To Catch a Serial Killer

Gano Smith had just shot and bludgeoned his entire family to death. I was 9, staying with my paternal grand parents in Sigourney, Iowa when the news broke that this blood-thirsty madman was running rampant in our area. Gano had always been considered a harmless and gentle man by those who knew him; a 24-year-old dullard who had been adopted at birth by this family of God-fearing farmers. Then, in the summer of 1962, he came unglued and took out the only six people who had ever shown him any kindness. The papers said he was armed and dangerous and that there was a $5,000 reward for his capture. I was thrilled. Nothing ever happened in Sigourney and God did I hate that town. The only fun I ever had there was when my older cousin Jon would come to visit and we would go to the salvage yard and look for blood and pieces of smashed skulls on the dashboards of freshly wrecked cars. Back in those days, when a TV bulletin interrupted regular programming, you could bet it was a big deal -not like today where every little thing is considered breaking news.

My grandfather owned a shotgun, but he was so stricken with emphysema by then that even I knew he was no match for an off the deep end fugitive. Grandma McCuen was an imposing woman of German descent who could throw down world-class, made-from-scratch noodles and mince meat pies, but she wasn?t gonna be much help if Gano showed up lusting for more blood, either. Her idea of a rockin? Saturday night was knitting a sweater while she watched Lawrence Welk and Billy Graham on their 10-inch black and white. So it all came down to me. Even though I?d never even seen a gun, I decided to borrow Grandpa's 12-gauge and go looking for Gano myself.

This was my first experience with sheer terror and while I couldn't explain it at the time, I relished being in the clutches of absolute fear. It made me feel alive; a welcome reprieve from the daily drudgery of this shell of a town where time itself seemed to stand still. The frequent bulletins only added to my excitement. "GANO STILL AT LARGE?MAN-HUNT CONTINUES," screamed the headline. I spent an entire day gathering weapons for my arsenal and hid them under the hand-made bedspread that my grandmother had fashioned with her chronically arthritic hands. If Gano decided to come calling in the middle of the night, I had everything I would need to stop him in his cold blooded killer tracks. As Grandma led me in my nighttime prayers, I couldn't wait for her to go to bed so I could survey my inventory. I had a bag of oranges, a butcher knife, a Louisville Slugger, a sack filled with roofing nails and my ace in the hole: a pair of golf cleats. And there was always that shotgun, which I knew was loaded. I lay awake all night, listening to the freight trains rumbling by a mere football field away. I was banking on Gano being on one of those trains and he was gonna get his this time.

Sometime around sun up I must've drifted off to sleep when suddenly I was startled awake by someone shaking me. A large, menacing figure was standing over me, mumbling indecipherably. Without hesitating, I reached under the covers and whacked Gano right between the eyes with a golf shoe and followed up with a shot to the back of his head with the oranges. He stumbled and fell to the floor with a dull thud and then started to moan. But it wasn't Gano after all. It was grandma, and she'd gotten up at the crack of dawn to make me homemade sugar donuts.