I'll Be Watching You by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page A

profoundly hated his given name, Edwin Fales Snelgrove Jr. His distaste was so much that he had whittled it down years ago. “Call me ‘Ned’,” he’d tell new friends. Edwin sounded so Gilded Age. So dated and traditional. So, Ned it had been.
    Ned had pushed-back kinky hair of a brownish blond persuasion, cut conservatively. He wasn’t overweight by any means. He had a chiseled body (not through weight lifting, though, but genetics, one of those “you can eat whatever you want and never gain an ounce” bodies that some are lucky enough to be born with). Being a fan of wrestling, he could get you in a hold that, former college friends said, he could keep for hours. Beyond this penchant for pain, Ned had serious psychological issues. He hated women. Not that he hated being around them, or the sight of them, but something inside of him was wired so that he viewed the female—the good-looking ones with large breasts—as some sort of object that, in a certain position, provided, in his words, “ enormous sexual arousement.” Yes, they had to be in a particular situation. This was important to Ned. They had to submit. Appear helpless. Powerless. And there was only one way to get them there, Ned believed: strangulation.
    If that didn’t work…well…out came the knives.
    These thoughts and urges began during Ned’s childhood, as far back as the second and third grade. For unknown reasons , he wrote later, he had never thought it was a problem until years after it started. The pleasure, he explained to a friend in a letter, came from seeing a good-looking female become helpless. The woman could be “asleep,” but he had to be standing over her “in person.” Watching “a girl faint,” too, did something for him. And yet, seeing a girl “killed in a movie or TV show” seemed to offer the most satisfaction—that is, beyond the real thing.
    I cannot even come close to describing the feelings I get, he once wrote, talking about seeing a woman in a movie incapacitated. When he watched women in those situations, his heart rate increased to a point, he wrote, until I think [it] is in my mouth. Ned became “dizzy” and his “hands sweat.” He also got an erection like never before. Back in grade school, Ned explained, he had these same feelings about his teachers. Every time I see a girl I am attracted to , he wrote, and it didn’t matter if it was in person, on television, or in photographs, instead of “undressing” the woman with his “eyes,” Ned always imagine[d] strangling her or hitting her over the head and carrying her limp body onto a bed. Once she was unconscious, he would undress her and arrange her arms and legs in some kind of seductive pose. Maybe position her like a doll. If she came to, well, that was her problem: he’d have to resort to other means.
    II
     
    The man who liked to be called Ned, or even “Neddy,” whom Mary Ellen had met at the singles dance and allowed in to use the bathroom, was now on top of her, forcefully grabbing and clutching her breasts and holding her down with all his might. As Mary Ellen struggled with him, he put both of his hands “up onto her throat.” And then he squeezed as hard as he could.
    Mary Ellen started to say, “What are you doing?” but could not finish because her airway was closing. With that, he placed both of his thumbs together and dug them into the middle of her throat. He had obviously studied the human anatomy and knew exactly what he was doing.
    “I almost wanted to think he was kidding,” Mary Ellen said later, “but he wasn’t kidding…. He was staring straight at me and he just squeezed my throat.”
    She could barely move. He wasn’t much taller than Mary Ellen, but he was much more powerful. Looking at her, it wasn’t hard to see what Ned had found so attractive earlier that night when it seemed he was interested in getting to know her. She had shoulder-length, wavy-cut dark brown hair, emerald green eyes (quite alluring