But he’d drawn the line when the trolls he pushed in my direction went after my kids instead.
I’d gotten a remarkable message from him just after that hideous campaign started, a heartfelt e-mail that talked about his own childhood traumas, his own pain, and how he’d pursued me to banish his own demons. The train he’d started couldn’t be stopped; the crusade had taken on a life of its own. But he wanted to help me, and what was more, he could help me.
By that time we’d been on the run out of Wichita, desperate and uncertain, and having him offer a hand? That had been the turning point. That had been the moment I’d retaken control of my life, with Absalom’s help.
Absalom isn’t my friend. We don’t chat, and I suspect he still hates me on some level. But he helps. He builds false identities. He finds me safe havens. He does what he can to control the constant online harassment. When I get a new computer, he images it from backups he keeps in a secure cloud, so I don’t lose data. He writes the custom search algorithms that allow me to keep track of the Sicko Patrol.
For this favor, of course, I pay him money. No need to be pals. We keep it strictly business.
While the search is running, I make a cup of hot tea with honey and sip it with my eyes shut, gathering myself for the challenge. I always keep certain things within reach as I do this: A loaded gun. My cell phone, ready to speed-dial Absalom if there’s an issue. And last but not least, a plastic garbage bag into which I can throw up, if necessary.
Because this, this thing: this is hard. It’s like sticking my head into a blast furnace, a writhing fury of mindless hatred and vile fury, and I am always shaken and scorched when I back away.
But it has to be done. Daily.
I feel the tension spiral down from my head, slithering like a cold serpent along my spine, my shoulders, and coiling heavily in my stomach. I’m never fully prepared when the search results come back, but today, as ever, I try to be calm, observant, distanced.
There are fourteen pages of results. The top link is new; someone’s opened a thread on Reddit, and now the gruesome descriptions, speculations, and howls for justice are ginning up again. I grit my teeth and click the link.
Where’s Melvin’s Little Helper these days? Would love to pay that church lady hypocrite bitch a visit. They like to call me church lady because our family had been a member of one of the larger Baptist churches in Wichita, though Mel was spotty on attendance. I’d usually been there with the kids. There are plenty of ironic pictures posted on that theme—split screens of me and the kids at church, crime scene photos of the dead woman in the garage.
On Sunday mornings, Mel had usually excused himself by saying he had things to do in the workshop.
Things to do. I have to close my eyes for a moment, because there’s a hidden monster’s joke in those words. He’d never thought of the women he’d tortured and murdered as people. He thought of them as objects. Things.
I open my eyes, take a breath, and move on to the next link.
Hope Gina and her kids get raped and ripped and hung up like meat so people can spit on them. Mutilating Mel don’t deserve a family. That one’s accompanied by a crime scene photo of someone else’s kids shot and dumped in a ditch. The callous hypocrisy is breathtaking. This troll is exploiting someone else’s personal horror to make his point about mine. He doesn’t care about children.
He cares about revenge.
I run through the rest in a sickening rush.
You see his daughter? Lily? I’d bump that til its cold.
Burn them alive and put em out with piss.
I got an idea, find some working outhouse and drown the kids in shit. Then send her directions on where to find them.
How can we make her suffer? Suggestions? Anybody got eyes on the bitch?
On and on and on. I leave Reddit, go to Twitter, find more threats, more hate, more vitriol—just in concise, 140-character bites. Then the blogs. 8chan. The true crime message boards. The websites that are shrines to Mel’s crimes.
On the message boards and websites, the deaths of innocent young women are casual drive-by entertainment. Historical information. At least those armchair detectives aren’t very threatening; Mel’s family is just a footnote to the real story for them. They’re not dedicated to our destruction.
The ones who are more interested in us, in Melvin Royal’s missing family . . . those are the ones who could be dangerous.
And there are hundreds, maybe thousands of them—all competing to outdo one another with terrible new ways to punish me and the kids. My kids. It’s a sick horror show, devoid of even a shred of conscience. None of them recognize that they’re talking about people, real people who can be hurt. Who bleed. Who can be murdered. Or if they do recognize that, they absolutely don’t give a shit.
There are some, an unnerving skim of this unholy broth, who are true, cold sociopaths.
I print it all out, highlight usernames and handles, and begin cross-referencing in the database I keep. Most of the names on the list are old hands at this; they have, for whatever reasons, fixated on us. Some are newer, zealous acolytes who’ve just stumbled on Mel’s crimes and are looking to exact some retribution “for the victims,” but it’s really got nothing at all to do with Mel’s victims. I rarely see any of their names mentioned. To this particular crop of vigilantes, the victims didn’t matter alive, and they don’t matter now. It’s an excuse to let their vilest impulses out to play. These trolls are no different from Mel in many ways—except that unlike him, they probably won’t act on those impulses.
Probably.
But then, that’s why I keep the gun sitting next to me, to remind me that if they do, if they dare come near my kids, they’ll pay the price. I will not let anyone hurt them ever again.
I pause in reading, because whoever the psychopath is behind the handle fuckemall2hell, he’s stumbled over a careless piece of court paperwork that has one of our older addresses. He’s publicly posted the street address, looped in victims’ families, called reporters, sent out downloadable posters that have our pictures on them, with the words MISSING: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE? It’s a tactic these savages have adopted recently, trying to play on genuine humanity and concern. He’s preying on the better instincts of people to rat us out so that predators can reach us more easily.
I’m more worried for the innocent people now living at that address he’s distributed, though. They might not have any idea what’s coming. I send an anonymous e-mail to the detective in the area—a grudging ally—to let him know the address is being passed around again, and I hope for the best. Hope that the family living in that house doesn’t wake up to packages of rancid meat and dead animals nailed to their door, to a flood of torture porn, to terrifying threats in their inboxes and mailboxes and on their phones and at their work. I clearly remember the shock of discovering the flood of abuse being leveled at my empty house, even though I was safely in jail and the kids had been spirited away to Maine.
If the current residents have kids, I pray they aren’t targeted. Mine were. Signs on telephone poles. Their pictures sent to pornographers as models. There are no limits for the hate. It’s free-floating, a toxic cloud of moral outrage and mob mentality, and it doesn’t care who it hurts. Only that it does.