Memories of a Racist Serial Killer -- Repressed and Obsessed

Last updated: Sunday 1/21/14 @ 5:34 pm

This is a very personal note, a memoir about scary events that happened back in 1975, memories that were, evidently, so disturbing that I have repressed them for 39 years.

A. Repression
This evening, Saturday 1/18/2014, I was having a pleasant chat with my ex-wife at her home in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, about the birth of our younger daughter's first child a few days ago. Mother and daughter are doing well. Perhaps it was our thinking about our daughter's own birth and childhood that prompted my ex-wife to suddenly ask me if I ever thought about the time the serial killer almost killed all four of us. "What killer? When? What's she talking about?" were my first thoughts. Then ... slowly ... the memories began to return ... oh ... yes ...

It was 1975. Our younger daughter was still a babe in arms. We had driven out on a Sunday afternoon to buy something for the baby or some other domestic requirement -- me driving, my wife sitting in the passenger seat holding our baby girl, our five year old other daughter in the back seat. As we pulled into a parking spot in front of a drugstore in Wheaton, Maryland, I suddenly threw the car into reverse and hit the gas with such force for a split second that the baby almost flew out of my wife's arms into the windshield. She shreiked. I jammed on the brakes. "Why the hell did you do that???!!!" she demanded ... I was stunned. I really didn't know why I had just risked our baby's life. It was like I had blanked out. Then as I regained consciousness, I just stammered, "There's something very bad about that guy standing in front of the drugstore."

She looked and I looked. He was white and had unpleasant features, but there was nothing about him that would justify my risking our baby's life. Our car was now idling in the middle of the parking lot, so my wife told me to park in another spot.  I parked and went into the drugstore, feeling greatly confused, unbelievably stupid, and deeply ashamed. I don't remember what I had been looking for, but I do remember looking for around five or ten minutes and not finding it. So I returned to the car. When I got inside, my wife said "I think you're right. There's something very wrong about him. Let's go someplace else." ... So we drove down the road.

The car radio was on, tuned to a local news and talk station that I listened to frequently in those days. About fifteen to thirty minutes after we had driven away from the drug store, we heard an announcement that a white gunman had gone on a killing spree, beginning in that same parking lot. He only shot black people. A few had died; others were seriously wounded. Later reports said that the gunman had been killed by the police.

I distinctly recall the initial news report saying that the police did not think that the shootings were racially motivated. And I remember feeling incredibly angry. The drugstore was not located in a black neighborhood. The neighborhood was well integrated. The only way the gunman could have only shot black people was his deliberate intention to only shoot black people.

My wife and I were shaken by this announcement because she is white. We quickly concluded that the sight of an interracial couple was the trigger that set the racist killer off on his shooting spree. Indeed, when we had moved to the DC area from Boston three years earlier we had originally decided to move into DC itself rather than into Maryland or Virginia because of our judgment that as an interracial couple that we would encounter far less overt racism in the District than in the bordering states. But our concerns about good public schools for our children caused us settle in and remain in Maryland.

The day after the shooting, when I went down to my office on the main campus of my HBCU, I told a couple of my colleagues about the incident. I remember one of them remarking that he had been concerned about me when he heard about the shootings because he knew that I lived very near that drugstore. And that's the last time I can recall talking to anyone about it or even thinking about it. The memory was totally repressed until tonight.

So in answer to the question from my ex-wife, I honestly replied that I had never thought about the incident until just now; but now that I think about it, let's see if Google can find any descriptions. So I opened the browser on my smart phone and plugged in the terms "shooting wheaton maryland 1975 gun black dead." Google returned the following blog note as its first entry

• "Sidewise Thinking: Eyewitness to Murder"

B. Obsession
When you read the white author's account, you will learn that he drove through the location around the time of the shooting spree. He saw some people crouching and others on the ground, but he did not report hearing gunfire. Indeed, his immediate thought was that one of the people on the ground was drunk. So when he drove by a police station at some point down the road, he stopped in to report his seeing the man who was drunk. The police quickly corrected his gross misapprehension of the incident and interrogated him as an eyewitness.

The author never stopped thinking about the incident, mainly because of his obsession with the question of whether he could have done anything to have stopped the gunman from shooting anyone else. The fact that he didn't report hearing any gunfire suggests that he must have driven through the area during a lull between the gunman's serial assassinations. Indeed, his obsession and his desire for closure led him to post his own memoir about the incident on its 35th anniversary in 2010; and then to post a follow-up note in 2012 that reported information he had received from other eye-witnesses or relatives of the victims who had read his first blog.

C. Why the Repression???
When I suddenly threw our car into reverse on that Sunday back in 1975, my actions proceeded faster than the speed of thought and on a deeper level than conscious thought. I still don't know what I knew or how I knew what I knew. But now that my memory is restored, I am as convinced today as I was 39 years ago that our leaving that parking lot saved our lives. So the question that jangles in my brain tonight is "Why did I repress this memory for so long?"

I will probably obsess about this question for the next few days ... or weeks ... or months ... or years.

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Related note

• At the Gates of Distraction ... July 2009