The Sunshine Slasher

Warning: the following story contains descriptions of gore, harm to children, and themes of sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.

During the summer of 1999, there was a string of murders in a twenty mile radius around Sunshine, Minnesota. It wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect a serial killer to crop up. The whole population was just over fifteen hundred people. There was a single building that housed the K-12 school. There was just one grocery store. One gas station. Old folks left their doors unlocked at night. There wasn’t ever much theft or petty crime. Everybody knew everybody else, and strangers didn’t often have much cause to pass through.

I was born in Sunshine, just like my parents, and their parents, on and on back through the generations since our family immigrated from Scandinavia. Like most people in town, we were tall, and stocky, with fair skin and pronounced midwestern accents. Bag is pronounced like ‘beg’ and any food can be made in casserole form if you are creative enough. 

My two best friends lived on my block. Patrick Otternoose, the buck-toothed, bespectacled disaster, and Violet Espinoza, with her curly dark hair and small, perfectly-centered nose. The three of us would make snowmen, and drink copious amounts of hot chocolate, and play video games all winter. When summer came and the snow melted, we’d ride our bikes around town, seeing what sort of trouble we could stir up.

In the summer of 1999, I was eleven years old. Just out of fifth grade, heading into sixth. I think I was still too young to really understand the panic that rippled through our town when the murders started. But I was old enough to notice how every adult’s face looked stricken and afraid.

***

The first body was found in Hickory Park. On the basketball court. It was high school sophomore named Dan Matheson. He was short, and kind of skinny for his age. I didn’t see the crime scene in person. Pictures weren’t released to the public, but in a town that small, people talk.

According to the much whispered conjecture, he was spread out across the asphalt like a grotesque snow angel. Arms above his head, legs apart in a wide vee. His torso was split open, from his pelvis to the base of his neck, exposing his ribcage and internal organs. 

A detail that is added in some tellings, but not others, has to do with Dan’s penis. In some tellings, it was sliced off and stuffed into his mouth. Whether or not he was still alive when it happened, is another optional embellishment. 

***

After Dan’s funeral, things in Sunshine started to change. Doors got shiny new locks. People emptied off the streets before sunset. My mother suddenly wanted to know where I was going, who I’d be with, and what time I expected to get home. 

Patrick, Violet and I avoided Hickory Park for a while. But after the police tape was taken down, and the blood stains were washed away, curiosity got the better of us. 

We rode our bikes on the cement path that weaved through the grassy hills and clumps of trees. It was a Tuesday afternoon, so not many other people were around. We slowed down as we approached, with Violet in the lead. She was the bravest. There was never any question about it. 

She stopped and dismounted her bike about ten feet from the chain-link fencing that surrounded the court. Patrick and I followed her at somewhat of a distance. 

It was quiet. Eerie, standing at the edge of the fence, looking at the place where Dan’s body had been. None of us knew him that well. But he had a sister that was just one year younger than us. She hadn’t left the house since the funeral. 

“It feels bad here,” Violet said, crossing herself and then flicking her fingers like she was trying to get rid of water droplets. Violet’s Abuelita was a good witch. That’s what Violet said anyway. Whenever we went to visit, Abuelita gave us little velvet pouches full of herbs and animal bones to keep in our houses for protection.

I wasn’t sure if I believed in magic, but figured it couldn’t hurt. I kept mine in a row on the windowsill of my bedroom. 

“Do you think this is where it actually happened?” Billy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his sweaty nose. “My dad says the killer probably did it somewhere else and then just cut him open here.”

“Your dad is really morbid.” Violet snorted.

I took a step closer to the fence. It all seemed so out of place. We were just looking at black asphalt and yellow lines. There shouldn’t have been anything sinister about it. But in that moment, I felt more uneasy than I had in any graveyard. 

We didn’t hold out much longer before running back to our bikes and pedaling away.

***

The second body was found on the train tracks. 

Nathan Herrick, the football quarterback who’d gotten a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, and officially lost it from a failed drug test. The unofficial reasons he got kicked out were the accusations from several cheerleaders that he liked to slip things into people’s drinks.

He’d left town a hero, and come home a has-been. He got a job at the grocery store because his uncle owned it. 

The police had a hard time collecting his remains, as he’d been smashed up pretty good by a freight train. The biggest piece they found was his head. The blood in it tested positive for GHB.

***

Violet took Patrick and me to Abuelita’s house after the news about Nathan got on television.

Abuelita lived on the outskirts of town, so we had to go in the middle of the day. My mom wouldn’t let me bike anywhere after three in the afternoon. 

We arrived a little before eleven in the morning. The small house already smelled of aromatic spices and cooked meat. Abuelita had apparently been up since five making *pozole rojo*. 

Pozole verde and blanco are traditionally made with chicken. Pozole rojo was once involved with the rituals of human sacrifice. The human meat would be added to the stew, and high priests would eat it to commune with the gods. It was a symbol of the beginning, the story that humans were created from maize, meeting the end. Today pozole rojo is traditionally made with pork. 

Abuelita did not speak much english. She waved towards the kitchen table to indicate we should sit down. She gave us each a very large bowl of stew and some tostadas for dipping. 

As we ate, she burned fat bundles of herbs and waved them around us, chanting in Spanish. She gave all of us a fresh pouch full of flowers and bones and traced crosses on our foreheads with ashes from her wood-burning stove. 

She spoke to Violet in hushed tones. I recognized the words peligroso and mujer. 

Violet cleared away the plates. I washed dishes. Patrick dried them. 

Abuelita sat at the table, casting knuckle bones like dice and muttering to herself. She kissed each of us on the cheek and patted the tops of our heads before we left. 

Violet didn’t speak again until we were halfway back to our block. 

“She says the killer is a woman.”

***

The third body was found out by the turnpike. It was halfway buried in a clump of bushes, about a mile away from the river they’d found the victim's car in. 

As it turned out, Mr. Kildare was actually the first victim. He’d just been hidden a little better. Maybe the killer was nervous. Not yet confident enough to display their handiwork.

Like Dan, Mr. Kildare’s torso was split open. Most of his internal organs were missing, as were his eyes and tongue. Mr. Kildare was a fairly rotund man. He used to drive the school bus when I was younger. He must have retired by the time I was in the second grade. 

It took the police quite a while to search Mr. Kildare’s house. He’d never married. The place was a mess of old magazines, newspapers and empty whiskey bottles. He’d clearly had a hoarding problem. 

They found the pictures between the pages of a King James Bible under his mattress. Pictures of a disrobed toddler that had gone missing many years ago. Brandy Cooper, if you ever saw the headlines. She was a four year old beauty queen that simply didn’t come home from preschool one sunny afternoon. 

***

Two murders is a disturbing coincidence. Three makes a serial killer. 

News outlets started calling the mystery killer The Sunshine Slasher. Once a serial killer has a pseudonym, they are taken from the realms of mere mortality into the stuff of legend. 

Violet, Patrick and I stayed up late into the night, having ”camp outs” in my living room, floating wild theories about who it might be. Definitely not some drifter. People would notice a drifter in this climate and blame them immediately. 

“Maybe it’s Mrs. Pearce.” Patrick said in a conspiratorial whisper before passing the flashlight to Violet so she could illuminate her face from beneath her chin. 

“I think it’s Ms. Watson.” Violet wiggled her fingers in what was probably supposed to be a spooky flourish. 

She handed the flashlight to me. I held it for a few moments, composing my thoughts. 

I found it doubtful that the notoriously harsh high school math teacher was stalking through the night and gutting people. It was equally unlikely that a nurse practitioner had decided to use her scalpel for evil. 

Even at that age, I had an interest in forensics and detective novels. I was thinking about concepts like motive and patterns in victim selection. What did a drug dealer, a bag boy, and a retired bus driver have in common? It was a hard question to answer. 

“I think it’s Lila Covington.” I was uncertain even as the words were only halfway out. 

Lila had just graduated from high school. She used to be on the volleyball team, but overnight she went from sporty to gothic with dark makeup and black clothes. She used to babysit for Dan’s little sister. She was a freshman when Nathan was a senior. She rode the bus for a few years when Mr. Kildare drove it. 

Of course, all those things could be coincidences. They could describe dozens of girls in our town. But Lila had such a sudden change in appearance and personality. Everyone whispered about it. People even said she was a witch. The bad kind. 

“Really, Everett?” Violet rolled her eyes. 

“What? It’s no more ridiculous than anyone else.”

“Yeah, but it’s like, cliche.”

“Whatever.”

***

The fourth body was found in the backyard of Mr. Henry’s house. It was, of course, Mr. Henry. The retired policeman. Split open and run through on a crude spit. His flesh was charred, with the remains of a small fire underneath him. 
There was a typed up note pinned to his shirt. 

You could weave silk from pig bristles before you could make a man anything but a man.

The killer had grown bold enough to taunt the police directly. It signaled a new phase. It was palpable. Like the beginning of a thunderstorm. 

Suddenly, there was a strictly enforced curfew of 7:00pm. Children were encouraged to walk in groups if they had to leave be house. The mayor and the police chief gave lots of speeches about how hard they were trying to catch the killer. They were confident they’d found the scent and it would all be over soon. 

***

Abuelita showed up at my front door on a Thursday morning. She draped a silver crucifix around my neck and held the sides of my face. She stared at me with those deep, worried eyes. 

“You… you will see la bruja mala,” she said, voice thick with sadness at the inevitability of it all. “The bones say me, you see her soon.”

She dipped a hand into her pocket and drew three lines across my forehead with some sort of fermented-smelling paste. I didn’t protest. As far as we were all concerned, Abuelita was the only person in town who could really protect us. 

 ***

The fifth body was discovered on the school playground. 

It was Timmy Potts. A third grader. Just eight years old. He’d gone missing a few nights previously, from a Chuck E Cheese a few exits down the highway. 

They found him splayed across the monkey bars, blank eyes staring skyward, arms dangling down, dripping small red pools of blood onto the sand underneath. He was gutted, like the rest of them. His fingers had been chopped off at the knuckle. 

There was a note in the pocket of his bloodstained shorts. 

The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.

Mr. Potts was the town’s Pastor. He did not give any sermons after little Timmy was found. A pastor from another church came to fill in for him while he was grieving. His wife was spotted in town on a few occasions. Grocery shopping, making arrangements for the funeral. 

But it was only about two and a half weeks before Mr. Potts was found in his basement. He’d hung himself. Some people say there was a suicide note, or confession letter, but Mrs. Potts burned it out of shame before calling the police. Other people say we will never know exactly what the killer was trying to punish Mr. Potts for. Mrs. Potts moved away to live with her sister after burying both son and husband. I’m not sure what happened to her after that.
 
***

My father passed away when I was very young. I can barely remember him. So it was just me and my mother, living in a house that always felt a little empty. It’s probably why she didn’t mind me having friends over all the time. The laughter of children is preferable to the horrible silence of loss. 

My mother didn’t like to leave me alone. She never would have, given the option. She didn’t ask for a deer to run across the road while she was driving home from the grocery store. She swerved to avoid it, and ended up
running into a tree. 

She’s fine now, for the record. We just celebrated her fifty-third birthday. 

But she came out on the other side of her car accident with a concussion, a broken leg and some snapped ribs. She had to stay at the hospital for a while. That left me in quite a predicament. 

I stayed at Violet’s house a few nights. Then at Patrick’s. Not wanting to rely too heavily on the kindness of others, my mom managed to hire a sitter during her last few days before discharge. 

To my dismay, she hired Lila Covington. I didn’t have the heart to protest, after my mom went on and on about how Lila had been at the hospital reading to seniors, and how she was such a nice girl under all that makeup. 

Maybe I was wrong in my ideas about Lila. Maybe everything would be fine. I would sleep with my door locked, if I slept at all, and pray for it to be over soon. 

Powerless youth is a thing everyone has to come to grips with. We all end up in at least one awful situation, with no ability to fix it or even voice our concerns. You survive and adapt or you don’t. It’s all just the luck of the draw. 

***

Lila arrived the next morning, wearing steel-toed leather boots, with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder. Her dyed-black hair covered more than half her face. I showed her to the guest room and promptly informed her I was going out to play. 

“OK,” she shrugged. Her voice had a raspy quality to it. I could see the pack of camel cigarettes bulging in her jacket pocket. “Just be back before curfew. We’ll get takeout for dinner.”

After I left, Pat and I tried to spy on Lila with binoculars from his yard. We saw her descend the stairs, but she closed the living room curtains as soon as she walked in. 

We grew bored of looking at nothing pretty quickly. We ended up going to Violet’s and playing on the wooden jungle gym in her backyard. Mrs. Espinosa gave us all lemonade and ham sandwiches for lunch. It got late much too fast. 

The three of us all turned on our walkie talkies before I went home. If anything went badly, I’d be able to signal them so they could tell their parents or call the cops. 

The smell of incense overwhelmed me the second I stepped through my front door. There was strange droning music playing from the living room. Like a funeral dirge with high-pitched inhuman chanting layered over it. Lila was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. It was dark except for the four candles she’d placed around her. She had her hands pressed together in front of her chest in a prayer pose.

“Hey, Everett.” She nodded at me. “I’ll be done here in a few minutes. Wanna call the pizza place? Order whatever. Just get something without olives.”
 
“Sure.” I backed away slowly into the kitchen. 

I stepped into the pantry closet, tugged the light chain and closed the door. I crouched on the floor and held down the button of my black, $10 walkie. 

 “This is Sparrow. You guys reading?”

“Flowergirl here. Over”

“It looks like Lila’s doing some kind of satanic ritual in my living room. Over.”

“What, for reals?”

“Weird smoke and candles and everything. Over.”

“Are you gonna run? Over.

“Not yet, I don’t think. I don’t know. Should I? Over.”

“I wish Abuelita had a phone so I could ask her. Over.”

“Wait, what’s going on?”

“Specks. You can’t just jump in like that. And you have to say ‘over’. Over.”

“She’s doing witch stuff. Over.”

“Shit. Over.”

The music switched off abruptly. I heard the hallway floorboards creak. 

“I think I hear her moving. I’ll keep you guys updated. Over and out.”

I sat in the pantry for a few moments longer, trying to collect myself. When I opened the door, Lila was standing there, smiling. 

“You playing secret agents or something?” She nodded at the walkie in my hand. 

“Um… yeah.”

“Nice. Sorry if I scared you with the music and stuff. I lost track of time.”

“It’s OK.”

“Want me to order the food?” She quirked an eyebrow. “I know I hated making phone calls at your age.”

“I can do it.”

“Cool.” She nodded and settled down at the kitchen table with a book. *The Bell Jar.* Our landline was in the living room, so I scurried off as fast as I could. 

***

It’s funny, how certain memories become crystallized in the mind. Something that seems innocuous while it happens can end up being a pivotal moment of your life. Everything is obvious in hindsight. But so very few of us possess the ability to distinguish when we are looking a monster square in the eyes. The ugly truth of it is that monsters look exactly the same as everyone else. 

I opened the door for one. 

She was standing there, in a red and white striped *Minnie’s Best Pizza* t-shirt. Her soft blonde hair was in a ponytail, pulled through a red baseball hat. 

“Well hey there, little darlin’. Are your folks home?” She smiled down at me with glossy lips and perfectly white teeth. “I’ve got a pepperoni pizza here that’s not gonna eat itself.”

It was Margot Johnson. Sixteen years old. Wide-eyed and eager to please. She was the high school yearbook photographer, head of the chess club, and somehow still popular enough to get invited to parties. It was probably the sparkling laugh. Her soft manner of speaking. She had that girl next door look. The plain but pretty affectation that puts just about anybody’s guard down. 

I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Lila had walked up behind me. 

“Hey, Maggie. I didn’t know you were working tonight.” Her voice had taken on an odd, somewhat strained quality.

“Yuppers! There’s been extra shifts to pick up ever since, y’know…”

“Dan.”

“Rest his beautiful soul.”

“Have you started on Mr. Huckle’s summer reading list?” Lila reached above me to take hold of the pizza. 

“I sure haven’t.” Margot’s mouth twitched. The sort of thing you could blink and miss. 

“You’d better get on it. Time goes much faster than any of us can keep track of.”

“Well you couldn’t be more correct. Matter of fact, I should go start on it right now. See ya around!” Margot turned on her heel and started to walk away 

“Don’t you want money?” Lila called after her. 

“Whoopsie daisy. I’d lose my silly little head if it weren’t attached.”

Lila held out a twenty. Margot took it and waved cheerily before getting back in her car. Lila carried the pizza inside and immediately dumped it in the garbage. I stared at her, open mouthed. 

“Sorry.” She offered after a moment. “Um… don’t eat that. I’ll order something else.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t want anything that bitch has touched.”

I absentmindedly scratched my forehead. The place where Abuelita had smeared the paste on me a week previously. It had been itching like crazy since that morning. The skin was turning progressively redder, like an allergic reaction.
 
Lila picked up the phone and placed some other food order. I slunk off to my room and stayed there until the food arrived. That night, I wedged a chair against my door after locking it, and clutched one of Abuelita’s spell pouches to my chest. I don’t think I even tried to sleep.

I didn’t rest a single night that Lila was in my house. I subsisted on cat naps taken in Violet’s jungle gym and the bag of old halloween candy in the freezer. 

Once or twice each night, I’d hear the soft rattle of someone trying to turn my locked doorknob. I’ve attempted to rationalize it. Just a sitter checking on their charge. But noises like that seem incredibly sinister when the moon is high and the shadows are long. 

The day my mother got home for the hospital, I crashed and slept a full seventeen hours. We chalked it up to stress or a summer cold and didn’t discuss it. 

***

Things happened very fast after that. It all shook out in a single weekend. 

An entire family killed and gutted while they slept. The Andersons, who lived about ten miles outside of town. The Andersons, who had owned Minnie’s Best Pizza for generations. Husband, wife, and three sons were all executed on a Friday night. The children were all injected with GHB and the violent wounds were inflicted after they went unconscious. They didn’t struggle in the slightest.

The husband and wife were also drugged, but the killer dragged them out to the barn. The killer tied the wife to a chair with duct tape and strapped the husband to his own bench saw. The wife was ultimately strangled. Perhaps after being forced to watch her husband get split in half.

The killer left a single note on the barn door.

Is there an easy crime of silence?

On Saturday night, Mr. Huckle the English teacher was abducted from home. The killer drove him outside of town to the bordering forest. Mr. Huckle died bound to a tree. Chest cavity and abdomen excavated completely. 

The note was pinned above him.

A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.

Mr. Johnson was the final victim. Dead early Sunday morning.

He’d been fired from his job at the steel factory towards the start of the summer, and nobody had seen much of him since. It seems he spent a majority of June, July and August chained up in his own basement. Fed nothing but the organs of other victims and the occasional energy bar. Given just enough water to keep him alive. 

In the end, he expired from simple starvation. The ultimate message was scrawled on the walls with his blood, post-mortem.

“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”

***

Margot Johnson turned herself in on Monday morning. She gave a full and detailed confession with a smile on her face. She gave most of her targets “free pizza” laced with sedatives. Once they’d passed out, she broke in and killed them. In her final spree, she’d dropped the pizza gimmick. Because she knew she was almost done and wasn’t worried about being caught anymore. At first, the police didn’t believe her. But when they found her father’s corpse, they changed their tune. 

The trial was short. Margot got shipped off to a maximum security prison and is serving several consecutive life sentences. Minnesota abolished the death penalty in 1911, or I’m sure the prosecutor would have tried for it.
That’s where the official story ends. 

But there were whispers around town, suggesting Margot hadn’t acted alone. Her confession contained various inconsistencies. Mr. Epson, the grocer, swears that Margot was babysitting his daughter the night little Timmy Potts was kidnapped. The police took his statement, as well as that of Elisa Epson. But as she was only three years old, she couldn’t provide much useful detail. 

She did say one curious thing. A throwaway comment, about a witch coming to visit that night. A witch that sat in the kitchen and talked to Margot for a while. When asked why she thought Margot’s visitor was a witch, Elisa laughed and said “she was dressed like one!”

Another interesting, much discussed oddity of the case, is the notes. The notes didn’t start appearing until the fourth murder. The victim choice also seemed to change at around that point. In her retelling, Margot characterized her first three kills as a twisted sort of self defense. These had been her abusers. Mr. Kildare had molested her and said he’d make her disappear if she told anyone. Nathan had drugged and raped her at a party. Dan had coerced her into giving him oral sex one night when they were closing together. 

From there, however, she started exacting a more indirect revenge. The police chief who told her she didn’t have a case against Nathan, because there wasn’t any proof. The teacher she confided in who didn’t get her help. The owner of the pizza shop who had hired a scumbag like Dan. The father who never believed her, or blamed her for being a stupid slut.

The children were another deviation. Margot went after grown men. She killed men who hurt people. Her confession offered no explanation as to why she swerved and took the lives of four innocent children. 

In the official story, nobody mentions that Lila Covington used to babysit for the Andersons. Nobody mentions how Lila lived right next door to little Timmy Potts. It’s a small town. Such coincidences are far from unlikely.

Lila moved away at the end of the summer. Again, quite typical. A recent graduate heading off to college. She either changed her name or got married. I’ve looked. I even hired a private detective for a short while, but it seems that Lila fell off the map the second she left Sunshine. 

Perhaps it’s all just a paranoid flight of fancy. The manifestation of trauma I’ve never been able to process. It’s not so strange as far as coping mechanisms go. Becoming obsessed with the story of a hometown murderer and convincing yourself the police missed something. It won’t fix what happened. It likely won’t stop anything else from happening. 

But what else am I supposed to do?

***

In the late summer of 1999, after the murders stopped, I dug up the hex bag I’d watched Lila Covington bury in the backyard when she thought I was asleep. I brought it to Abuelita, as it seemed like the only rational thing to do. 

Violet, Patrick and I huddled around Abuelita’s kitchen table as she sliced the small leather pouch open and combed through it with her old, wrinkled hands. 

It was full of herbs, but smelled different than the ones Abuelita used. The herbs weren’t loose, they were clotted together with some brown, crusty substance. 

“Sangre.” She whispered. Blood.

She found the end of a bone and gently pulled it away from the herbs. Some of the tendons and rotten flesh still clung to the pale ivory. 

It was a human finger.