Yes, I murdered her in cold blood after deliberating about the most effective manner in which to achieve the desired outcome. Not in the heat of passion, in self-defence, due to temporary insanity or under the influence of alcohol or drugs; none of the defences to murder apply. There were no elaborate or complex reasons involving emotions, sentimentality or scruples of any kind. I abhor the arbitrariness of human emotions. This was strictly an exercise in pragmatism, after careful weighing of risk and reward.
And this was not my debut murder either. I am rather an old hand at it and have perfected the art and science of it. The reason for the murder is a constant each time (for I am not unprincipled enough to commit murder senselessly) – money and the access to all the splendours it can bring. The modus operandi in each case is as startlingly different as my mind can conjure up. It appeals to my creative streak and has the added benefit of tripping the police up.
I am nothing if not meticulous. I wait years until the I hit upon the perfect plan, then work on refining it until virtually nothing is left to chance. After years of plotting and scheming and temporizing on the perfect murder, I prepare the blueprint for one and execute it to perfection each time. As it turns out, there are a multitude of ways to commit the perfect murder.
I have an IQ of 179 points, and it may seem trite but yes, I am a genius, and from my vantage point, most people seem to have the brains of degenerate cockroaches. I can and have manipulated them at will, bending them to do my bidding and making them like it. No, I am not the socially awkward, introverted, absent-minded nerd or social reject who passes for a genius in popular fiction. This over-tired cliché amuses me for it is the furthest from the truth in my case.
I am the embodiment of finesse, raw personal magnetism, charm of manner and impeccable social skills. These did not come naturally to me, but I have cultivated them, invested time and practice and honed them to precision. Years of practice have made me an expert at simulating human emotions and expressions. I am a master communicator, a silver-tongued wordsmith, or so I have been told. I have perfected the fine art of telling people what they need to hear to enable me to get what I want. The humble masses cannot help but yield to my superior intellect, rapier wit and social wiles.
The irony is that Ciara’s murder was to be my personal masterpiece, my magnum opus. It was the culmination of three years of laying the foundation, trust-building exercises and pulling some of my most strategic and tactical moves. It had taken me twice as long as any of my other projects but the pay-off was more than worth it.
The late Ciara Hutchinson, businesswoman, socialite, fashionista and day-time television actress to boot was the sole heir to the Hutchinson’s millions and my golden ticket to an early and cushy retirement. According to my calculations, it should have gone without a hitch; Like it had, countless times before.
If asked to compute the probability of success, I would have put it at 98.2%. The probability of failure was so infinitesimally small that I would have scoffed if anyone had suggested it. The chances of it being traced back to me even if there was a hitch in the works was even more staggeringly miniscule that it did not bear consideration. It would have taken more than human agency to untangle the complex web of subterfuge and deceit I had carefully woven around Ciara. Looking back, I am certain now that there was more than human agency at play; it appears to me that the very universe was conspiring against my plans.
For a blissful four months after Ciara’s untimely demise, as I masterfully played the role of heart-broken husband in the public eye, bidding my time until Ciara’s will was probated, it seemed like I had gotten away with the coup of my life. Early in our marriage, I had proposed that Ciara and I draw up our respective wills and take out life insurance policies in each other’s names. Even though it is the oldest trick in the book and Ciara was a canny businesswoman in her own right, I had exercised my charms so thoroughly that blinded by her love for me, she had bequeathed the entirety of her breath-taking fortune to me.
As I revelled in the lap of luxury and the divine comforts that only money could buy, I felt surfeited. Ciara’s earthly goods were so bountiful that even if I were to pursue an extravagant lifestyle for the rest of my days, there would be plenty left over.
I conjured up beatific thoughts about sailing away to exotic, far-away locations on Ciara’s luxury yacht, ‘The Lady’ to sustain me as I waited for a decent amount time to elapse before I could actually do so. It would be unseemly for the grieving husband to go gallivanting around the world so soon after the death of his beloved and very famous wife and I was not fool enough to give in to my impulses. It would not do to rouse suspicions until Ciara’s considerable wealth was firmly and irrevocably in my grasp.
One day, a detective came to Ciara’s (soon to be mine) sprawling mansion unannounced. He mentioned later that he was just playing a hunch. There was nothing to suggest that Ciara’s death was anything but an accident. Not a shred of evidence but apparently something did not sit right with the detective. He had come over to ask some routine questions and convince himself that he could close the case in good conscience.
It was unfortunate for me therefore that I was lounging in pyjamas, swilling wine and generally enjoying the company of a few of my more attractive female friends when he happened to drop in. This was so at odds with the image of the dutiful husband that I had been at pains to cultivate in interviews with the police and media that it roused his suspicions.
He had had nothing concrete to go on, except his intuition of course. I was too clever for that, but he was a tenacious old bulldog and he refused to relinquish his pet theory that I was instrumental in Ciara’s death. He started investigating things that were best left alone, asking intrusive questions and making a regular pest of himself. He was making life distinctly unpleasant for me. I could have borne this with fortitude but what really alarmed me were that his investigations, haphazard though they were, were raising a definite stink and seeding ideas in people’s heads. The court of public opinion which had been so staunchly in my favour began vacillating. Nasty rumours were circulating and gathering momentum.
I submit this as explanation of my clumsy and misguided attempt to peremptorily get rid of this thorn in my side. For the first time in my career, I could not afford the luxury of crafting a perfect plan and biding my time for the opportune moment. Something very much like panic began gnawing at my insides. It was an alien feeling – one that was singularly repellent to me. The threat of discovery when I was on the very brink of actualizing my roseate dreams made me uncharacteristically reckless. Perhaps if I had left things well alone…
My murder plan for the detective was hastily made. It had nothing of my signature flair and panache. It was impulsive and amateurish by my usual standards. It had none of the usual safeguards and guardrails. Yes, it did cause the detective horrific injuries and to be rendered a permanent cripple, which is gratifying; the problem was that he survived and lived to tell the tale.
As a self-declared connoisseur of the killing arts, I truly blush with shame even now at my failed attempt to eliminate that pesky detective. It marked the change in the tide of my fortune. Not only did I fail to silence him permanently, but I had also inadvertently provided him with much needed ammunition to level a murder charge at me.
I pleaded insanity on the advice of counsel. I am clearly not built to endure prison life. My attorney was able to arrange for a favourable psychiatric evaluation. The prosecution was sceptical and required that I sit through a rigorous psychiatric evaluation by several experts in the field of their own selection. I was able to out-manoeuvre the system with ease. Once you know the markers and indicators they are looking for, it is childishly easy to provide the ‘correct’ responses to elicit the preferred outcome.
Which brings me to Greenacre Asylum for the Criminally Insane. From the outset, I had no intention of being there for an indefinite period of time. It was a necessary part of the long game that I was playing. I estimated that two years would be sufficient time for me to lay low and wait for the current public furore to blow over. I would then request another psychiatric evaluation, present the appropriate answers and declare myself rehabilitated and ready to be a functioning member of society once again, to Greenacre’s credit.
Greenacre was one of the city’s first asylums and apart from being dilapidated, dank and in a state of grave disrepair, had spawned many tales of woe and terror over the decades of its miserable existence. There were numerous unverified reports of inhabitants being subjected to abuse, neglect and human experimentation.
Decidedly, I would not have chosen Greenacre if I had a say in the matter. As I did not, I found myself straight jacketed and shackled in a tiny box of a padded room of such appalling squalor and dereliction that my gorge rose at the sight of it. The rumours about Greenacre were dead right in this aspect at least.
There was little to no ventilation in the room and the walls were discoloured with age and an all-pervasive damp. The padding on the walls was leaking in several spots where the fabric had been scratched repeatedly and deeply with great force. The rudimentary dirt floor was filthy and was swarming with insects of various species. The thin mattress stripped of its sheets revealed a suspicious reddish-brown stain throughout its mid-section. However, it was the unwholesome stench that permeated every corner of the unventilated human cage that most shook my resolve. I decided that my initial two-year plan was far too ambitious and spending two months in this dungeon was the most I could tolerate.
The ceiling however was in pristine condition and looked like it had been recently whitewashed. I had noticed it particularly as it was in such sharp contradistinction to the rest of the room. As I spent long hours lying on my bed, staring at my ceiling, I would fantasize that the rest of the room looked as spotless, clean and sterile. It was the single thing of beauty in that ravaged wasteland.
It was on the eighth night that I first encountered ‘him’. I had awakened from a nightmare. The room was poorly lit even at the best of times. In the gathering darkness of night, I could barely see anything distinctly beyond a few feet. I could not rid myself of the conviction that I had seen the silhouette of a man separate itself from the shadows on the far corner of the ceiling.
A staunch adherent of logic and rationality, I forced myself to calmly confront the impossibility of such a thing happening. It was a trick of light, an optical illusion or no doubt, my own mind was playing tricks on me. It was the heat, the damp, the vile conditions of the place that may be creating vapours that made it look like the shadows had shifted. I chided myself for allowing my senses to be however briefly, confused. There were so many rational explanations, I told myself when one only stopped to think about it. Yet, I could not rid myself of a nebulous uneasiness and fell asleep that night, my muscles tense and my eyes straining to catch any further movement.
The next morning, I saw a single black footprint against the pristine whiteness of the ceiling. It was a large foot, and the phalanges were clearly marked as if there had been more pressure placed on the front of the foot – as if ‘he’ had been standing on tiptoes. I fought back a rising hysteria. There had to be a rational explanation.
Perhaps, the mark had always been there and I had overlooked it. This was a feeble explanation and I dismissed it quickly as I have superior observation skills and have trained myself to be attuned to even minor changes in my environment.
The more likely explanation was that one of the attendants or nurses was trying to ‘mess’ with me, as the vernacular goes. Maybe they were all in it together. My case had been a high profile one and had garnered a great deal of media attention. No doubt, that was why I was being singled out. Perhaps this was their idea of a joke.
My mind turned to a more sinister explanation. Was this a perverse game of some sort that they had concocted to make me think I was losing my mind? Perhaps the plan was to gang up against me and deny noticing anything amiss until by degrees, I began to lose my mental faculties in truth and was actually frothing at the mouth. I had the distinct impression during my brief interactions with them that the staff were sceptical that I was mentally afflicted at all. I overheard a couple of them making snide comments to each other to the effect that this was all an elaborate ruse of my design to escape the death penalty.
The more I pondered over it, the more plausible an explanation this seemed. Could they have drugged my food to ensure I was asleep while they were up to their infernal tricks. The keys made such a din when the metal door was being opened that I found it difficult to believe I could have slept through it otherwise.
I decided I would test out my theory. I had previously attempted on more than one occasion to reach out to Dave, the attendant, who was assigned to me. He had been uniformly dismissive and brusque; several times, downright hostile and abrasive. I was forced to admit that it was challenging to exercise the full extent of one’s magnetism and charm when one is trussed up like a thanksgiving turkey.
Dave came in twice a day to bring me food. I decided that I would remain resolutely silent about the footprint on the ceiling and observe his reaction. If he was not party to the devious ploy, he would notice the mark, find it inexplicable and make some comment about it. Otherwise, he was bound to be frustrated by my refusal to play into their hand and give himself away in some way. This seemed a brilliant idea and I awaited Dave’s arrival with eagerness.
Dave’s reaction when he did come, stumped me. He neither alluded to the mark nor seemed unduly bothered by my unwonted silence. If anything, he was as eager as ever to be done with his duties and leave my presence and the room as quickly as he could. However, I was not ready to give up on my theory. I skipped my meagre rations and waited grimly for nightfall.
It was a moonless night and the cell seemed more shrouded in darkness and shadows than usual. It was pitch black on the corner of the room where my bed lay. I could hardly see my hands before my eyes as I waved them back and forth. Only the far corner of the room caught some stray rays of light from the fluorescent bulb outside the cell and offered some scant respite from the inky blackness. I had secreted a fork from the meal tray that evening which I told myself I was not afraid to use if the occasion called for it. I fixed my eyes on the accursed spot on the ceiling and settled down to wait for developments.
I lay unmoving and in rapt attention for hours. Hunger gnawed at me, and I was feeling awfully uncomfortable in my cramped position. Sleep which had been tugging at my eyelids relentlessly finally overcame me. Just before falling under the ether, I saw a blur of movement in my peripheral vision. A shadow had detached itself from the darkness and was moving towards me. Feeling a wave of vague disquiet, I tried to yank my eyes open.
The next morning, there were three additional, perfectly formed, identical footprints on the ceiling. The contrast between the blackness of the prints against the snowy white ceiling was so stark that there was no missing them. The eye was irresistibly drawn to them to the exclusion of all else. The footsteps were lined up one after the other reminiscent of one taking a leisurely stroll and they were en route to my side of the room.
I had the first nervous breakdown of my life that day. It took the form of a hysterical fit. The last thing I remember was being strapped down to the bed by an orderly and Dave’s disapproving sneer as he injected me with a syringe full of some fluid. It must have been something potent as by the time I woke up, night had fallen again, and my room was immersed in darkness. I would have agreed to go anywhere else on the face of the earth as long as it was out of this god-forsaken place. I wanted to run shrieking to the door and thump on it with both fists until someone let me out of this devilish hellhole, but I felt my arms strapped tightly against my chest and a muzzle stretched taut across on my face.
My eyes were slowly getting attuned to the darkness, and I could make out the darker impression of the four footprints against the white of the ceiling. ‘One, two, three, four,’ I counted mechanically, ‘five, six’. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. There were two more footsteps and they had stopped exactly midway across the room. I squinted. Was there a seventh footprint?
There was a huge patch of blackness that had seemingly materialized out of nothing. It was much too big to be a footprint and it seemed to expand before my eyes, not just in size but in dimension. This was no flat two-dimensional footprint. This was a three-dimensional form that seemed to pulsate, throb, fester and grow with an unnatural force and energy. It was like a human-sized butterfly that was thrashing about wildly trying to hurl itself out of a tightly enmeshed cocoon.
Raw, unadulterated fear which I have never felt before coursed through my veins. Straining against the muzzle, I screamed inwardly with an intensity that I was sure must have ruptured several blood vessels in my brain. I was sure too that my heart had stopped for I felt an icy hand close around it. I dashed myself about with abandon, struggling to free my bonds but the straps only dug more cruelly into my flesh.
All the time, the shapeless mass on the ceiling was growing and lengthening and vibrating with an unholy, diabolical energy, from the size of a cat to a dog to a small child until it was the size of a large man who was doubled up and crouching. One end of it seemed stuck to the ceiling so that as it expanded both horizontally and vertically, it started encroaching into the space between the floor and the ceiling.
There was a blessed hiatus of two minutes. It had stopped moving altogether and just hung silently like a giant spider’s egg-sac suspended up-side down from the ceiling.
It was then that the worst happened. The illusion of the crouching man ceased to be and before my horrified eyes, I saw the form rise from its doubled-up position and stretch itself to its full height, which was formidable. At an estimate, I would say it was around 1.9 to 2 meters in height. As it was hanging up-side down, its feet were planted firmly on the ceiling and its head was level with mine on my bed. It was humanoid in form and figure, possessing a head, a torso and decidedly long spindly legs but there was nothing remotely human about its expression.
It swivelled about until its single huge, cyclopean eye was looking straight into mine. Its upside-down smile widened, disclosing a double row of razor-sharp teeth. I saw the flabby lips move rhythmically and could indistinctly hear a raspy voice like nails on a chalkboard. It sounded like a chant. It took me some time to make sense of the words, “six more steps and you are mine, six more steps and you are mine, six more steps and you are mine...” over and over again.
I must have lost consciousness. It appears that the human brain has an automatic shutdown button when it encounters extreme trauma, for which I am eternally grateful. When I came to, sunlight was pouring in through the single window. It showed off the six footprints to maximum visibility.
When Dave came in that day, I asked him for two things - pen and paper and for him to put in an urgent phone call to my lawyer. I remember now that he did not seem too surprised. In fact, he was pathetically eager to please.
I wrote down a full confession including a detailed section on how I had manipulated the psychiatric evaluation. Much to my attorney’s disgust and chagrin and against his voluble expert legal advice, I insisted on sharing my written confession both with the police and on live television. That got me carted out of Greenacre faster than anything else I could have said or done.
There was a national outcry. Once again, I was under intense public scrutiny. People reviled me and politicians and preachers denounced me alike from their pulpits. I was public enemy number one, and I was lynched in the court of public opinion even before my actual trial.
My trial was over in a record number of days with the prosecution seeking the maximum permissible penalty for my ‘heinous crimes’, as they called it. I was incarcerated in a maximum-security prison awaiting the death penalty, without possibility of parole.
Over and over again, I was asked the reason as to why I had capitulated and confessed to my crimes when I was sitting ‘pretty’ by all accounts - by the court, the prosecution, the police, my own attorney, the media and the public at large.
It was inexplicable to one and all. There was something here that did not add up; a loose end; a story behind the story and I could tell that it bothered them all. What could have induced an inveterate, cold-blooded murderer like me to turn myself in when there was no earthly reason to do so. The theory of my developing a conscience and repenting of my ways which my attorney was duty-bound to peddle in mitigation during my trial was openly scoffed at.
I am writing this account on the eve of my execution, six long years after the above specified events. Hand over heart, I have not once regretted my decision. I do not believe in bringing my secrets to my grave nor am I able to bear the burden of this monstrous secret alone any longer. I am breaking my long self-imposed silence. I would like this communication of mine to be freely and widely published and circulated in all national and international media, newspapers, publications, and all other avenues and channels to reach as many people as possible.
May my tale of terror and woe befuddle, terrify and haunt all those who read it and force them to recognize that there are unholy forces in our midst that are far beyond the ken of our limited human understanding, knowledge or cognizance.
PS: Dave wrote to me only once in all the time I was in prison. He told me that the ceiling has been freshly whitewashed.