Actually, there were two serial killers.
My most vivid memory from freshman year of high school is standing at the front of a drugstore reading the Chicago Sun-Times. It was the winter of 1978, and I was 14 years old. Day after day after day, pictures of boys shared the front page with a mug shot of a heavyset middle-aged man with a bad haircut. The boys looked like classmates I had crushes on. They were all dead.
My parents subscribed to the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, and both papers were spread out across our kitchen table every morning. I could have read them there, but I couldn’t risk seeming too interested in this “gay” serial killer who buried his victims in the crawl space under his suburban home. I couldn’t risk looking like I cared. I didn’t want my parents or siblings to think I was gay, too. So I left early for school every morning and read the papers at the drugstore.