THIS FILE CONTAINS ANOTHER EXCERPT OF AGENT BARTOSZ'S PUBLISHED MEMOIR, "CHASING THE MAGGOT MAN". THE INFORMATION HERE IS PERTINENT TO THE OVERALL CASE AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF ALL PIECES OF DATA.

--File 012: "Chasing the Maggot Man" Excerpt: Horrors--

Technically, the Maggot Man is in a weird classification of Serial Killer.

You see, Serial Killers are notably big on the whole sexual aspect of things... but Grantham wasn't. Grantham was a lot of very strange, abnormal things that made classifying him real hard, and it drove the psych guys mad. Nothing he did seemed to match their expectations.

Take, for example, some of those early on reads they tried to get on him. One of my guys, we'll call him Mike, he kept saying that Grantham had to be sexually repressed, and that we'd see him act on it soon. We never did, thank God, and you KNOW your work is fucked up when you say "Thank God he only strangled them". You learn to find relief in the darkest shit.

The guys concluded that if that wasn't the case, then Grantham was likely suffering from a psychosis. It's unusual in serial killers, because they're usually pretty damned driven and aware of what they're doing, but it's not impossible. The psych guys all believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Maggot Man was suffering from a psychotic breakdown- something like Herbert Mullin, who was having a paranoid schizophrenic break, but who couldn't be detained. The guy was let loose, and he went off and brutally murdered people because a voice in his head screamed at him, "Why won't you give me anything? Go kill someone! Move!"

He moved, all right.

When we finally caught up to Grantham, the reality was a shock for everyone involved.

Grantham was mentally sound.

You get guys like Ted Bundy, right? Guy was a psychopath, and I'm using that term scientifically- medically, even. He lacked empathy in its entirety. I heard one of my guys say he was a "moral imbecile", and that's stuck with me ever since. Morally, he was broken. He had no morals. Most serial killers don't. There's a bunch of different ways to say this, and the guys from like two hundred years ago kinda hit the nail on the head, I think. Morally insane, a moral degenerate, morally defective- all really good ways to look at these evil sons of bitches.

Grantham wasn't suffering a psychosis at all. He was surprised that we'd caught him at last, sure, but he was completely full up on his faculties. Guy bred flies, for fuck's sake, you don't do shit like that when you're suffering from hallucinations. That takes serious dedication.

Grantham wasn't insane. He wasn't sick, or suffering from some mental illness. He was fully there, completely, entirely sane when it came to his mind. When it came to the guy's morals, however, he was straight evil.

Because evil is a real, actual thing in this world.

Lotta folks like to talk about how "there's no evil" out there, but in reality, they just haven't worked in the business that I share with homicide detectives, violent crimes reporters, autopsy folks, and anyone who deals with murder.

Serial Killers are a whole other brand of evil. One guy defined "evil" as "an intent to cause emotional trauma, to terrorize or target the helpless, to prolong suffering and to derive satisfaction from it all." (Forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner of the New York University School of Medicine, circa 2001.)

I'd say that sums up serial killers perfectly... and it sums up Grantham to a T.

Grantham was a psychopath. I looked that man in the eyes, and I saw hell itself staring back at me, calm and cool and collected. He was only put out in the fact that we were stopping him from achieving his next victim, which probably woulda been one of the two girls who actually found the guy for us.

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We had pinned Grantham down to the area we suspected that he was heading into. We thought we were the hounds of hell itself, biting at this monster's ankles, just minutes from dragging him back to whatever circle of hell he'd crawled out of... but we weren't expecting to lose him in the woods of Massachusetts. The trail ran cold, up until we got a call that a little girl and her sister had been playing in the woods and actually seen the guy walking past with his next victim.

Those kids were smart. They ran home, quiet as possible, but they didn't tell nobody till they saw their friend's missing report on TV. We got out there the second we got the call, and it's a good thing, too. I couldn't have told them then, but Grantham was stalking that house.

They were his next victims, these two little blonde girls.

We never did find the body of their friend, that last victim. She's still missing to this day, and Grantham never gave it up. No matter how we needled him, he said nothing, except to admit openly that he killed the girls.

I still remember his confession. I hadn't gotten a word outta him the entire time, that stupid, smug bastard. He sat there still as a statue... until I brought out the photos of the Lost Girls. The crime scene photos sat there in front of him, and for the first time, he smiled.

God, I wish I'd never shown 'em. To see him look at them almost fondly, like they were good memories.

"Did you kill these girls?" I asked him.

"They made a nice meal for my flies."

That's what Grantham said. His voice was quiet and soft. There was nothing to him. He said nothing more.

We convicted him, but it was weird. No one wanted to talk about the guy. Turns out, that town out there, it was Grantham's hometown. People shoulda known him- it was a small-ass town out in the middle of fuckin' nowhere. There shoulda been records of him.

Nobody wanted to talk.

Not a single camera crew, reporters, TV show- nobody for years has said a thing to any of us. Nothin'. Nada. The day those assholes crack, it's going to be a miracle.

Because of this, nobody knows why he did it. We don't know what was going on up there, and one day, we may not ever have a chance to find out. He'll be dead, the whole town'll be dead, and he'll get to rot in the earth and become food for his creepy science experiments that nearly started an epidemic in our country- not that most people knew that was going on.

We searched his house, too. We found it. Other side of the lake. There was nothin' there, save for the fucking flies. They were all over everything, but as far as we could tell, there was no one there. No bodies, no smell, no rot, no decay- nothin'. We found no secrets, no journals that explained some sordid past, no survivors, no bodies... nothin'. It was a normal house. We don't even know how he was makin' those weird games he kept leavin' behind.

God, those games- if anything feels like a thread wholly disconnected from the whole tapestry, it's those games. He clearly made 'em, but why? What purpose did they serve? Was it some other hobby that never took off like the flies did? He never told us. Every time we asked, he just smiled. We brought 'em out, showed 'em to him, and the only thing he told me was "You haven't figured them out." We tried everything. Our best code monkeys tried everything, and we even broke a few of them trying to look for some crazy answer.

Nothing.

We did find his mother's grave, but that provided about as much as you mighta thunk it would. Nothin'. No messages on that gravestone at all- save for one maybe morbid thing. Grantham must've requested it, because there was a fly carved neatly into the top center of her headstone.

I asked for records on how the old lady died, and I was given them without much in the way of friendliness or help. All she had marked down was a fall down the stairs and a broken neck.

I somehow doubt that.

I think that town still knows something, but without proof, we could never get them to spill. They never said a word, not a soul, not even the mother of the girl who disappeared. They all shut us out, and seemed- still seem- ready to let the whole damned thing die.

Something happened in that town, before all of this went down.

Something happened, and they all know it.

I know those two little girls left that town afterward. Mom couldn't stand the thought of it, and took 'em out, went to start a new life somewhere. Last I saw them, I think her girls dyed their hair. They were so young, but even they knew, or maybe their mom knew. It was the blonde hair that had attracted him to them and nearly got them killed.

The Maggot Man was something else. It was a once in a lifetime real nightmare unfolding right in front of my face. I never knew what to expect, and dealing with Grantham was torture. Being anywhere near him just seemed to make my head hurt, like I was being split in half. I felt like I was seeing double when I looked at him.

He was a demon. If there is evil in this world, it's that sorry mother fucker, and the day he finally goes over the edge and gets what's coming, that's the day the world will start to feel just a little brighter.