Free to Feel

"Jive talkin'
You're telling me lies, yeah
Jive talkin'
You wear a disguise
Jive talkin'
So misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin'
You just ain't no good..."

–Bee Gees, Jive Talkin'

Visalia Ransacker

The bad man was 20 feet from my sister and me. We were asleep, being alone most nights, our mother working the swing shift as a police dispatcher and our first stepdad working graveyard at a tire plant over 40 minutes away.

The bad man was 20 feet from my sister and me, breaking into our house from inside the garage. We'd left the door from the backyard to garage open, leaving him easy entry. Fortunately, my mother had left work earlier than usual, some time after midnight. She pulled into the driveway, got out of my stepdad's Corvette she drove to and from work less than 10 minutes away, and opened our garage door. The Corvette's headlights filled the garage with eerie white light.

The bad man stood at garage door that led into our house. He turned and his eyes shone bright through the holes in the dark ski mask he wore. Immediately he fled through the backyard. Immediately our mother jumped back into the Corvette, drove across the street into our neighbor's driveway, and then pounded on their door to wake them. They called the police.

The bad man was long gone by the time the police arrived. I remember being woken by our mother to tell us what happened, why police officers were all over house. Some of the officers asked us questions, questions we couldn't answer because we'd been asleep.

No, we didn't hear anything. No, we didn't see anything. 

The year was 1975, two years earlier than when I thought it all went down -- I was 10 and my sister 8. Which made sense, since the bad man I'm referring to was known as the Visalia Ransacker. He stalked Visalia from about 1974-1975, before moving on and escalating his violence; he was also known as the East Area Rapist, the Golden State Killer and the Original Night Stalker. Joseph James DeAngelo, a white male and former police officer, now 72 years old, was recently arrested after all these years, having committed at least 12 murders, more than 45 rapes, and over 100 burglaries in California from 1974 to 1986.

I had forgotten about the Visalia Ransacker for decades until my sister recently started asking me what I remembered. Our second stepdad, the one we always considered to be dad, was a police officer and detective for 32 years. One of his colleagues had worked on the Ransacker case and continued to do so for years, even after he retired. During the late 1970's, that's all the Visalia Police Department talked about. My sister also followed the case for years, theorizing for him to get away with everything he got away with, he had most likely been a police officer, which he was. She got me started reading I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.

Chilling now, because more than likely he'd been stalking our family, just like he did with all the homes he broke into, with all the victims he terrorized, raped and killed. In fact, the odds are pretty good that he had already been inside our house prior to that night.

For my sister and I at the time, the horrid irony was that we lived with a real bad man, our first stepdad. He emotionally and physically abused our mother, emotionally abused my sister, and sexually abused me. His crazy didn't escalate until about a year after our mother found the Ransacker in our garage.

According to RAINN and the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 60 percent of sexual assault perpetrators are white (probably higher) and mostly male. There are simply too many angry white men and boys in American society, something that patriarchy -- in this country's case, white men holding all the power and excluding women and minorities, who are encouraged to squash their own vulnerability and all emotional outlets -- has incubated for decades in the hearts and souls of too many repressed men. If you haven't seen The Mask You Live In, I highly recommend it. The documentary follows boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity.

I'm not a criminologist or a sociologist or a mental health professional, and sometimes crazy is crazy, but I am a man who grew up with violence and sexual abuse; a man who's thankfully not emotionally repressed (I thank my mother for that); a man who's now a father of two girls and married to an amazing partner and mother. So, when I hear that the latest school shooter in Texas had pushed his romantic inclinations onto a girl who refused his advances, and then she became one his victims, I'm furious and flummoxed. Same as when I hear crazy talk about the Toronto van killer by this so-called patriarchal proponent: “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges."

America cultivates this repressive and violent culture. We can no longer stand by as ineffectual bystanders and shake our heads at these tragedies. We have to be the positive change of awareness and prevention that ends this emotional repression, this toxic patriarchy, with both men and women alike. And it all starts with our children, our boys, being free to feel and love in healthy relationships in healthy environments.