FATHER WAS A SERIAL KILLER

I found the L.A.P.D. Detective's business card fastened by a clothespin to my mailbox when I got home from work that Friday night. Living the beach life in Venice, I liked to party and have fun, but I wasn't a criminal. I thought to myself: "What the hell have I done that the L.A.P.D. -- and a detective, no less -- wanted to talk to me about?" I would have to wait until Monday to make the call, so I had the rest of the weekend to assuage my guilty conscience.

Well, Saturday and Sunday came and went and on Monday, I made the phone call before going in to work. Turned out that the detective was a straight-forward guy with an easy voice and he didn't want to talk about me after all. What he wanted to know is, if I knew "so-and-so". I said yes, I worked with him (I was the assistant manager of a certain retail store out in the San Fernando Valley), but he hadn't shown up to work for a number of days and hadn't called in. He just sort of disappeared.

He went on to ask me about this young man's performance at work. I replied that he was nice enough and got along alright with customers, but seemed to be a little nervous all the time. My impression of him was that he was a bit of a drifter. Since I was responsible to count the day's till, I also added that we had been short on a regular basis since he started.

I finally asked: "What's this regarding?" The detective didn't offer a lot in reply, but he said that "so-and-so" had been found deceased off one of the Freeways that crisscrossed Los Angeles. He asked if there was anything else I could tell him about this person, and I said, "No, there wasn't." He thanked me and hung up. I was left stunned.

I slowly started to put two and two together and realized that by the detective's description, I had just learned that a person that I had worked with just a few days before had not only become a murder victim, but the victim of a serial killer.

It was during this time (1979) that William George Bonin, a.k.a. the Freeway Killer was at large and killing off boys and young men at a fast clip. He was finally arrested, charged and eventually confessed to the killings. In 1996, he was the first inmate to be executed by lethal injection in the State of California.

My story pales in comparison to the one told below by Kerri Rawson. Not only was her father a serial killer, but he was Dennis Rader, the notorious human monster called the BTK Killer. She tells her story in the February 4, 2019 issue of PEOPLE magazine.