Authors: Christopher C. Payne
The most meaningful event that happened on my five-day stay in Meredith, N.H., was my experience with Match.com. A co-worker had told me about the Web site, and I had decided to sign up. One evening I went through the procedure. If you have not done it, I would highly suggest it even for those of you who are married. It is self-reflective to put down on paper who you are, what your likes and dislikes are, what you enjoy doing/not doing, etc. You also analyze who you are interested in and then list the same qualities in a future partner that you want to find. It is a meaningful and interesting process for all of us desperate, lonely, losers in life.
My current motives were somewhat different. I was familiar with Craigslist (thanks to my brother-in-law) that offered the opportunity to pick your partner for an hour (if you were willing to pay). Match.com was not dissimilar. For both sites, the seller lists out their positive attributes, places pictures to entice you, and then you pick who you are interested in. One site just gives you a sure thing, while the other site (assuming you pay for dinner, etc.) costs about the same. The glaring difference is you most likely will go home unsatisfied that evening. It is really a choice between short and long term. Craigslist, being short term, guaranteed, immediate gratification and Match.com, being long term, not guaranteed somebody “special.” Both sites are really nothing more than a conduit, allowing us to prostitute ourselves for a chance at happiness.
My goal was simply to look for a likely candidate to meet, torture, and then murder in a slow deliberate way. This might sound sadistic to say out loud, but it is truthful, nonetheless. I debated about which site would be better, as I was familiar with both. Craigslist might seem like the site of choice; but after thinking about it carefully, I realized the women on this site were much more street savvy. Although they tend to be young, they are also connected to people you do not want to piss off. My site winner was Match.com. Having chosen my venue, I would now enlist the time to find a good candidate.
I could not stop dreaming and fantasizing about the possibilities. What I would do, how things would work—my constant state of anticipation had me frenzied. Why could you not carefully and consciously pick somebody out from a crowd, seduce them to be your friend, and then take them to a secluded spot and do what you would like to them? Avoiding the obvious answer to the question—it is against the law. Books are written all the time about the aspects of killing and how to elude the police. How hard could it possibly be? I wonder if they have anything at the library titled
Killing for Dummies: 101 Ways to Murder Somebody
.
My plan would be simple. I would disguise myself, making slight changes in my face and body, and then take pictures in this altered state. I would have to keep a completely separate wardrobe, which I would purchase only with cash. I would have my online clothes, which I personally could never wear; my online pictures could not be taken anywhere that I myself had recently been. In a nutshell, my online self would have to be completely and totally separate from my real identity. The two could never cross.
I would then have to set up a P.O. Box under a false name for billing information. I would use this name to set up a profile on Match.com, and then attempt to find the first person to share in my new experiences. All of this was truly the easy part. The difficulty was where I would take them once I had managed to ascertain a prize, and what to do with them when I was done. I owned a house up in Twain Harte (a quaint community near Yosemite), which seemed like an adequate spot. I would just need to determine how to modify the house, transportation, and disposal. I realize it all sounds emotionless and mechanical, but keep in mind that the logistics of killing somebody needs to be mechanical. You really need to think it through, as you would an equation. If you are careful, consider all the possible outcomes, and plan accordingly, you can really do whatever you want. Luck is also a good tool, as long as it is on your side.
Most people who see my house in Twain Harte reference its likeness to the Winchester House—with its many twists and turns and endless rooms. People have a tendency to get disoriented in the house. The house is more than 4,000 square feet, and has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, two kitchens, two living rooms, a TV room, a pool table room, and a dining room. It is brightly colored (we bought it that way) and has themes in different areas. The living room for example is the red, white, and blue with flags, decorations, blankets, knick knacks, everything red, white, and blue down to and including the furniture with the blue couch and the large, overstuffed red chairs. I am as patriotic as the next guy, but a blue couch and red chairs? What the hell were these people thinking? Still it was beneficial having everything in place. When purchasing a house in a vacation community, it is normal to have furniture included in the sale.
We did not redecorate the house once we purchased it (slightly more than a year ago) because we rented it quite often as a vacation home and did not want the disruption. The house was split into two sections. The main part of the house contained the bulk of the square footage. There was a small apartment with an entrance up the back steps that contained one bedroom, a functional living room, kitchen, and one bathroom.
The trick was going to be how to keep the main house rentable, keep the bulk of the apartment intact, and section off a room in between that could be completely hidden and soundproof.
I decided to drive up to Twain Harte the following weekend and see what I could do. The house was not rented for the month of April. I was not going to see my girls much, so I could actually work on the house unnoticed. It was now the end of March, so my plan could not be shelved for reflection at all. In retrospect, had I more time to contemplate, it might have swayed me from the path on which I was about to embark. I personally believe that most people are capable of doing things that are horrible. They end up not doing them because of the time frame in which they have to talk themselves out of it.
I was lucky enough in my childhood to have been forced to work in my dad’s rental property empire. He had purchased several houses in the communities surrounding DeSoto and had accumulated upward of 35 homes. Keep in mind, most of these were in the $50,000 range as a purchase price. Housing costs in that area are almost as depressed as you might imagine living there could be.
I was the designated flunky on many projects, including roofing a house, installing a sewer line, hanging drywall, painting, siding, etc. In-between the open-hand slaps to the face and the balled-up fists to the head, I had at least learned a trade that might be able to help me in my current endeavors.
Friday, April 4
th,
I went home, picked up my black lab and drove my Volvo XC90 SUV the twisty route to Twain Harte. Traffic was a little heavy so the trip actually took me closer to four hours versus the normal three, but it was relatively uneventful. As I pulled into the driveway, my next-door neighbor Ron was out walking his dog Buddy for his evening shit. He waved hello. Ron and Darlene would be my biggest obstacle in my planned activities. I still remember when I first purchased the house and Ron introduced himself. He stated that he had keys to all the houses on the block; he and Darlene watched most of them for the owners. My first task as a new homeowner was to make a spare key and give it to Ron and Darlene.
This actually turned out to be a lifesaver. One weekend in the middle of winter, I woke up early to let Delilah take her morning stroll. I ran outside in my usual bedclothes of running shorts and nothing else. Delilah paced back and forth looking for the perfect spot to make her mark. As I turned to go back inside and escape from the 20 degree frigid air, I realized I had locked the door behind me and could not reenter. After 10 minutes of attempting to break into any crack in the exterior, I ran across the lawn and beat on Darlene’s door. She reluctantly opened up after several minutes and, upon seeing me, reached over grabbed my spare house key, flung it in my direction, and closed the door. She most likely saved me from frostbite and breaking a window to reach the safety of warmth. I thanked them profusely later that morning and several times after.
I did smartly have the upper apartment and the house keyed separately. So although Ron and Darlene had access to the main portion of the house, they did not have the ability to enter the apartment upstairs. They could only come and go in the rentable portion. Still, I would have to plan carefully not only the changes that I had in mind, but also how to mask them so they were as unnoticeable as possible.
I pushed the button on the garage door opener, pulled into the garage, and let Delilah out of the back of the SUV. She hopped out of the car, full of pent-up energy from the four-hour drive. Immediately she lost her water intake from hours earlier and, then, went about reacquainting herself with her surroundings. The house was on two lots and had a semicircle drive that entered in one side of the parcel and then emptied out on the other. My neighbor Charlotte had just recently painted her house the same color (exactly, is that not freaky?) as mine. It was a bluish gray that had a wafting smoky effect. I actually shared the driveway with Charlotte. Our houses were originally built by sisters, and they were relatively close together.
I closed the garage door after corralling Delilah and unpacked the few items that I had brought (I kept a second set of most things at the house). I walked up the stairs. It was a little cold in the house. It was still chilly there at night, and we kept the heat off to save on the energy bill. I turned on the heat and lights, put the overnight bag down, and went immediately to the refrigerator for a beer. A nice cold Stella always hits the spot no matter what frame of mind you are in. I chugged down a nice big gulp, stretched, and went to survey the house with new motives.
I walked down from the apartment. It ends at a wall, and you can either turn left or right. Turning right leads to a short hall that opens up to the renter’s area with the pool table room on your left and the TV room on your right. Turning left takes you either down more stairs to the garage or up a few stairs to the kids’ room. It was the kids’ room that I felt held the most promise. I would need access from the garage and access to water that was close from the bathroom. The ability to section it off in a non-obtrusive way would prove to be more difficult.
As I sat there in a chair five sizes too small for my frame, drinking my ice-cold Stella I waited for an epiphany. It came quicker than I would have imagined. The room was about 18 feet x 45 feet – it was a very large room. When you walked up the stairs you came to a cupboard on your right with a shelf about waist high. The shelf held a dollhouse and other miscellaneous toys on top. As you walked ahead, there were three stairs leading into a pass-through bedroom that, then, led to the rest of the rental portion of the house. The room continued past the three stairs and contained two bunk beds (full on bottom and twin on top and a futon that was folded most of the time into a couch). At that end of the bedroom was a window seat, spanning the full width of the room. Everything was directly above the garage.
I could section off the portion that contained the dollhouse, wrap the stairs from the garage upward, have a door leading into my section of the house, and let the hallway move forward into the bedroom. This would require the slightest structural changes to the house, and could be explained away by changing a portion of the apartment, as well. I could simply add on some of the space to the apartment. Keeping most of the area for a hidden room would be easy. It is not like anyone ever measured the dimensions.
I now had a plan for my personal playground. Since the main house was not rented, I went down to the TV room, flipped it on, and started a fire. That room contained an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, which was used for heating, not aesthetics. It was made from solid iron and had a large handled door on the front that once shut increased the heat in the stove to unbelievable levels. The stove could heat the entire house when it was stoked to full capacity. This meant the TV room became unbearably hot as the heat sifted through to the rest of the house. My second epiphany was disposal. I was sure that this stove could faithfully rise to a level that would allow me to disintegrate bones. Why not put it to the test?
I ran back up the stairs, grabbed a couple of my dog’s thoroughly used and completely chewed beef bones, and threw them in the fire as it was reaching full capacity. My job now was to sit back and watch a DVD entitled
Hostel II
. It was about the ability to pay for the pleasure of killing people in a small village in Europe. How ironic.
As the movie ended—and three beers into my evening—I decided that the fire idea would work (the bones were about 30 percent gone). It would take a long time, and I would have to be very diligent in my burning efforts, but that was a small price to pay. This meant that I would not be able to have mass amounts of people flow through my new procedure. I would have to take my time on the experimentation and fun and, then, slowly dispose of the remains.
I spent the next four weekends, taking an extra Friday when possible, working on the project. It was slow going at first, but went relatively quickly after the structural portion of the renovation was underway. I put four layers of soundproof drywall and insulation into the walls, floor, and ceiling. This cut into my space of the room, but I felt it was necessary for the end result. I slightly expanded the upstairs apartment, and I must say the finished product was something of a modern-day masterpiece. I had successfully added a room approximately 10 feet x 10 feet that was completely hidden—off from the rest of the house.
On the outside of the newly built cube, I placed finishing strips along the seams of the wall that successfully hid the door from anyone who might be looking. The door was in the upstairs apartment in the back of a closet. I felt extremely confident that there would be no way that anyone would ever be able to find it. I had added a self-release lever that worked by pushing a button at the baseboard. This released the hook holding the door, allowing it to open in. It was perfect.