Chasing the Boogeyman Read online

  PRAISE FOR CHASING THE BOOGEYMAN

  “Chasing the Boogeyman is genuinely chilling and something brand new and exciting. Compulsive reading and scary… I thought often of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, but never to the story’s detriment. Ray Bradbury’s influence is all over it, but he never could’ve written that ending. Chasing the Boogeyman does what true crime so often cannot: it offers both chills and a satisfying conclusion.”

  —Stephen King

  “Hammer in hand, Richard Chizmar’s come to shatter the idea that everything’s already been done. An absolutely chilling mash-up of styles, media, biography, and legend. Elastic, unsettling, brilliant. And here you thought you knew the names of every genre.”

  —Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie

  “Brilliant.… Absolutely fascinating, totally compelling, and immensely poignant. I dare you not to finish it in one sitting. This one will stay with me!”

  —C. J. Tudor, New York Times bestselling author

  “Riveting. Chilling. Chasing the Boogeyman is an unflinching look at a real-life monster and the ordinary heroes obsessed with stopping him.”

  —Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Final Girls and Home Before Dark

  “Literature was invented around 3400 B.C. Approximately 5,419 years later, Richard Chizmar has invented an entirely new genre of literature with Chasing the Boogeyman. Compulsive, encompassing storytelling. Do not miss this one!”

  —Brian Keene, bestselling author of The Rising

  “With Chasing the Boogeyman, Richard Chizmar demonstrates the full power of his impressive storytelling reach. A fascinating conceit paired with deeply human writing creates a thriller that conjures writers as disparate as Stephen King and Michelle McNamara. The result is a marvelous mind game of nuanced, layered storytelling.”

  —Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of Never Far Away

  “Richard Chizmar, with Chasing the Boogeyman, presents himself as a print version of Norman Rockwell, if the artist had devoted himself to the creepy things that hide under the bed.”

  —Linwood Barclay, New York Times bestselling author of Find You First

  “If Ray Bradbury had written In Cold Blood it would probably look a lot like Richard Chizmar’s masterful Chasing the Boogeyman, a perfectly written and unnervingly suspenseful thriller about a series of murders that tear apart the fabric of a picturesque Maryland town and the writer who puts everything on the line to solve them. This is a mind-bendingly engaging book. Be prepared for the hairs on the back of your neck to be standing at attention as you devour every rich page.”

  —David Bell, bestselling author of The Request

  “Richard Chizmar spins dark magic with Chasing the Boogeyman. A true-crime masterpiece with Chizmar himself as a key player in the grisly mystery. Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart.”

  —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of V-Wars and Patient Zero

  “Wonderful… a knotty mystery with an elegant resolution at its heart.… It feels so original, dizzy-making in its expert layering of fact and fiction.… A hymn to both innocence and to growing up.”

  —Catriona Ward, bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street

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  For Kara.

  Again.

  a note to readers

  Chasing the Boogeyman is a work of fiction, an homage to my hometown and my passion for true crime. There are slices of life depicted throughout that are very much inspired by my personal history, but other events and real people and places and publications are used fictitiously, and to provide verisimilitude to this crime story. Other names, characters, settings, publications, and events come directly from my imagination, admittedly at times not a very nice place to inhabit.

  foreword

  James Renner

  I write about crime, and sometimes I chase serial killers across the country. I cut my teeth at the Free Times in Cleveland, where I worked as an investigative journalist at a time when young women were disappearing on the west side of town. We all knew there was a murderer in our midst, but nobody could find him. I spent a month researching the cases of victims Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. One of Amanda’s ex-boyfriends looked good for it, but the police had no evidence. Then one day, in 2013, I was watching my son tumble around in his gymnastics class when I got a text from an old source in the Cleveland Police Department—Amanda and Gina just walked out of a house on the West Side. And a third woman is here. By the end of the day, Ariel Castro was in custody. When I went back through my notes, Castro’s name was there. His daughter was the last person with Gina DeJesus before she was abducted. My editor had asked me not to interview her because, at the time, she was a minor. I will always wonder what might have happened if I never listened to him.

  The summer after they caught Castro, I took my family to Ocean City, Maryland, on vacation. I needed a break from it all and intended to get caught up on some Stephen King and John Irving novels while my kids built sandcastles on the beach. The condo had this old dining room table with an annoying wobble, and on the second day I was motivated to fix it. I surveyed the owner’s bookshelves for the right-sized paperback, and in that way happened across a sun-faded copy of Richard Chizmar’s true-crime book, Chasing the Boogeyman. I started leafing through it and quickly forgot about the table. By dinner, I was obsessed with the details revealed in the book and the horrible unsolved murders that rocked the town of Edgewood in 1988. By midnight, I’d finished it.

  I took Chasing the Boogeyman with me when we left. I guess that’s stealing, but I reasoned this was a better fate for the book than holding up the corner of a dining room table. When I got home, I puttered around the internet for a bit to find out if they’d ever caught the guy, but all I could find were old articles on LexisNexis. No updates for the last ten years. I was surprised, though, to find that Chizmar had become a publisher himself, with some Stephen King titles, no less. I even had an old issue of his magazine, Cemetery Dance, from back in college, and it had his contact info listed on the editorial page.

  On a whim, I decided to email Chizmar. Any updates on the Boogeyman mystery? I took a picture of my pilfered copy of his book and sent it along as an attachment, and included my phone number. Five minutes later, my phone rang. It was Chiz. I think we talked about the murders for two or three hours that night. Twenty-some years later, he still remembered every detail, every source he’d spoken to. It was still an obsession, I could tell. I had planned to write a feature story about his quest as a young man to find the killer, but other stories, newer stories, got in the way.

  Then came that morning in September 2019 when I saw “The Boogeyman” trending on Twitter. I clicked the link, thinking it was a promotion for some new horror movie, a part of me trying not to get my hopes up, and sure enough, it concerned the Edgewood murders. I felt my body go numb when I saw the name of the man police had just arrested. It was the last person I’d expected.

  Chizmar didn’t answer the phone that day, or for the rest of the week. I got the details from Carly Albright’s updates in the Washington Post. There was a feeling of palpable relief in the air, and it reminded me of when the Golden State Killer was apprehended. When a monster is fina
lly caught against all odds, it feels like magic. The author J. R. R. Tolkien had a word for that feeling—eucatastrophe. The opposite of catastrophe, and all the more important because it’s even rarer.

  I’ve been waiting for Richard Chizmar’s final words on the matter. I heard he actually interviewed the killer in prison, and I was anxious to hear what he’d discovered. So it’s quite an honor to be asked to introduce this long-overdue final edition of his book.

  If I’ve learned anything from Chizmar’s journey though, it’s that, in the end, patience and hope win out over evil and indifference. Almost all the time. I hope you will agree.

  —James Renner

  March 3, 2020

  James Renner is the author of True Crime Addict, the controversial book on the Maura Murray disappearance, as well as the novels The Man from Primrose Lane and, most recently, Muse. He got his start as a crime beat reporter in Cleveland. He currently hosts the Philosophy of Crime podcast.

  introduction “What kind of monster does that?”

  When I first started clipping newspaper articles and jotting down notes about the tragic events that transpired in my hometown of Edgewood, Maryland, during the summer and autumn of 1988, I had no thoughts of one day turning those scattered observations into a full-length book.

  Many of my closest friends and colleagues have a hard time believing this to be true, but I promise that is the case.

  Perhaps something working deep in the basement of my subconscious had an inkling there might be a story here to tell, but the surface-world Rich Chizmar, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old—who on an early June afternoon loaded up his meager belongings (including my beloved Apple Macintosh computer, which I’m still paying for in monthly installments) into the back seat and trunk of his dirt-brown Toyota Corolla and headed north on I-95 to his parents’ house at the corner of Hanson and Tupelo Roads—had no clue whatsoever.

  All I knew was this: three days earlier, a few blocks from where I’d grown up, a young girl had been taken from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Her savaged body was discovered in nearby woods the next morning. The local police had no suspects.

  I learned most of this information from a pair of newspaper articles and the evening news. Initially, reporters were suitably vague about the condition of the girl’s body, but an old friend’s uncle was a Harford County sheriff, and he spilled all the grisly details. “Jesus Christ, Rich. What kind of monster does that?” my friend had asked, as if my lifelong interest in the macabre made me some kind of an expert on deviant behavior.

  I had no answer for him that day, and now, more than a year later, I still don’t. Call me naive, but I believe some things just aren’t meant to be understood. So much of life—and death—is a mystery.

  My father was his typically quiet self when we spoke on the phone the evening before my homecoming—he was mostly concerned with what I wanted for dinner my first night back so he could pick up groceries at the commissary—but my mother was a mess. “We’ve known the Gallaghers for over twenty years,” she said, voice cracking with emotion. “They moved here shortly after we did. Joshua was just a toddler and poor Natasha hadn’t even been born. You should reach out to Josh when you get home. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to lose a baby sister… especially like that. Can you? You’ll come with us to the funeral, won’t you? You and Josh graduated together, right?” On and on like that.

  I assured her that no, I couldn’t imagine losing a baby sister (it didn’t matter one bit that I was the youngest of the Chizmar children and therefore didn’t have a baby sister; that clearly wasn’t the point), and yes, of course I’d go with them to the funeral, and yes, Josh and I had in fact graduated together, although we hadn’t been particularly close, the two of us running with different crowds.

  Even at such a relatively young age, I was already well on my way to becoming a reformed Catholic, but my folks were about as devout as they came, especially my mom. When the world around her suffered—a deadly earthquake in Asia, floods in South America, a distant second cousin diagnosed with treatable cancer; it didn’t matter how near or far—my mother suffered right alongside each and every one of them. She’d always been that way.

  Almost breathless by this point in the conversation, Mom went on to say that she and Norma Gentile, our elderly next-door neighbor, had gone to mass every morning for the past week to pray for the Gallagher family. They’d also walked over a platter of homemade fried chicken and coleslaw to show their support. I could hear my father’s muffled voice in the background then, chastising my mother for keeping me on the phone for so long, and she scolded him right back with an emphatic “Oh, you hush.” When she got back on the line, she apologized for being so upset and chewing my ear off, declaring that nothing like this had ever happened in Edgewood. Before I could muster much of a response, she said goodnight and hung up the phone.

  Late the next afternoon, as I steered my overloaded Toyota off the I-95 exit ramp and headed for Hanson Road, the radio newswoman pretty much echoed my mother’s claim. There’d always been plenty of crime to go around in a town like Edgewood—assault and battery, breaking and entering, theft, any number of drug-related offenses, as well as the occasional homicide—but no one could remember anything remotely this violent or depraved. It was almost as if an invisible switch had been thrown, the reporter claimed, and we now existed in a different place and time. Our little town had lost what remained of its innocence.

  Sitting beside me on the passenger seat that day was my diploma from the University of Maryland School of Journalism, still rolled up in the cardboard mailing tube in which the college had mailed it. I hadn’t bothered buying a frame. To my parents’ disappointment, I hadn’t even bothered walking across the stage at my graduation ceremony earlier in the month.

  After four-and-a-half seemingly endless years, I’d had enough of formal education. It was time to get out in the real world and do something with myself.

  There was only one small problem.

  What that something was, I wasn’t entirely sure.

  I’d published a folder full of newspaper articles during the past couple of years, mostly sports stories and a handful of public interest features in my college paper. I’d also gotten lucky and managed to crack my hometown weekly, Hartford County’s Aegis (twice), and the Baltimore Sun (once). As a lifelong Baltimore Orioles fan, I was particularly proud of the Earl Weaver feature I’d written for the Sun. Unlike my diploma, it was neatly framed and carefully bubble-wrapped in the back seat of my car.

  So, armed with my impressive body of clippings and hot-off-the-press journalism degree, you’d think I’d be anxious to get settled in at home and launch right into an aggressive job search.

  And you would be wrong.

  You see, somewhere along the way, amid all those stuffy classroom lessons about how to write a proper lede and when to utilize an unnamed source and how to interview a reluctant subject, I fell head over heels in love with a different kind of writing. The kind that came with a whole lot fewer rules and no harried bosses barking in your ear to “hurry the hell up, Chizmar, we need to go to press!”

  That’s right, I’m talking about the bane of every real journalist’s existence—the hippy-dippy, Peter Pan world of Make Believe: fiction.

  But wait, it’s even worse than that. I’m talking about genre fiction. Crime, mystery, suspense, and that black sheep of them all: horror.

  I’d already managed to sell a half-dozen short stories to small-press publications located around the country. Magazines with illustrious names like Scifant, Desert Sun, StarSong, and Witness to the Bizarre. Magazines with circulations in the mid-to-low three-digit range that often arrived in my PO Box with sloppily stapled bindings and painfully amateurish black-and-white artwork on the front covers; magazines that paid a penny per word if you were lucky, but oftentimes, nothing at all.

  As further evidence of youthful ignorance and bravado, I’d actually taken my love affair with genre fiction a
step further, by recently announcing the start-up of my very own horror and suspense magazine, an ambitious quarterly going by the questionable-at-best title of Cemetery Dance (stolen from the name of the second short story I’d ever written, for which I’d received compliments from roughly a dozen editors regarding the evocative title of that particular tale and exactly zero compliments regarding the quality of the story itself). The debut issue of Cemetery Dance was scheduled to be released in a matter of months—December 1988—and as usual, I was in over my head. An awful lot of long days and long nights of on-the-job training awaited me.

  But first came the hard part—explaining to my old-fashioned, by-the-book, conservative parents that I didn’t even plan to assemble a résumé, much less look for a real job. Instead, I had a different master plan in mind: First, I’d take up residence in my old bedroom on the second floor of my childhood home. Then I’d spend the next seven months sharing their dinner table most every night, preparing for my impending marriage (and subsequent move to Baltimore City so that Kara, my bride-to-be, could finish her undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins University before moving on to physical therapy school, thus insuring that at least one of us would eventually earn a steady income), and lounging around in my sweatpants or pajamas while I worked on my little magazine and wrote stories about bad guys and monsters.

  Talk about a Can’t-Miss Plan, right?

  Fortunately, my mother and father soon revealed themselves to be saints on a whole new level (they still are to this day), and for reasons unknown to intelligent man, they agreed to support my plan and expressed their unwavering faith in me.

  So, there you have it… that’s how I found myself in the early days of summer 1988, sitting behind my writing desk beneath a window overlooking the side yard of the house I grew up in. Every time I took a break from the computer screen and glanced outside, I imagined the ghosts of my childhood friends sprinting shirtless across the lawn, whooping with laughter and disappearing into the wavering shadows beneath the towering weeping willow whose spindly branches had snagged so many of our taped-up Wiffle balls and provided hours of cooling shade in which to play marbles and eat pizza subs and trade baseball cards. I’d even kissed my first girl under that tree when I was eleven years old. Her name was Rhonda, and I’ve never forgotten her.