"How did you know?" I asked, not sure I wanted the answer. I thought I had been careful. I thought she had been oblivious this whole time. I suppose after a while, you get confident. That confidence turns into assurance. That assurance turns into laziness. That laziness turns into ineptness. I had been doing this for such a long time. I thought by now I could get away without going over every detail. That I had gotten to the point to where I was so good at what I was doing, that there was no way I could make a mistake. I suppose deep down inside I knew a time would come when my luck would run out. Regardless, I lived as if it wouldn't.
"Insult." She answered. "You've always had trouble spelling that word."
She didn't have to give any further explanation. Papers I had written in high school and papers I had written in college often had ink as red as the blood of my victims marked around the word. For some reason I could never get it through my head that the u came before the l. If I went back and reread what I had written, I'd catch it. I'd see inslut and I'd correct it. 10 years, 8 murders and of all things to do me in, a simple spelling mistake.
I held the phone in my hand looking at her through the glass partition. I tried to imagine what was going through her head. In love for nearly two decades and now she looked at me, her husband of 15 years and the father of her three children as if I were a stranger. Someone she wondered if she even knew at all. I pictured her reading the newspaper and coming across the letter I had written the editor. Seeing that damn spelling error and beginning to contemplate that maybe I had something to do with this. I'm sure she wanted to dismiss the fact that the Toledo Torch and her husband both misspelled insult as a simple coincidence. But then I imagined she read about how the last victim has been poisoned with rodenticide and how I had recently bought some even though we didn't have a rat problem. I imagine she began to wonder what I had bought it for.
I imagine that's why she had notified the police. Why she took the kids on a road trip to her mother's, only notifying me after they had been on the road for three hours. I didn't think much of it until Detective Vince Johnson and Officer Carl Sutton showed up at my door. Looking back on that day, I wonder if I should have lied. I can't be the only person in Toledo, Ohio to misspell insult and there probably isn't a garage in the city that doesn't have a bag of rodenticide. Yet I told the truth because I already knew the one thing they had that would convict me. The only thing they had. My blood.
My first victims were an accident. Or at least the first one was or so I'd like to think. I didn't go in with the intention of killing either one of those boys. Was it fate? Was what I did that night and what I'd do sixteen times again my destiny? Was it a matter of circumstance? I think about that night every day. What if I hadn't have been there? What if I had never seen those kids torturing that cat? Would I have became the Toledo Torch? The psychologists all say I would have. The television reports all agree. According to them the Toledo Torch as they came to call me, I, John Ray Dennis was born to kill.
They were teenagers. Both football players on the local high school team. Kenny Roberson a fifteen year old sophomore and Bryant Coolidge a seventeen year old senior. Rich kids, with nothing better to do than to bury a cat up to its head in the dirt, while one held the camera and the other started the lawnmower. I saw it from a distance. I still had on my gloves from work. I hadn't taken them off yet. It would later make it seem like a premeditated murder, but having the gloves on that day was nothing more than luck. I ran out of my car yelling at the boys to stop. When I arrived at the scene, I expected the boys to be afraid. For Kenny to stop filming, Bryant to turn the lawnmower off and for the two of them to begin apologizing profusely. Instead I was met with the one yelling at me to get off his property and the other yelling at me to mind my own business. I began to dig the cat out of the dirt when Bryant shoved me, knocking me over sideways onto the ground. I had dug out enough for the cat to escape as Kenny yelled out in frustration of its getting away and Bryant began to reprimand me.
"Your lucky my father isn't home!" The tone of his voice set something off inside of me that I had forgotten existed. This little entitled bastard had the nerve to try and treat me as if I were doing something wrong. I kept telling myself that the cat was now safe and that's all that mattered. It was time to go. There was nothing I could teach either one of these young punks. If they had it in them to torture a poor, defenseless cat the way they had planned, nothing I said or did would knock any sense into them. I should've walked away, but I didn't. It was the word "father" that filled me with rage. I thought of my own father as I tried to picture Bryant's. I pictured him, the way my father had been, an insensitive, cruel, cold and callous man. The type who would condone such behavior. Celebrate the torturing of a cat and think anyone who opposed a pussy. Had Bryant Coolidge not mentioned his father, I do believe he and Kenny Roberson would still be alive today. But he did mention him and I walked right up to that boy grabbed the handle of the lawnmower and yanked it out of his hand. I then thrust it towards him, narrowly missing his foot.
"What in the Hell are you doing you crazy..." Before he could finish I threw the lawn mower against the fence as it busted apart.
"I hope you know I got this all on film." It was the last words Kenny Roberson ever spoke. I rushed him knocking him to the ground and as I grabbed his head and began to beat it against the cement. Bryant had come over trying to pull me off, but I was in such a rage I didn't even notice. He had hit me in the face twice, bloodying my nose. My blood on the middle phalanx and knuckle of both his index and middle fingers of his right hand. I'd like to think that maybe my intention had only been to teach Kenny Roberson a lesson. To put some fear inside of him, but I know better than that. I knew he wasn't knocked out. I knew he wasn't simply unconscious. I knew he was dead, long before I ever stopped beating his head against the pavement.
Bryant stood in shock as I should have been too, looking at his dead friend. The only thing that shocked me was my own behavior. It was as if I had suddenly become possessed. Bryant began to scream for help, but advantage was mine. This home was out in the country. Outside of city limits. Two miles west of the factory I worked at and three miles south of the city. No one could hear him. He hesitated for a moment, I suppose contemplating on whether he should stand and fight, or make a run for the house to the phone. Had he gone right away, he might have made it, but the hesitation gave me just the right amount of time to reach out and grab him by the foot as he turned to run. To describe what happened next would only be speculation on my part. I blacked out and when I came too, the body of Bryant Coolidge as did the body of Kenny Roberson lay lifeless on the ground.
My thoughts and my feelings as I stood there, the blood of these boys on my shirt and on my hands, contradicted one another. I wanted to feel panic. I felt that I should feel immediate remorse. If anything distress. Instead I felt calm, uncomfortably calm. I didn't even breathe hard. I dragged both boy's bodies to the fire-pit in the yard, grabbed the can of lighter fluid and put it all over them. I noticed a bulge in Kenny's pocket as I reached in and pulled out a lighter. It scared me how as to how helpful the atmosphere and environment were. I hadn't been prepared for any of this, but everything I needed, it was all right there. It's as if something knew I was coming and what I would do. I lit them on fire and walked out of that yard and back into my car as if I had woke up on a Sunday morning and walked outside to casually grab the paper.
On the way home I thought more about my father and of how he had always referred to me as a gutless sissy. He wanted me to be a man's man, but after a few attempts of converting me into his macho indoctrination, he gave up. He took me out hunting when I was eleven years old. I pointed the gun at a doe that day but I couldn't get myself to pull the trigger. That deer hadn't done anything to me. I saw no need to do anything to it. My father hit me in the eye, a wound that later required two stitches, with the butt of the rifle. He told me I belonged in the kitchen with my mother and then he shot the deer right in the chest as it fell to the ground. He made me watch as he ran a knife across her throat and told me that he was ashamed of me and would only give me a ride back home because he knew if he didn't, he'd have to listen to my mother bitch about it.
I had many nightmares about that day. At first they were pretty much as the events had played out. I pointed the gun at the deer and I was never able to pull the trigger. They would always end with me waking up in a pool of my own sweat at the thought of that deer being shot or my father slitting her throat. Then the dreams changed. The deer was no longer in front of the gun when I put my finger on the trigger. It was now my father and this time I pulled without hesitation. I'd even wake up with my index finger bending back and forth in convulsion.
It was a nightmare I hated having. There were times when I'd wake up in the morning and slowly walk into my parent's room afraid of what I might see. Those nightmares were too real and I had to see my father, snoring in his bed before I could convince myself that it was a dream and I hadn't really killed him. What frightened me most was how satisfying it was in my dreams to have shot him. How good it made me feel. Even more frightening was the disappointment I tried so hard to suppress, at the realization that he was fine and unharmed. I did everything I could to block those thoughts out of my head. I was terrified because I think I even knew then that they were the first signs to indicate what I was capable of. What it is that one day I would end up doing. I had silenced them to the point to where I thought I had defeated them. But now they were back, and this time there was no getting rid of them.
We talked about the murders once they had become well known around Toledo. I made sure to be a part of the conversation.
"I can't imagine someone doing that to one of my kids." I said. "I'd kill him."
My friend Wayne said to me, "I hope they catch that piece of shit." I responded that I agree.
When the news-reporter said that after examining the charcoaled bodies that blood not matching Bryant or Kenny had been found, I accepted my fate that it was only a matter of time before it eventually caught up with me. I knew that if I were ever a suspect, they'd take a blood sample, the DNA would match and that'd be all they need. It was the one vital mistake, the one I couldn't undo, that I could not deny. It was the only one I ever made but it was also the only one I ever needed to make.
"Did you ever think about killing me?"
I came to after day dreaming, examining the question my wife had just asked me. It caught me off guard. I thought of the many times I had lied to her about where I had been and what I had been doing. All those lies and each time she had believed me. Now I was about to tell her the truth. The most honest thing I had said to her in years and I knew as she looked back at me that she doubted what I said.
"No." It was all I could manage to get out.
The idea of ever harming my wife, my kids, anyone I cared about had never crossed my mind. My lawyer informed me that my neighbor Jeff Fowlkes had recently been interviewed. He said that he had known me for fifteen years and he had never once felt threatened by me. He wondered now if it had all been an act. As if he had only been one time away from saying the wrong thing or doing something wrong. As if it was all in good fortune that he hadn't pissed me off and ended up a number himself.
"I thought about coming to you and asking you first." Her voice weakened as she spoke. "I really did."
I looked up at her at that moment. I hadn't been able to look her in the face until then. I could see the truth in her eyes, as well as the pain. There was a sense of guilt. A sense of sorrow. She took the responsibility for why I was in here. For why I sit in a jail cell awaiting trial, which will undoubtedly lead to a guilty verdict, and a sentencing of being put to death.
It was then and only then where I felt regret. Not for myself. Not for my victims, but for my wife. I had been asked if I had been sorry for any of the lives I had taken. I wasn't. Each person earned what I did to them. Molesters, abusers, animal mistreaters, con artists who had screwed people out of thousands of dollars. I am no more sorry for what I did to them, than will be the people who eagerly await the day the state of Ohio pumps 500 mg of hydromorphone into my blood. I'm sure the fathers, the mothers, the sisters, the brothers, the sons, the daughters, and the friends of those I killed won't be sorry. If anything they'll be as I was when I took the lives of those they loved. Satisfied.
I don't feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for her though. I do regret what my wife and my kids will go through. My 12 year old and what he'll endure at school from those who are old enough to know what I did, but too immature to understand that he is not me and he had nothing to do with it. My eight year old. Too young to even begin to comprehend any of this. My three year old, who will one day ask his mother who will have to explain to him what Daddy was and why he was executed. Do I hate myself for what I did? Yes, I do. Or at least a part of me does anyway. Only for them though. My wife doesn't deserve the ridicule and shame that she'll face. She doesn't deserve the turmoil she'll face. She's no longer Angela Dennis. She never will be again. My kids aren't Christopher, Cassidy and Casey anymore. They're now the wife, the sons and the daughter of John Ray Dennis, The Toledo Torch. And for that I am sorry.
"You did the right thing." I knew I had to say something to her. It wasn't fair to sit in silence after she had said something to me that I knew took a lot of courage. I knew I couldn't comfort her. I couldn't say anything to make her feel better, but I also knew I had to try. It was the least I could do.
"Did I?" She responded.
She had the same thoughts I had, but for different reasons. I won't deny my selfishness, but her's was more out of fear. For reasons I've already mentioned and for those I haven't. She would have to leave Toledo. Change her name. The kid's names. I was the one with the job. The money. How could she support three kids without me?
"You did the right thing." I repeated it again. I wanted her so badly to believe it.
I had tried thinking about what would happen to her and my children a few times throughout the years but I blocked it out of my head before I ever got to far. After a while it never even crossed my mind at all. I wouldn't allow it too. I had convinced myself of what I needed to do and I wouldn't let anything deter my mission.
The officer came in a few moments later and informed us that visiting hours were over. She left that day having came in looking for answers, only to leave with more questions. I haven't seen her since. I might not ever again. I know I'll never see my kids again. She won't allow it and I don't think if I were asked, that I would allow it either.
I sit here now. The newspaper my lawyer had gotten me that I now hold in my hand. The very one where the journalist had the audacity to call those eight innocent. Innocent? It still boils my blood. No, they weren't innocent. None of them were innocent. They were all guilty and they all paid a price. Kenny Roberson and Bryant Coolidge paid a price for tutoring a cat. Clancy Green paid a price for molesting his daughter. Heather Lane paid a price for purposefully infesting others with HIV. Tony Timm paid a price for conning dozens of people out of tens of thousands of dollars. Lacy Pederson and Aaron Jeffries paid a price for running an illegal dog fighting ring and shooting those that didn't perform well in the head. Paul Hines paid a price for hospitalizing his children. I know I was wrong to write the paper a letter. I know I was wrong to write it and send it in without proof reading it first. I had taken the time to find an old type writer at a garage sale. I had taken the time to drive all the way to Pittsburgh to mail it. Yet I couldn't take the time to proof read the damn thing. To see as plain as day, "To call these people innocent is an insult. An insult to me and an inslut to anyone they ever hurt." I see it now and I keep seeing it as I read it over and over and over again.
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