Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

victims, so I would rule out a hedonistic killer, and he strikes me as too organized to be a visionary killer. But I would argue his choice of victim, his stringent criteria, also alludes to a mission-oriented killer. Even though he doesn’t choose victims from a marginalized group like many mission-oriented killers do, he does select the same type of victim over and over: a white female from an upper-middle-class family. The only thing that changes is the age, and that’s obviously intentional too.

This man, whoever he is, is highly intelligent. He would almost certainly be college-educated, perhaps even with a master’s or doctorate degree. He is white—Nora Watson described him as such. And he would no doubt be aware of the connotations of choosing a young white female as his prey. They have historically been considered a symbol of innocence, which of course is rooted in harmful tropes of classism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

It’s also worth noting that while the common adage is that killers only kill within their own race, that is not always true. Samuel Little is possibly one of the most prolific serial killers in the country, and he seemed to kill women indiscriminately, paying no mind to their age or race. It was about access. Statistically, people do tend to kill within their own race, but that is usually more a matter of proximity than psychology.

Elle:

You said he didn’t get any thrill from killing his victims, but what about the way he tortured them, tortured the public psychologically?

Dr. Sage:

How do you mean?

Elle:

Well, after the first few murders, we all knew what his pattern would be. We knew once a girl was kidnapped by him, she had a week to live. There was the way he tortured them, of course—with a slow, painful death and the torment of working for every scrap of food he gave them. The poison. The whipping. But there was also us, the people in the community, observing and preparing ourselves for the inevitable. It was like he was tormenting us too, like he knew we were all sitting at home watching the news on the seventh day, waiting for story to break about a corpse being found. The bodies weren’t hidden away; they were made to be found, left exposed in public places. I was only a kid, but I remember what it was like on that seventh day. It was like the siren had gone off and you were bracing yourself for the tornado to touch down.

Dr. Sage:

I suppose you’re right.

Elle:

How do we know that the numbers and the formulas and the patterns were compulsions at all, that it wasn’t all designed to throw people off and make detectives chase their tails while he killed more and more girls?

Dr. Sage:

The short answer is, we don’t.

Elle voice-over:

After everything I’ve discovered talking to Dr. Sage, Detective Sykes, Tina, and Martín, I have put together my own profile of TCK. It might not be FBI-grade, but it is based on all the evidence we have gathered so far. Remember, criminal profiling does not help investigators identify a singular person. Profiles are not evidence; they are educated guesses based on deductive reasoning and statistics. But on a case this cold, a beam of light pointed in a plausible direction is better than stumbling around in the dark.

I want you to listen carefully and think about everything we’ve learned. Remember, the people we have investigated and caught for previous seasons of Justice Delayed have turned out to be ordinary, everyday people with neighbors and relatives and friends who never suspected them. People who do monstrous things often don’t seem like monsters to us.

If you have any questions or theories, I want to hear them. We’ll talk about it next time.

The Countdown Killer is smart, college-educated, perhaps with an advanced degree. He likely suffered abuse as a child and would be abusive to women in his everyday life, possibly physically but definitely emotionally. He has an interest in numbers, which means he may have a career in math or science, although as Dr. Sage noted, all the numbers he chose seem to have particular relevance in the Bible. At least at one point in his life, he had a fondness for Darjeeling tea—specifically Majestic Sterling.

He’s white, probably between twenty-five and thirty-five when he first killed, so in his late forties or early fifties now. The only physical description we have is that he was strong, well built, and had blue eyes and a deep voice. He wore brightly colored clothing or accessories the very few times he was witnessed close to a victim. Given the extensive time we believe he spent stalking his victims, as well as the fact that most of them were taken in the daytime, he likely works a flexible job where he controls his own hours, or possibly he works the night shift. He has to have a vehicle, perhaps several, and might even be skilled at stealing cars. It’s possible he’s even been arrested for this without the police knowing what he meant to do with that vehicle.

He seems to have knowledge of law enforcement processes and movements, which has led some to suspect he’s a police officer or private investigator of some kind. But he also has a keen sense of the limits of the human body, how to measure his victims’ vital signs well enough that he could poison them at just the right rate that they died on the day he wanted. He likes to have control and make people do his bidding, and he lacks empathy when his actions harm other people—in fact, he may enjoy it.

And on this podcast, we are operating on the assumption that he is alive—he’s still out there. And we can find him and bring him to justice.

Next time, on Justice Delayed . . .

17

Elle

January 15, 2020

The sun was setting and Martín was still at work when Elle got home. She turned her phone back on, and a single text