They say nine out of ten murder victims know their killer.
Cops love those odds. They begin close to the body and work outwards. The husband. The wife. The coworker. The neighbour. The ex who sent angry messages after midnight.
There is usually a history—recent, intimate and obvious. It appears in telephone records, bank accounts, photographs and arguments overheard through thin walls.
But what if the relationship is not fresh?
What if it is dated, buried beneath decades of dust and no longer recognised as a relationship at all?
I have thought about this a lot.
A child is bullied in a playground. His face is pushed into the dirt while three other children laugh. The bell rings, and everyone returns to class. By the end of the school year, the bully barely remembers doing it.
The child remembers.
A fleeting romance at university ends badly. One person calls it a youthful mistake. The other carries away the precise sound of a cruel sentence delivered outside a crowded bar.
A customer is shortchanged at a shop in 1983. The cashier rolls her eyes at his complaint, serves the next customer and forgets his face before closing time.
He remembers hers.
People leave thousands of these small collisions behind them. Insults, humiliations and dismissals are scattered across the years like litter beside a road. Time softens their edges. People mature and forgive themselves for things nobody else remembers.
But forgetting is not the same as being forgiven.
How Well Must a Victim Know Their Killer?
That is the flaw in the equation. When investigators say a victim knew the killer, what qualifies as knowing?
A marriage counts. So does a business partnership. But what about the boy who sat three desks away in Year Nine? The temporary employee who worked in the storeroom for one summer? The quiet man at a party who stood beside the drinks while everyone talked over him?
A face can be familiar without having a name attached to it. A victim might open the door because the visitor seems harmlessly recognisable. They hesitate, searching their memory, and decide familiarity must mean safety.
It does not.
In fact, familiar faces are harder to question. The mind dislikes leaving a person unidentified, so it fills the gap with reassurance. I must know him from somewhere. He does not look dangerous.
That final thought is particularly useful.
Police can examine a victim’s present life and still find nothing. They may discover affairs, debts and disagreements, but none leads back forty years to a schoolyard, an old party or a shop that no longer exists.
The connection is real. It is simply too old and too small for anyone else to see.
A Killer Without a Pattern
People expect repetition. They expect a killer to develop a taste, choose a type and return to it until the similarities become obvious. Investigators look for patterns because patterns turn several inexplicable deaths into one solvable problem.
But memory does not work in neat categories.
A bully, a lover, a cashier and a teacher may have nothing in common except the person who remembers them. They can live in different suburbs, belong to different generations and die years apart. On paper, the crimes are unrelated.
Some might call such a person a sleeper killer, although sleep suggests inactivity. Waiting is not sleeping. Waiting is patient, watchful and deliberate.
Time helps. Faces change. Hair disappears or turns grey. Bodies thicken, bend and slow. A boy nobody noticed becomes a man nobody recognises. The victim studies him and feels that small, irritating tug of familiarity but cannot place it.
He can place them.
Every one.
Of course, modern DNA science changed crime fiction and real investigations too. Cameras watch streets. Phones remember locations. Machines preserve connections people would rather erase.
Science can reveal that someone was present. It cannot always explain why two apparently unrelated lives crossed before records became permanent. Evidence may identify a body, a place or a moment. Motive remains buried in memory.
That is where I live.
The Missing Piece
Because I am the missing piece. The anomaly. The statistical outlier.
I once knew them all.
Not intimately. Not in the way detectives expect.
A face glimpsed in a school hallway. A voice that mocked me at a party. A hand that pushed me aside. A cashier who shortchanged me in 1983.
They continued with their lives. They married, moved house, raised children and accumulated enough new memories to bury the old ones.
They forgot me.
I remembered them.
That is why the most normal men make the best monsters. The obvious monster attracts attention. The ordinary one passes through a room without leaving an impression. He waits in a queue, mows his lawn and nods politely to neighbours.
If questioned, people say they have seen him before.
Somewhere.
Perhaps.
Nine out of ten murder victims knew their killer?
No.
Ten out of ten of my victims knew theirs.
They simply knew him too long ago.
The difference comes down to when. That kind of darkness waits throughout the SEETHINGS trilogy.
I remember everything.
-K
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Love, lust, and lies collide on land and water. A temptress, a faithful wife, and a photographer haunted by shadows drift into a world of seduction, betrayal, and control.
Marriages unravel, secrets surface, and civility dissolves into primal instinct. Nothing is safe. No one is innocent.
SEETHINGS (first in the series) is downloadable and free for a limited time here.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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