how much they actually knew about him. “I, well, had a girlfriend who one time tried gettin’ physical with me and tried to hit me with something.”

The hands came loose again as he acted out how he grabbed the former girlfriend and threw her down.

“I tried to walk away, but she attacked me again.” He slapped at the air with the back of his hand, imitating how he had struck her. “Jeez,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head, “the amount of damage was amazing.” He looked up as if he suddenly realized that laughing had been inappropriate. “It made me feel like a real asshole.”

Macdonald wasn’t particularly concerned about Luther’s tendency to laugh when he talked about the violence in his or his family’s past. It could be just nerves or embarrassment. It would have taken much longer than he had to uncover whether the laughter was tied to enjoying the pain of others.

In the meantime, Luther had continued on, talking about the sexual assault that had landed him in prison.

“I didn’t get real violent with the young lady until she started screaming,” Luther said. “Mostly that was out of fear, I believe. Just my paranoia of the cops: ‘Oh my God, they’re gonna catch me with coke in my pocket and pot under my seat.’ ”

“She make you real mad?” a detective asked.

Luther laughed. “Oh yeah.” As if he could hardly believe his own rage, he shook his head and chuckled again.

“What triggered that?”

Luther shrugged. “I don’t know what triggered it. I guess it got to a point where I just didn’t want to have control or didn’t feel I should have control or ...” he nodded emphatically, as if he had just made a great breakthrough, “I guess that’s it. I felt like I shouldn’t have control. I felt it must be all right to go ahead and light her up. Or punch her out, ya know? ‘Cause she was askin’ for it.”

Luther went on, “This was accepted behavior in my family with my mom and dad.” He spread his hands and shrugged as if there had been no other options. “My mom would get out of hand and Pops would do what he had to do to take care of it.

“If it meant slappin’ her,” he said, slapping the back of his own hand, “she got slapped.... Like one time, she walked up and hit him right in the forehead with a brass bookend, and he just punched her,
pang!
”

Luther giggled. “It knocked her right out. And that was that.”

It was evident that Luther knew he shouldn’t be laughing, but he was having a hard time controlling himself. “I mean it’s not a funny thing to think about, but, jeez, you just have to laugh.”

A detective asked if he was aware of at what point he decided to rape his victim.

“I was completely in a rage,” Luther said growing somber again. His eyes flashed as he relived the night. “I was in no frame of mind to be dealin’ with any situation. I should have left.

“But I needed to overpower the area. It was my domain. I’m the lion.” As he spoke, Luther held his hands in front of his body and half rose from his seat as if he was a big cat pouncing on its prey. “This is my kingdom that you’re in right now. And you’re going to play by my rules.”