The Highwayman

Chapter 7: Blood Thirsty

Chapter 7: Blood Thirsty

It was a fluke that the FBI found Damian Truth and offered him a full-time job shortly afterwards. Agent Ridge Tyson accidentally ran into Damian outside of Philadelphia some eight years before. Both were working the Little Boy Blue case, which entailed eight murdered boys at Camp Billows outside of Newtown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philly. Each of the boys were raped, stabbed to death, and painted blue. Damian had worked for the local police department at the time, creating pencil sketches. The pay was lousy and the crimes he sketched were minimal: shoplifters, domestic violence issues, and petty theft. The state police then hired Damian to work the Little Boy Blue case, which he accepted. The FBI entered the case after four boys were murdered and discovered Damian Truth in Philly. Thereafter, it was a match made in heaven and Damian had been working with the FBI ever since.

His worst case was three years ago, which was called the Faceless Beauties case. It was rare to run across a female serial killer but Paris Hines Shelton was barely considered human since she mutilated eleven women, chopping their faces to shreds with a butcher knife. Paris left behind a m******e in her wake. Her work was concentrated mostly in the southern states, which consisted of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Damian and the FBI followed her down the east coast, missing her by hours following her killings. Although Damian’s pencil sketches were accurate, Paris was on task, knew how to outwit and outmaneuver the FBI, and murdered three more women before she was caught. When questioned about her rage and kill spree, she replied, “A woman has to do what a woman has to do to stay alive in this world. Obviously those women didn’t know what to do.” In the end, Paris was doing four lifetimes in a Florida state penitentiary, where she ended up being gutted by two female inmates. After Damian sketched her murder he vomited and couldn’t sleep for a week.

* * * *

The new case Damian was working on was called the Highwayman case. Some psycho fucker was traveling the highways of Pennsylvania and butchering young gay men. The Highwayman had killed almost thirty men in the last year, raped over a dozen, and sometimes left notes in his victims’ blood at his killing sites. Although the FBI didn’t know the psycho’s name, they had his fingerprints, his DNA, and blood type.

The last of Highwayman’s victims occurred in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Two queer men, a couple, were found with their intestines ripped out of their torsos. The killer left a note by using the organs and spelled out Love’s Forever on the living room floor of their shared apartment.

Damian had sketched ten of Highwayman’s killings before or slightly after they had happened. Unfortunately the FBI couldn’t determine the killer’s whereabouts to take him down. Instead, they were on a chase from county to county in Pennsylvania for the last month in search of the maniac. Sometimes Damian’s sketches were helpful and put Highwayman in a ten-mile radius. Other times his pencil art was totally useless and had nothing to do with the case, but the percentage of such unserviceable works were minimal, of course.