I was 7 years old when Richard Speck made me aware the world could turn intimate spaces--rooms, beds, the ordinary geometry of safety--into killing floors. I was 7 when Charles Whitman showed me that a killer could touch you from a place you couldn't see or reach.

I saw the newspapers. Speck, a human stain with a Dickensian name. Whitman, the blond crew-cut Boy Scout. I had uncles who looked like Richard. I was surrounded by men who looked like Charles.

You couldn't tell by looking. Whatever was wrong with them was on the inside.

When I was 9 and Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, we were afraid of riots--there were riots in those days--but they never came close to our street. Two months later I woke before anyone else in the house and, for reasons I have never understood, turned on the big color television in the living room we hardly ever used. Robert F. Kennedy had been shot. I remembered his brother. I wondered if there was something inevitable about it.

I was 10 when Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, about 60 miles from where we lived in Rialto.

"They could get here in an hour," one of my basketball teammates said.

I was 11 when they arrested and charged Charles Manson and members of his "family" with the Tate-LaBianca murders. My father recognized some of the girls; he used to see them hitchhiking when he drove into the city to visit Litton Industries.

My father was in the Air Force. He worked on missile guidance systems. He visited Litton Industries for reasons that were obscure to me. He was given one of the first microwave ovens. It weighed 50 pounds and could hold a bowl of soup or two cupcakes.

My mother was afraid of it. It took up too much room on her countertop. She made him give it back. I was not afraid of the microwave. I was afraid of hitchhikers.

We moved from California to Louisiana in 1972. I had lived in the South before, but they told me Louisiana was different. I expected bayous. We got loblolly pine. Shreveport was more oil and catfish than filé gumbo. There were Saturday night shootings and sad domestic events. After I graduated from high school, a man shot a suspected rapist to death on live television, and a docile-looking doctor at the medical school killed his wife with a sledgehammer.

I spent a lot of my 20s drinking cop-shop coffee and talking to detectives. I interviewed murderers who were convicted and murderers who got away with their crimes. I tracked Henry Lee Lucas across the country. I had a hit man laugh at me over the phone.

By then I thought I understood it as well as anyone could.

Last year I read Caroline Fraser's "Murderland." I am not persuaded by all of it. Sometimes I think she is onto something. Sometimes I think she is drawing lines no one can prove are there. But the book says the map is not only yours. It says proximity matters. Not only the distance between people, but the closeness of events. Things that happen near each other in space and time may belong together. What looked separate may not be.

In the book she describes what she calls the "crazy wall"--photographs linked by string, notes scrawled beneath them. It is meant to show how things connect. From a distance it makes sense. Up close it does not. Each line depends on a choice.

I had a wall like that. In my head. Names tied together because they felt the same. I did not know what

the connections were. I knew they were there.

Fraser rebuilds that wall with care. She uses place. Roads. Neighborhoods. The way people move. She shows clusters. She shows overlap. She makes a case that these things happen where they happen for reasons that are not always visible.

She speaks of the land. Of industry. Of what was in the air and the soil. Lead. Arsenic. She says they may change people in ways that matter. They may shift the balance.

There is some evidence. Studies, populations. Children exposed to certain things grow and act differently. It is a tendency. It does not tell you who will do what. It tells you the ground is not neutral.

I think of the names again. Speck. Whitman. MacDonald. Manson. Lucas. I place them on the map. I see the distance. I see the nearness. I wonder if what I felt as a child was a kind of recognition. Not of cause. Of pattern.

And then I add new names.

Northwest Arkansas. A place with trails and neighborhoods and stores I have walked through. In 2025, a couple was killed on a trail at Devil's Den State Park. It does not fit the old categories. It is not hidden, not distant. It is ordinary space turned.

There are other cases. A former police chief--already convicted of murder--walks out of a prison in the Ozarks and disappears into the woods for nearly two weeks. Domestic cases that end in silence. Public violence that erupts in places meant for something else.

These are not the same kinds of crimes. But they belong to the same map. That is the part that settles in. The adjacency.

The wall is still there. Only now the photographs are closer to home.

When the crimes are distant, the wall is an abstraction. When they are local, the lines feel heavier. You draw fewer of them. You look longer at each one.

Fraser's book would tell you this is how you should proceed. Acknowledge the cluster. Resist the urge to explain it too quickly. The pattern may be real. The explanation may not be.

I stand back from the wall. Some lines hold. Some do not. The Devil's Den murders do not explain Speck. The lines do not resolve into a single figure.

But they do not disappear either.

Is there something in the water? Fraser does not say yes. The proof is not there. She says there may have been something in the environment. She says that matters. She does not say how much.

The feeling returns. Not panic. Not fear. Recognition.

I understand now what I did not then. The ledger was never about solving anything. The wall is never going to resolve cleanly.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

Philip Martin has been a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1993. In that time, he has won more than 100 regional and statewide journalism prizes, including five Green Eyeshade awards, published six books and released eight albums of original music. He appears weekly on “The Zone” with Justin Acri and D.J. Williams on 103.7 FM in Little Rock.

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