“I could pack up and move tomorrow - just give me my woman and my dogs,” he said, craning his head back at the torrent of stars above the Front Range. on a cold November night, escorting an interviewer to a rental car parked outside his trailer in a poor neighborhood on the east side of Colorado Springs. “Why?” was for intellectuals, and Charlie Hess had seen enough of them to say there were two kinds of people: intellectuals and those who got things done.

Robert, can you remember what year that was? Was the body north or south of the highway? Where did you get the ice pick? “Why?” was bottomless and slippery and often fraught with useless moral overtones. Names, dates, locations cause and manner of death - these were his goals as he tried to flesh out the transgressions of a man who, by his own account, killed 48 people. agent in Vietnam, he was no longer interested in “Why?” What counted were simple, incontestable facts: who, when, where, what. tilting at the criminal mind, all his years in private practice running lie-detector tests, his time extracting secrets as a C.I.A. After all the years he spent in the F.B.I. At this late hour of his life, Charlie Hess said the question “Why?” didn’t matter anymore.

Louisiana serial killer 1920s