When at last it did come, it was out of my jurisdiction, in the Columbia Correctional Institute, a maximum-security penitentiary. The job was sloppy – bludgeoning and stabbing with a broken broomstick. I had had a much more fitting end in mind. Even now, there are three serial killers in my domain. One, Clive Darrow of Griffith, Indiana, hasn’t killed in over a decade. A white man, he had been an assassinstyle killer, getting drunk and driving his 1976 Ford Grenada past toll booths, open garages, car washes, and other such places and slaying his white victims with a shotgun. The police suspected a race crime by a black man, but the FBI profiled a white man of a little less than Clive’s age – 54.

The police arrested their black man at the same time that Clive struck and killed a pedestrian and was imprisoned for reckless homicide. He happened not to have the shotgun in the car because he had just lent it to a friend for duck hunting. The killings stopped, the police were satisfied, and Clive sat in a cell for five years of an eight-year sentence. A model prisoner, he found Jesus.

Since his release, Clive has spent his time working as a janitor for Harvey’s Department Store and volunteering his time at Hoosier Boys Town. His witness to the young men there includes frank discussions of his serial killings and the difference Christ has made. The listeners give Jesus little credence, and the talk of shootings even less. The police have been called fiftyseven times to investigate Clive’s allegations of serial killings, but have found no evidence, and have ceased responding.

The other two serial killers are still somewhat active. Jerome “Jerry” White is twenty-nine years old and has been killing since he was seventeen. He lives winters at his mother’s house in Evanston but spends his summers at a rundown cottage at the flood-prone Methodist Campgrounds in Des Plaines. Like Darrow, Jerry is a born-again Christian, though his conversion yielded the opposite effect.