The Serial Killer Next Door: The Double Lives of Notorious Murderers

by Richard Estep

Overview

How well do you know your neighbors? Maybe you should get to know them better! Growing up, we are taught that monsters are easy to identify, but the truth is very different. Too often, the serial murderer does not stand out. Otherwise, he, or she, would get caught.

The contrast between the ordinary-seeming lives that provided cover for their cruel secrets is exposed in The Serial Killer Next Door: The Double Lives of Notorious Murderers. To their coworkers, neighbors, and others who knew them, they led unremarkable lives. They had careers as military pilots, police officers, landscapers, small business owners, farmers, realtors, reporters, authors, veterinary technicians, nurses, doctors, handymen, painters, and chefs, while they simultaneously stalked city suburbs, college campuses, trailer parks, and red-light districts. This chilling book looks at the horrifying stories of nearly 30 malevolent killers (and hundreds of innocent victims) who were mistakenly trusted, including …

• Genene Jones, a nurse responsible for the murder of 60 infants and children in her care. She’s said to be the inspiration for Stephen King’s iconic character of Annie Wilkes, in Misery – and her nephew broke into King’s home, threatening to blow up the writer and his family because of it!
• Robert Lee Yates, a helicopter pilot in the Army National Guard who, when caught, buried one body outside his bedroom window as his wife slept.
• Gary Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, went undetected for 20 years, working for 30 years as a painter for a truck company and married for 17 years.
• Kathleen Folbigg, whose three children were at first thought to have died from natural causes. She only got caught when her husband found her personal diary.
• Joseph James DeAngelo, who worked various jobs, including as a police officer and a truck mechanic. He went on a decades-long crime spree and was finally caught with the help of DNA evidence. His case was instrumental in the establishment of California's DNA database.
• And dozens of other serial killers!

It’s chilling to realize that many serial killers have created second lives that are completely divorced from the brutality and evils they commit. It’s incomprehensible to think that they are able to flip a switch, transforming them from apparently loving, ordinary men and women into torturous, homicidal slaughterers. With more than 120 photos and graphics, The Serial Killer Next Door is richly illustrated. Its helpful bibliography and extensive index add to its usefulness. We trust our neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances. Of course, we do. It's ominous to think that we can't!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578598175
Publisher:	Visible Ink Press
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Series:	Dark Minds True Crimes
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	518,603
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard Estep is the author of more than twenty books, including Visible Ink Press’ Serial Killers: The Minds, Methods, and Mayhem of History's Most Notorious Murderers and The Handy Armed Forces Answer Book. Additionally, he’s written numerous paranormal nonfiction titles, including, The Horrors of Fox Hollow Farm: Unraveling the History Hauntings of a Serial Killer’s Home. He is a regular columnist for Haunted Magazine and has also written for the Journal of Emergency Medical Services and appears regularly on TV shows such as Haunted Hospitals. He has had a lifelong fascination for true crime, the military, and ghosts. British by birth, Richard now makes his home in Colorado a few miles north of Denver, where he serves as a paramedic and lives with his wife and a menagerie of adopted animals.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SUFFER THE CHILDREN – GENENE JONES

Clad in a dark blue prisoner’s uniform, Genene Jones cut a pathetic figure as she sat in San Antonio’s Bexar County courtroom on 16 January 2020. To the casual eye, the heavy-set, matronly 69-year-old looked like nothing more than a particularly morose grandmother. In actuality, she was one of the most prolific child killers in the history of the United States, and a black mark on the medical profession to which she belonged. 

Peering at reporters and photographers from behind thick-rimmed black spectacles, the stone-faced former nurse was still absorbing the fact that she had just been sentenced to spend, at the very least, the next twenty years of her life in prison. 

Although some serial killers derive enjoyment from the fact that their victims put up a fight, others prefer to prey on those who are defenseless and vulnerable. There are few who are less capable of protecting themselves than young children. As a pediatric nurse, Jones had the sacred duty of healing those infant charges who were entrusted into her care. Instead, she deliberately snuffed out dozens of innocent lives during a medical career which would be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Abandoned by her biological parents and placed into the care of a couple who adopted her. As a child, Genene Jones never quite fit in anywhere. She was born on 13 July 1950, in Texas. Little is known about her childhood, other than the fact that she had three other adopted siblings, one of whom — a younger brother — died in an explosion at the age of 16. Genene never got over his death. 

In 1968, at the age of 17, she married a young man her own age. Four years later, they had a son together. In order to help support their family, Jones took a job in the field of beauty and cosmetology. A second child followed (a daughter this time) in 1977. This was the same year that Jones decided to pursue a career in medicine, enrolling in nursing school. She and her husband divorced, on the grounds that he abused her physically and emotionally, but Genene did not let that prevent her from finishing up her education. 

After completing her schooling, Jones earned the credential of licensed vocational nurse in the state of Texas and began looking for work. Although an LVN is not trained to the same level as a registered nurse, they perform skilled and important work, much of it in the form of hands-on patient care. Just as today, there was no shortage of work for licensed nurses.

From the very outset, she earned herself a reputation among her colleagues for being something of an unusual character. She was boisterous and loud, never missing the opportunity to tell a crude or smutty joke, preferably one laden with profanity. That’s not necessarily unusual in the medical field, where a black and often highly inappropriate sense of humor is sometimes a necessary coping mechanism. Jones liked to relate stories with a sexual bent to them, tales of men she had supposedly slept with, or wanted to, replete with lurid and graphic details. She was nothing if not an attention seeker. 

She also had a hot temper and was not the sort of person to take a perceived slight or insult lying down. Nobody pushed Genene Jones around. She could be argumentative and confrontational when provoked, quick to anger and slow to forgive. Her co-workers were sometimes wary of “poking the bear.” More than one doctor or nurse had gotten on the wrong side of her abrasive personality. 

The fall of 1978 saw her being working at new job in the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) at San Antonio’s Bexar County Medical Center Hospital. Typically, the sickest and least stable children are admitted to PICUs; those who require round-the-clock treatment and monitoring. The nurse-to-child ratio is usually very low. The latest addition to the nursing staff worked the night shift and made a name for herself as being technically adept, clinically proficient…and confident to the point of arrogance. PICU nursing is some of the most difficult, challenging, and high-stress work in the medical field. It drew Genene Jones toward it like a moth to a flame. For all of her issues, she was regarded as an excellent nurse, knowledgeable and dependable. 

Nobody suspected that she might also possess murderous tendencies. And so it began … 

Coda:

In April of 1991, a 26-year-old man broke into the Bangor, Maine home of acclaimed horror novelist Stephen King. The author’s wife, Tabitha, had the terrifying experience of being confronted by a stranger in her own house. The man claimed to have a bomb in the backpack he carried. After confronting Mrs. King, he locked himself in the attic and refused to come out.

Fortunately, the police were able to take the intruder into custody without any further incident. The backpack bomb proved to be nothing more than a hoax. 

The reason behind the break-in was bizarre. In 1987, King had published the bestselling novel “Misery.” It tells the story of Annie Wilkes, the self-proclaimed “number one fan” of a writer of historical fiction named Paul Sheldon. By turns charming and psychotically deranged, Annie kidnaps the author and keeps him captive in her home, forcing him to write a sequel to her favorite series of novels. When Sheldon attempts to escape, Annie — a former nurse — hobbles him in a truly uncomfortable scene which made readers and viewers of Rob Reiner’s movie adaptation wince. As the story progresses, it also transpires that, during her nursing career, Annie was a serial killer. Many of her victims were infants. 

Whether written on the page by King or portrayed on screen in a powerhouse performance by Kathy Bates, Annie Wilkes is a truly iconic, larger-than-life character. She has come to define the crazed, obsessive “super fan” that all celebrities fear. 

What does this have to do with the break-in at the Kings’ home? The intruder was convinced that Stephen King had based the character of Annie Wilkes on the life of his aunt and wanted the writer to help him publish a sequel that he had written himself. 

The man was Genene Jones’ nephew, thus proving that sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1. Ronald Dominique

2. Jack Unterweger

3. Mikhail Popkov

4. Gerard Schaefer

5. Levi Bellfield

6. Joseph James DeAngelo

7. Russell Williams

8. Robert Lee Yates

9. Vickie Dawn Jackson

10. Michael Swango

11. Genene Jones

12. Elizabeth Wettlaufer

13. Bruce McArthur

14. Robert Pickton

15. Israel Keyes

16. Gary Ridgway

17. Paul Bernardo and Karen Homolka

18. Todd Kohlhepp

19. Stephen Port

20. Robert Berdella

21. John Norman Collins

22. Joanna Dennehy

23. Kathleen Folbigg

24. Pedro Lopez

25. Robert Maudsley

26. The Snowtown Killers

Further Reading

Index 

Editorial Reviews

"Could a serial killer live next door to any of us? Richard Estep shares tales of serial killers who slipped under the radar while doing their evil deeds." —Jim Harold’s Crime Scene

"... details the double lives of 30 lesser-known serial killers like the Golden State Killer, the Green River Killer, the Ken and Barbie Killers, the Bayou Strangler, the Austrian Ripper, and others. He provides profiles of the public and private lives of these killers as paramedics, physicians, nurses, painters, gardeners, handymen, chefs, accountants, real estate brokers, entertainers, and military members, including Robert Lee Yates, Vickie Dawn Jackson, Robert “Willie” Pickton, Israel Keyes, Gary Ridgway, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Todd Kohlhepp, Joanna Dennehy, Ronald J. Dominique, and Joseph James D’Angelo, also detailing their motivations for killing." —Book News

"… for a full look at some of the people inside … prisons." —Indianapolis Recorder

From the Publisher