Tracing the Echoes of Violence: Remembering the Mind of a Killer

There’s a particular smell that lingers in the air after something terrible happens. It’s not blood or sweat, but something human mixed with silence—the kind of silence that makes memory echo louder than sound. When I think of the man they later called a killer, I don’t recall the crime. I recall the quiet that came before it.

I knew him once, long before headlines gave him another name. We were young, aimless, the kind of people who mistake stillness for safety. He had this uneasy calm about him, a stillness that could be read as thoughtfulness if you didn’t look too closely. Maybe I didn’t want to look. People like to think you can sense evil beforehand, that it gives off a scent or a tremor in the air. But truthfully, most of the time, it’s just another face.

When the news broke, the shock wasn’t sudden but spreading, like an old bruise. I remember the photo they used: his school picture, unassuming, framed by the same forced smile I’d seen a hundred times. Reporters argued about motive, police searched through timelines, neighbors talked about how they “always knew something was off.” But I didn’t. That’s the part I can’t shake. I should’ve noticed, I tell myself, though that sentence has no real ending.

Memory is never innocent; it chooses what to keep and what to distort. In my mind, he’s still walking beside me down the narrow gravel path behind the arcade. The sodium lights made shadows of our faces, gold and uncertain. He was quiet that night, tracing circles in the dirt with his shoe. I asked him what he was thinking. He said, “Sometimes, I think I stand outside my own life and watch it fall apart.” I laughed, thinking it was just another one of his cryptic musings. But that sentence has come back to me every year since—long after the trial, long after the guilty verdict, long after I stopped speaking his name aloud.

Maybe I remember him because forgetting feels dishonest. The human instinct is to reduce—monster, murderer, psychopath—words that cleanse our conscience through distance. But I can’t forget how he once fixed my bike chain when it broke by the river, or the way he’d stare at clouds as if they might rearrange themselves into meaning. Those fragments belong to me, not the public record. And yet, they feel contaminated, touched by something I didn’t understand until it was too late.

I’ve come to think of memory as an accomplice. It protects us selectively, erasing the unbearable so we can keep moving. But when memory refuses to cooperate—when it insists on playing the same reels of laughter and small kindness—it becomes a form of imprisonment. I can’t look at old photographs without scanning them for clues, as if the future had already been written on his face. Maybe it was. Or maybe the story was ordinary until the day it wasn’t.

Years later, I visited the courthouse archives. I don’t know what I expected. The file was thick, the paperwork unremarkable. Words like “premeditated” and “malice aforethought” sat beside words like “childhood trauma” and “unresolved grief.” Reading it felt like trespassing into a life I no longer recognized. There was a statement from his mother, a woman I hadn’t met in decades. She said, “He was not born cruel. He just grew tired of being afraid.” That sentence gutted me more than the verdict ever did.

I can’t defend what he did. No one can. But I’ve stopped trying to align my memory of him with the person the world remembers. Maybe there are two truths existing side by side: the boy I knew and the man the world condemned. It’s the space between them that haunts me—the dissonance between who we are in memory and who we become in history.

In quieter moments, I still hear his imagined voice. He doesn’t speak of guilt or redemption. He just asks, “Do you still think of me as before?” To that, I can only answer honestly: yes. But “as before” no longer means innocence. It means witnessing the slow erosion of a human being and realizing how fragile that boundary always was.

I write this not because I forgive him, but because memory doesn’t belong solely to the dead or the guilty. It belongs to those left behind, the ones forced to make sense of the fracture between remembrance and reality. Every recollection becomes an act of translation—turning pain into order, turning fear into narrative, turning disbelief into something survivable.

When people speak of killers, they often ask about motive, pathology, and evil. I’ve learned those are easier questions than the one no one dares to voice: what happens to those who loved them before they became unlovable? There’s no public ritual for that kind of mourning. No neat closure. Just the lifelong burden of memory, and the persistent hum of guilt that maybe, deep down, you missed something you should’ve seen.

Still, I keep remembering. Because forgetting would feel like another kind of death—a quieter one, maybe, but just as final.