Born Evil
by J. Edward Ritchie
Age 0 – Genesis
My parents never spoke about the day I was born. They didn’t even attempt to weave a comforting lie to placate my curiosity. The subject was taboo. Many years later, I coaxed details from the staff that had witnessed my delivery. Despite having been present for hundreds of births, the doctors and nurses recounted that morning with alarming clarity. My first breath wasn’t a cry but rather a silent analysis of the world. I absorbed five senses of information without fear or wonder. In their words, I’d received the miracle of life and didn’t care. A midwife quit on the spot. I guess seeing a newborn ruminate in apathy was a disconcerting contradiction.
Babies are considered creatures of innocence, but I was never an innocent. I absorbed the fetal tissue of my dead sibling while in the womb. Vanishing Twin Syndrome they call it. I’m not suggesting that the absorption was a conscious act of malice, but instinct rarely coexists with innocence. I emerged the victor in a primal, bareknuckle blood sport fought on a cellular level. However, expectant mothers needn’t worry about a murderer gestating in their wombs. It’s a common condition and just one ingredient in my anomalous creation.
Whatever dreams my mother and father had for parenthood were dashed upon meeting my frigid, desolate gaze. Here was an honest, affectionate couple extending me all the love in their hearts, but I had nothing to give in return. Between eating and sleeping, I’d stare into the beyond, as if patiently waiting for the day when my motor functions would catch up to my mind. I had neither the desire nor capacity to swaddle myself in counterfeit humanity for the comfort of others.
For all the tenderness I received, one distinct sensation imprinted on my infancy—mother singing me to sleep. The ritual went on for years, but I wasn’t soothed by her voice. The melodies were soured by sorrow. Dissonance was my lullaby.
Age 5 – Discovery
My first years were a solitary crucible as I flailed to grasp the nature and order of reality. People were a mystery, complex and inconsistent. I knew that I didn’t belong. Something within me was lacking or…wrong. Otherness was my dominant trait. During that time of puerile introspection, I waited to become like everyone else. To become whole. To feel. Joy, anger, love, sadness—nothing more than words clattering in the jumbled mind of a toddler.
Time has slow-cooked my earliest memories into an unreliable stew, except for one that remains tucked in the most cherished corner of my hippocampus. My parents had a cat named Oreo, a fiendish and bitter demon that I imagined had clawed its way up from Hell to sow chaos. Traversing the hallway became a gauntlet of claws swiping at my Achilles tendons and dive-bomb attacks from atop the cabinets. During one of Oreo’s more daring flights, I dove for safety and heard a snap. Unlike twigs crunching underfoot, a natural occurrence, when bone breaks it sounds violent. The snap should’ve triggered revulsion, or at least distress, but not exhilaration.
Oreo was dead, neck broken from colliding with the wall. He died doing what he loved, the little bastard. I hadn’t been exposed to death in any capacity, and it left me breathless. The accident exposed an uncharted door in my psyche. Peering through a crack in the threshold, I beheld a gluttonous abyss pulsing with hunger. And possibility. It fed on Oreo’s passing, transmuting death to tease me with wisdom. The knowledge of self that had eluded me was in the abyss.
My parents found me hovering over Oreo’s body with a demented smile. How long had I been praying to that macabre altar? They were devastated. For whatever reason, they adored that mongrel. Father took great care explaining death and the feelings he assumed I was wrought with, but I felt nothing after the episode. No happiness. No sadness. No guilt or confusion. All I could think about was the abyss, my first and only source of feeling alive.
Whatever I was, whatever I was to become, I’d found my gateway to answers.
Age 10 – Exploration
My formative years were spent thrust between psychiatrists and neurologists. Father and Mother were desperate for a diagnosis. They scrutinized my every word and action. Any hint of abnormality inflated their worry into hysteria. But the truth wouldn’t bring them relief, only more pain. Logic (not love) dictated that I spare them and never speak of the abyss. Besides, I loathed the idea of spending life being studied and prodded by the psychiatric community. My solution was to apply a veneer of unexceptional humanity.
By age ten mimicking emotions was second nature, and my mental health was no longer in question. By all external accounts, I was a well-adjusted, polite child. My parents were convinced it had been a phase. Their love—and more importantly, renewed trust—was quite comfortable. So long as my veneer held up, no one saw the abyss smoldering underneath. It was my constant companion, a chimera of imaginary friend, confidant, and devil molding my potential.
The abyss forced me to recognize what was lacking in my soul—an inherent goodness. Goodness, as I understood it in regards to the people around me, was empathy. Connecting with others so that their joys and sorrows become your own. It was vulnerability, laying oneself bare and being clothed in the strength of others while having the compassion to return that strength in kind. Not once in my ten years of life had I fit that definition. I could fake the appearance of goodness through my veneer, but intention is everything.
What was my nature? The abyss held answers, I was sure of it, but the crack wasn’t wide enough to access them. Since death had revealed the abyss, I surmised that death would increase my access to its depths. The nearby woods were dense enough for privacy, and rich with all manner of critters. It became my abyssal playground. From my parents’ perspective, I was a child bonding with nature and letting my creativity run wild on adventures. I suppose that was true. I constructed traps. I hunted. I killed with impunity.
Gore had no effect on me. Meat and bone and offal were educational. I sliced open birds and rodents, exploring biology more intimately than in any formal classroom. Call it home schooling with a syllabus crafted for one purpose: preparing me to become one with the abyss. I was too young then, a dabbler, but my time would come.
When finished, I buried the remains, applied a happy face, and returned home with all the dirt and scrapes of a regular scamp. Dinner and family time. Homework. Bed. Routine is soothing, isn’t it? Our minds enter autopilot as menial tasks are checked off like tiny victories to get us through another day. Interruption in routine breeds anxiety and stress. My routine was solid. Safe. And my veneer?
Flawless.
Age 16 – Addiction
Humanity’s preeminent curse is that our hungers are never sated. The more I dabbled, the less fulfilled I became. Hunting animals wasn’t enough. The abyss had so much more to teach me, but its revelations had to be earned through sacrifice and danger. Up to that point, I’d done nothing that couldn’t be forgiven. Civilization trains us to believe that ending a life is the worst sin, one from which there is no return. Though I’d been dipping my toes into the abyss, killing someone would plunge me headfirst into its obsidian infinity. Enlightenment awaited.
Was I ready to sacrifice any chance at a normal future? Even if I could will a conventional life into existence, I’d be living a lie. My work was important, deeply personal, and incomplete. I was incomplete. I couldn’t stop now. I didn’t want to stop. My forays into death lacked consequence. I had to know what it felt like to take a human life, and in doing so, cut a thousand threads of possibility from fate’s loom. The abyss demanded it.
Trying to make a rational choice about who should die was folly. The bully who tormented me at school? Our drunken, wife-beating neighbor? A rapist who had served one month and walked? Or maybe the homeless and destitute that’d be better off dead than rotting in the streets? I wasn’t a vigilante seeking to make the world a better place, nor did I consider any life more expendable than others. And I definitely didn’t need to kill in service (or defiance) of a higher power. Truthfully, it didn’t matter whom I killed. To the abyss, a life was a life. This was about my rise, not their fall. In the end, I trusted in happenstance.
One perfect day, when the final splashes of daylight pierced the canopy, a slovenly hunter wandered into my territory. Assuming I was game, he fired a shot that whizzed past my temple and struck a tree. Upon seeing the error (and the blood trickling down my face), he dropped his rifle and ran to my aid. I didn’t move. Didn’t say a word. He thought I was in shock. Not so. The close call left me giddy with fear and adrenaline. What ensued is only preserved in memory as static flashes.
Picking up the rifle. Firing at the hunter’s kneecap. Blood and bone splattering on tree bark. My hands on the hunter’s throat, squeezing. Fingernails gouging flesh. Choking him longer than seemed possible. Twisting to stifle the confusion clouding his eyes. Vertebrae grinding under my grip, and snapping. Release.
A wave of living darkness crashed into me. I didn’t fight it. Merging with the abyss, I waited for a surge of clarity and transcendence…but I felt nothing. My mind could’ve shattered, but instead I held tight onto a notion that would inform the rest of my life: the next death would secure answers. Or the next. The search for the meaning of me was underway. I’d never know a worse addiction.
Age 21 – Denial
I immersed myself in the abyss until my veins and arteries ran black. But I remained fractured, no more enlightened as to the nature of my existence than when I began. Frustrated, I had a sickening sense that my way of life was unsustainable. I had no foundation, sinking in a tar pit of my own creation. Questions and scrutiny were inevitable, from my parents, friends, and more authoritative eyes.
The stress of desperation caused hairline fractures in my veneer. To disappear among the masses, I traded my forest for the concrete jungle of city life. One man in herd of millions all preoccupied with their own issues. Perfect. I landed a job at a telemarketing firm where being a detached automaton was encouraged. The theatrics of interacting with coworkers were integral in honing my unexceptional invisibility.
Romantic pursuits were limited to flings, until Stephanie lured me into her orbit. She saw through my contrived mediocrity and, for whatever reason, believed in me. Her support was boundless, and yet she respected my privacy. It seemed we were two halves that became a whole with each other, something I thought to be impossible. Stephanie loved me, at least the “me” that I allowed her to see. The convenience of our union made me consider that I’d found an alternate route to self-discovery.
But the abyss couldn’t be caged or ignored. It found freedom in my subconscious. I’d wake up drenched in sweat, convinced I’d killed Stephanie in my sleep. Eventually I would hurt her, of that I had no doubt. Abstinence came at the cost of self-control. To spare Stephanie’s life, I ended the relationship without explanation. Kids today call it ghosting. Stephanie called it being a heartless asshole. She’d live, yet she was gutted all the same. As far as I know, she never married. I didn’t take her life, but I damn sure took something. Heartless asshole, indeed. To this day, I can’t define what I had with Stephanie, only that it was good and warm. And fabricated. Selfish. A means of running. If I’ve ever felt anything resembling regret, it was from imploding the future we could’ve had.
I returned to my true work, wandering the worst parts of the city to tempt its predators. I wanted the challenge of facing others who gave no value to life, men who’d fight me for the sport and joy of violence. I imagined their fists and blades and guns as manifestations of Stephanie’s grief, part of me hoping to be punished, but they had no chance. Wielding a linoleum knife, I painted a gallery’s worth of Pollack-inspired masterpieces on brick and pavement. My youthful hubris was effective at amassing bodies, but little else.
The violence was vindictive and devoid of wisdom. I had to grow up.
Age 30 – Acceptance
Most people can’t reconcile their faults. Everyone is too ugly. Too fat. Too weak. Too afraid. Never mind the religious, racial, and sexual differences that breed rampant hatred. Why are people so obsessed with finding new ways to hate themselves and others? I’ve never hated anyone, because I’ve never devoted that much of my mental real estate to someone else. Stephanie taught me who I wasn’t and never could be. Who I was remained a subject of debate. Narcissist? Absolutely. Coward? In many ways. But my story was incomplete, and all I could do was begin my next chapter.
A change of scenery was in order. The city’s luster had faded, so I moved to a quaint cul-de-sac in the suburbs. Now a man by all rights, I amassed the fiscal duties of adulthood. Home ownership. Car payments. Tax returns. Lawn care. Before I knew it, I found myself part of a community. Block parties. Poker night. Potluck dinners. The neighbors embraced me with saccharine candor. I reciprocated just enough not to be suspicious and was soon acquainted with the entire block. Pleasantries polished my veneer to unprecedented authenticity.
My life felt real. I felt real.
While I couldn’t seal off the abyss, I exercised greater control over it. When the need festered, I’d venture into the city. But the experience became hollow. My offerings to the abyss were only to appease it and not because I expected anything in return. As the time between kills increased, I recognized that my work might not define me. That there were no absolutes in life. Why did my veneer have to be a lie? Why couldn’t it be as real as the abyss, if not more? A few years earlier I would’ve never entertained such radical notions.
During the next two decades I experienced what others describe as happiness, but for me it was contentment. Drunk on suburbia. I strove to cultivate the goodness I’d been denied at birth, or at least a reasonable facsimile. If I wanted to change badly enough—and I believed I did—why couldn’t I? Nature made me deficient at no fault of my own, but accepting the permanence of that deficiency had been my choice.
Age 50 – Resurgence
Shortly after my fiftieth birthday, my parents died in a car accident. No one was to blame, except bad weather and an unfortunately positioned telephone pole. I couldn’t understand the inanity of their passing, the sheer randomness. They had tried to raise me right against insurmountable odds and, for what it’s worth, I respected their efforts. The world was a kinder place with them in it. All that I lacked was abundantly present in them. Shouldn’t that have earned them a meaningful end?
Don’t mistake bewilderment for remorse. Throughout the process of putting them to rest, my heart didn’t whisper one syllable of sadness. Not at the wake or funeral or when receiving endless forced sympathies (and casseroles) from relatives. Those exhausting rituals used their memory as an excuse for the living to bask in melodrama and free food. Despicable. So you’ll forgive me for not weeping over carcasses gussied up and stuffed in overpriced wooden boxes.
While cleaning out my childhood home, I discovered a journal hidden under the attic floorboards. It was a well overflowing with my father’s fears, fears he couldn’t tell his wife. Fears about me and what I was capable of. He’d found my animal graveyard in the woods. Hell, he even stumbled upon the hunter’s rotting remains and incinerated them. For me. My veneer never fooled him, not once, and he still loved me. Still believed I could channel my urges into something positive. But he couldn’t talk to anyone about it, only hope and pray that I might one day come to him for guidance. He died believing that day would still arrive and he could save me from myself. Reading his journal, I learned what a man of true conviction would do to protect his family. What he would suffer alone to keep them from harm. My father wasn’t just a good man; he was a selfless man who deserved a son that he could’ve been proud of. Instead, he got me.
Death is an agent of change. Losing my parents and then finding that journal upended two decades of conformity and restraint. If I had given a eulogy, it would’ve consisted of two words: no more. No more morning newspapers. No more sorting the recycling. No more mowing the grass. No more breeding neighbors and their snot-nosed offspring. My routine, the people, the domesticity obstructing my potential—I wanted to burn it all to the ground and salt the earth. Where was my commitment? I’d barely averaged one visit to the abyss per month, a fact made all the more disturbing because I didn’t seem to mind. I’d become weak. Lazy. Complacent.
No more.
In hindsight, I recognize that it was a full-blown midlife crisis. Unable to feel grief, I had no valve to release the pressure of my parents’ death. That pressure threatened to snap the hinges off the door to the abyss and unleash it upon my suburban utopia. To avoid that bloodbath, I sold my house, bought a caravan, and hit the road. Once again it was time to break from the chrysalis I’d built myself, and what emerged?
A grotesque animal that fed the abyss with gleeful abandon. Stripping away all the safety nets and pretenses, I deteriorated into everything I looked down on. Everything I thought I was better than. A madman. A butcher. There was no greatness in my work, no quest for meaning, only rabid mania. Sooner or later, collateral damage was bound to happen.
Vagrancy is no basis for sloppy work and, sure enough, the police caught my scent. In the boondocks of Louisiana, a rookie and twenty-year veteran cornered me. I retreated into the abyss and gave it free rein to deal with them. When I regained control of my faculties, I recoiled from the carnage my negligence had sanctioned. I didn’t know where one body ended and another began. The dismemberment, the fluids splashed in a radius of lunacy, their cries cemented on twisted faces…I wasn’t built for anarchy.
Murdering those officers for no reason other than to save my own skin was an abject experience that exposed a parasitic ugliness that had infected me. No, not infected. You don’t invite an infection. If that’s what resided within me, my authentic self, my abyss, then I wanted no more of it. No more.
Age 75 – Confession
The world was becoming smaller, and the dark cavities for aberrations like myself to exist in were dwindling. I purchased a remote cabin in Montana to be isolated with my ugliness. I wouldn’t feed my abyss one more teaspoon of blood.
Withdrawal nearly destroyed me. Weeks bled together as I slept barely an hour a night. Phantoms of my victims materialized from the walls and scuttled across the ceiling. Mind and body atrophied from malnutrition. My abyss became caustic, its acidic fury hollowing me from within. But even when curled in a fetal position, drenched in sweat and vomit, I gave it nothing. Slowly, my abyss lapsed into a withered homunculus, but I could never be free of it. To stave off madness, I returned to my roots and hunted for food. Those meager scraps of death sustained me like methadone.
In isolation, I appraised life through an impartial lens. My work had come at a cost that I couldn’t feel, no matter how hard I tried to empathize. But loss doesn’t have to be tangible to be acknowledged. My nature was incompatible with civilization. I had no right to deal in death. The world and its people didn’t make me this way. Their lives weren’t sacrificial fodder to justify my wretched existence.
What had my killing accomplished? Self-destruction and contempt. The enlightenment I sought through indulging my abyss was a delusion. I couldn’t see the truth until I admitted that arrogance and emotional impotence were the driving forces behind my actions. There was no grand design. That was my revelation.
People have a romanticized view of “serial killers,” as if they’re some rare mutation to be studied, vilified, and even celebrated. But for every gimmicky villain sensationalized in the media, how many dozens—hundreds—remain anonymous? For decades, I built a body of work surpassing many of history’s most prolific butchers. I killed for myself, not to entertain the masses or dance with the feds. I didn’t need to erect tableaus of corpses or write cryptic letters to newspapers. The world didn’t need to know my name.
Why then am I writing this letter? I wish I could say it’s to offer repentance and closure to the families of my victims. Despite the strides made in my twilight, my knowledge of human emotion will only ever be academic. There’s no atonement for me. If a capacity for death was my gift, my purpose, it was given to end one life. That time is long overdue. Growing old hasn’t been graceful. I have tremors in my hands. Blurred vision. Urine-stained drawers. Heartburn and back pain. This is the banal, protracted demise befitting a recluse who has only taken from others. Before the strength leaves me, I must feed my abyss the one meal I never had the courage to prepare. A serrated blade between the ribs will serve me on a platter, for what it’s worth.
Enclosed is a chronological list of my victims and the locations of their remains. The media will call me soulless. Monster. Sociopath. When the families cry into cameras, demanding answers for my inhumanity, give them this letter. It’s not an apology or rationalization, but it’s all I have to give.
My name is Jonathan Howard Patterson, and I was born evil.