It Wasn’t Until I Learned He Was a Serial Killer That I Finally Remembered

“That’s probably why you’re still alive”

Photo by Evelyn Chong

The black cab whizzes down the gothic streets of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2016. Ewan’s fingers roll over words and symbols as if they hold actual form, thumb, and forefinger pressing together occasionally for emphasis. I can’t hear what he actually says, the sounds lyrical, his voice reminding me of when I was fourteen, a child like my child now, though I didn’t know it at the time.

I was an adult-child back then. Men treated me like one, used my body like one, molded my mind into one. Forced me to become one.

Though I am visiting him in Edinburgh, where I was born and once lived, Ewan and I were friends when I was fourteen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and this is the topic of his words right now, in the cab on the way to the airport.

It’s decades later and we’re both actual adults, I’m living and teaching in Nigeria with a child of my own.

The topic is the most gruesome thing, though it should be light as a feather since Ewan and I were friends during the time he talks of. There was joy in that time in Santa Fe, when we were young and surrounded in this kind of hippie, kind of punk rock, kind of new-age community. My girlfriends and I were all between thirteen and sixteen, and all the men were older, actual men.

In retrospect, none of it made any sense. They were in their twenties, some in their thirties.

Ewan, at least, never crossed any lines that could be considered, I now know, statutory rape.

Most of those men crossed that line all the time.

“They were dark times,” I hear Ewan say, his mouth moving as blue-green eyes stare out the window at the blue-gray sky, almost as ashen as the buildings we pass.

Everything was once on fire, I realize, and that’s why the city is blackened and the sky charcoal and my chest as cold as the Scottish sea.

“What do you mean?” I ask, jaw so tight it almost burns the way the past burned everything down, all memory. “We had fun at all those parties and when you introduced me to the poetry of Sylvia Plath it was like —”

His waving hand is a scythe. “I’m not talking about that, or us, or our friends. I’m talking about some of the others. There were other men, friends of Steve?”

Black Death Steve, dubbed for his love of Black Death vodka, was everyone’s favorite leather-clad teddy bear, at whose house denizens of the city would gather to pre-party and after-party and sometimes simply to party. He lived right around the street from where I stayed with my mother, and I spent many days lounging on his couch. He was like a big brother. Unable to speak, I nod, though I don’t know what I could possibly be agreeing to.

“Chris,” he continues, shaking his head. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

It’s like he thinks I have any idea what he’s talking about. Somehow, I do know, though there are no details, no specifics. There’s just this lurking, horrible thing, this thing the color of worse-than-ash.

This dead color that’s been dead longer than I’ve been alive and has been clinging to me forever.

“All those women?” His eyes are outside again, on the narrow streets I’ve come to love.

“What women?” My voice is tiny and young and somehow old, too, and something’s stuck or broken.

His brow clenches. “You didn’t know?”

I shake my head.

“Dozens of women,” he says. “Like, there’s a whole slew of cold cases, unsolved murders that date way back. They were happening when we were hanging out.”

The saliva is acid as I swallow too hard. “What do they have to do with Chris?” Somehow, I know. I don’t want to know but I know.

“I can’t believe you didn’t hear. He was arrested, charged with raping all these women, he killed at least one.”

Stringy black hair, that black leather jacket with words scrawled on the back, loose, dirty jeans that hung off his hips, stories spouting from too-thick lips. I knew him. I knew Chris. “He was… a rapist?”

“A serial rapist, and that’s just the beginning. The real story? Most of us, those of us who knew him, who read about and followed the cases, we're pretty sure he was a serial killer too. There are detectives certain he is.”

A serial killer. I say nothing out loud but watch Ewan’s mouth continue to move as he recounts terrible details.

A rope, more rope, dozens of feet of rope.

Bound bodies.

A favorite restaurant and a waitress, the mountain Chris once drove me up, the place Chris took me, too, behind the Santa Fe Spa and in the dry, brittle hills with cacti and sagebrush and arroyos so shallow and dusty our footsteps would fade in the lightest of breeze.

He was a ski instructor, Ewan says, somehow in this haze of talk and not-talk and what I can’t hear and can’t stop hearing and I know this.

I know all of this.

Ewan leans forward suddenly. It’s like a shock, an electric shock because we are at the airport and he’s so kind to have joined me on the ride here and he leans forward and hugs me, holds me the way good friends hold each other, and he doesn’t know what I know now, just like I didn’t know what he spent the whole ride showing me.

The thing about trauma and memory is that it’s tricky.

We try and save ourselves from things that may destroy us if we spend too long staring at them. Though dissociative amnesia has been the subject of skepticism, more and more research points to what those of us who have experienced it know in our bones: it happens.

It happens in our brains, and it happens for a reason.

We’ve got to protect ourselves, but if we spend our whole lives shielding ourselves from our pasts, we lose fundamental parts of who we are. We are not whole and never will be, and so when we are ready, we are forced to look.

To compound matters further, we don’t recall anything as profoundly as those events rooted in trauma.

In other words, once we see things we’ve buried, things so shocking we had to compartmentalize, they shine with such vivid brightness, it’s virtually impossible to look away.

As utterly counterintuitive as this sounds, these recovered, lost memories are staggering in their complexity, they are intricate tapestries grotesque and gorgeous in detail, far more profound and difficult to look away from than any others.

My flight back to the United States from Scotland is delayed almost seventeen hours.

The Edinburgh airport is civilized, offering unlimited free Wi-Fi, and I spend hours talking with my fiancé, going over and over Ewan’s story and words, piecing together my past and how it fits with this new information, this information that is not new.

“I mean, I knew it was rape, I guess,” I say for the third or fifteenth time over Skype as I sit huddled in the corner near the gate. “I just didn’t know it was rape, rape, you know?”

“I don’t know,” Michael’s deep voice is patience and kindness and everything it always is. “What’s the difference between rape and rape, rape?”

“I mean, he’s serving two life sentences. For rape and murder and he’s maybe a serial killer.”

“So, what you’re saying is this dude basically abducted you, treated you the same way he treated the other women he raped and at least one he killed, for some reason didn’t kill you, and you’re still not sure if —”

“I didn’t say no.” My interruption is weaker than usual. This new information has made it harder to justify my internal shame, these arguments that somehow, it’s my fault, what he did to me.

“You realize what you’re saying.” They’re not a question, these words Michael brings.

I nod through the pixelated panel.

“It’s not ‘fight or flight.’ It’s ‘fight, flight, or freeze,’ and you froze. That’s probably why you’re still alive.”

He’s right, though I don’t say anything. The memory is too bright, too crisp, and it’s different now.

Instead of shame and self-loathing, there’s Chris pushing and pressing and forcing, there’s bruising, there’s tears, a lot of them, though I can’t remember if I tried to hide them or not. The memory pummels me, as clear as if it were in the present moment.

“Maybe you’re right,” I say, finally, those cold, cold fingers creeping back into my chest, down my ribcage, into my abdomen, to clutch deep in my belly.

He is right.

About a year later, I speak with the cold case detective about Chris.

I reply to an ad seeking more victims because the detective is certain McClendon is tied to more crimes, and likely many more murders.

“He was a creepy dude,” the detective tells me over the phone. “He had all these boxes?” he describes the scene as if asking a question. “They were in his parents’ house. He was living in his mother’s house if you can believe it, and he had these trophies. There were all these earrings. Dozens of them. But the thing is?”

His pause is for effect. It works. “Yeah?” I urge. My fingers are numb.

“They were single earrings. He was collecting them.”

Instinctively, I reach for my left ear. I don’t know why it’s the left one, and I can’t remember if I wore an earring that night Chris forced me, that night he drove me in circles until I was too dizzy to stand, another detail that soon comes out in the detective’s description of other rapes. I remember too many details, but not whether I was missing an earring. “Wow,” I say, not knowing what else to add. “I hope I helped.”

“If nothing else, you gave me some good leads. Thank you. I appreciate your bravery.”

Now I look for them all the time, these hidden memories.

I don’t try to hide them anymore and I won’t. They’re often locked in those dark pockets, but they won’t stay there. I won’t let them.

This experience has taught me two things.

First, it showed me myriad ways I not only have nothing to be ashamed of but that my actions were rooted in self-preservation. It showed me that I am not alone.

Second, the fact that I’m not alone means my voice is an integral part of showing others the same truth: that they, too, have nothing to be ashamed of. That they, too, perhaps made choices rooted in self-preservation. That they, too, are far stronger than they know.

That they, too, can remember.