The Bayou Strangler

In 2008, Ronald Joseph Dominque was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences for the death of eight murders. However, police believed the total number of deaths by his hand might be as high as twenty-three. Dominique later confessed to twenty-three murders across Southeast Louisiana.

Like other serial killers, there wasn’t anything peculiar about the Bayou Strangler. Dominique was an overweight, unhealthy sexual predator who selected gay men he solicited for sex or stranded alongside the road to rape and kill. People who remembered his described his as just a quiet, ordinary guy. He was an active member of the local Lions Club and spent Sundays calling out Bingo numbers to the elderly. His private life consisted of cross dressing and bad impressions of Patti la Belle in the New Orleans gay scene.

Strangulation was his preferred method of killing. When he was done he’d discard the bodies in the local cane fields or bayous of the parishes bordering New Orleans. His victims ranged in age from sixteen to forty-six. He told police he killed his victims to prevent them from reporting him after the rapes.

Like the Gacy’s, Bundy’s, and Dahmer’s of the world he selected his victims from the overlooked, forgotten and discarded of society. His victims were often male prostitutes or homeless men. Some of his victims were heterosexual men lured into his trap with a promise of having sex with an imaginary wife or drugs.  He often took his victims to a trailer he lived in and somehow convinced them to allow him to tie them up. Once subdued, Dominique would rape and strangle his victims before discarding their bodies.

His reign of terror lasted ten years before he was apprehended based on a tip from a homeless man who told the police he’d been lured to a trailer to have sex with a man’s wife. The witness says he got suspicious and fled when the man tried to tie him up.

THE KILLING JOKE by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

One bad day. The story theme is that what separates the sane from the insane is an incident—a tipping point—that pushes the sane over the edge. The proposition assumes we are all teetering on insanity. The assumption in this story is that once we fall into insanity there is no going back.

Batman desperately wants to end the suicidal combat between himself and the Joker. The only end he sees in the continuing battle between the two is the death of either or both. Batman is driven to save the lives of his friend Commissioner Gordon and daughter Barbara after the Joker has severely wounded Barbara and abducted the Commissioner with the intent to drive him insane. The Joker’s point is to prove that even the sanest man(person) can be driven mad with the right motivation. In the end the Joker fails, sanity prevails, and humanity is resilient.

At one point, the Joker poses the question of Batman’s sanity and guesses at what drove him mad. But, is the Batman insane as the Joker implies?  Or was the catalyst in Batman’s life that moved him to be a crime fighter (vigilante) more a motivating event?  I’m not Batman expert, but what I remember of the storyline is that a young Bruce Wayne, after witnessing the death of his parents, was never in danger of living a life of crime or becoming a serial killer. He chose the path of protecting the prey from predators. The persona of Batman is a role whereas, the Joker, through some freak chemical accident, became a completely different person from his original identity. He barely remembers the life before becoming the Joker so it is unclear in this reading that the personal tragedy in his life was the tipping point to madness, but rather it was the chemical imbalance caused by his falling into the polluted river. By the way, the EPA should get on that.

If the story was attempting to drive the point home about the tenuous hold on sanity we possess I don’t know if it worked for me or even if I would have gotten that if I weren’t looking for it. None-the-less, to enjoy the artwork and the story I didn’t need to.

JOYRIDE by Jack Ketchum

What is wrong with Wayne?  Since the purpose of this class is to focus on psychos then we must place our attention on him and what sets him apart from the other characters we've discussed up to now. 

As I read his character, Wayne is a thrill seeking killer motivated by that purpose alone. We don't really know how he got that way and neither does he, except of course for the mommy issues, but that seems par for the course among crazies.  Killing is an itch he longs to scratch.  But it isn't just killing, it's killing humans.  When he witnesses a murder after nearly surrendering to the urge of killing his own girlfriend, Wayne thinks he's found kindred spirits who, at the very least, might share the rush of the kill along with him.  Wayne kidnaps them and thus begins the joyride.

I found the title interesting to me even if I didn't find the subject matter thought provoking. The idea of a joyride when compared to the pacing of the writing is an appropriate match. The story is fast paced from the beginning.  The initial setup is short with little time to dwell on how our two kidnapped ride alongs got to be in their situation. We know enough and we know it quickly then it's pedal to medal as we careening down the streets of crazyland with Wayne. 

Wayne was not obsessed with death.  His obsession was with killing.  The common theme, at least among the villains we've studied, is their killings were ways of gaining control.  Wayne was no different.  

This book reminded me of a very bad Steven Seagal movie call Out for Justice where a doped up thug goes on a rampage driving through the streets of a big city killing people he thought of as his enemies.  That's where the comparison ends.  This book is so much better.