FISHING WITH A SERIAL KILLER

Back in the early 1970’s I use to fish off a small pier behind Tom & Joe’s Sportcenter in Swansboro North Carolina. My dad, Tom, was co-owner of the bait and tackle shop. At the time, Swansboro was a quaint little fishing village set on the banks of the White Oak River.

Swansboro has grown, but it still is a small town by today’s standards. We now have a Burger King and Hardees. A stop light regulates traffic on the four lane highway which skirts the edge of town, and the Police Blotter in the Tideland News recounts four or five misdemeanors every week.

But the fall of 1974 was different. Several banks were held up at gun point in Jacksonville, a much larger town just twenty miles west of Swansboro. People were killed. Two teenage girls were found strangled, dumped on a rural dirt road on the outskirts of Swansboro. The girls had been raped before being brutally murdered.

On that same pier, the one behind my Dad’s store, as I took snappers from schools of small, needle-toothed Bluefish, the conversation usually turned to the crime spree. I remember one man in particular, Marcus, a Navy Corpsman thirteen years my senior, who always had fresh insights into the horrible deeds. We spoke at length on the subject as we fished. His teenage daughter, Debra Ann, a quiet, mousy slip of a girl, was always with him. She seemed embarrassed when her father mentioned the rapes and I figured it was partly due to her age and partly because it was her dad who spoke of such things.

Once, when a Snapper had cut his line,
Marcus tied on a new Gotcha-Plug and I noticed the holstered .45 in the bottom of his tackle box. I didn’t think much of it at the time. A lot of guys toted pistols, especially near the water where Rattlesnakes and Moccasins slithered.

Later, after the news broke, when they had that cold-blooded serial killer behind bars, I thought about that pistol. I saw it in my dreams. I smelled the cordite. I recoiled at the muzzle flash and clawed the sweat soaked sheets which bound me to the bed.