No movie tonight. Instead, Grimsley came over, to pick up some Guns 'N Roses books I had ordered for him on Amazon, and also to bring me the new Alice Cooper album as part of his payment. We are both very big fans of Alice going way back to the early years. Grimsley just saw him live, too, as part of last week's mega triple bill at The Greek Theater that also featured Edgar Winter (who opened) and Deep Purple (who headlined). To my mind, you can't have Deep Purple without Ritchie Blackmore, but Grim had a good time and was blown away by their keyboardist Don Airey, who also has been around for a very long time. We saw him way back in 1979 when he was a part of Rainbow - with Ritchie Blackmore - and then we saw him again with Ozzy's band in 1981, and even got to hang out and talk with him a bit at the after-show New Year's Eve party that year. That was the party we snuck into, at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA. We also met Randy Rhoads that night, and Ozzy, who was just beginning his relationship with Sharon, who looked a lot different back then.
The history of rock n' roll. But yeah, Don Airey was great back then, and Grim says he is even moreso today.
On an entirely different end of the spectrum, I just began reading a true crime book called "The Grim Sleeper" by a writer named Christine Pelisek, who used to work for the L.A. Weekly magazine. While on their staff, she was the first journalist in the city to pick up on the fuzzy (at the time) details of a possible serial murderer who was working in the already crime ridden areas of South Central Los Angeles. The cops, at the time, had not attached any significance to the case, as it happened to be in South Central - an almost all Black area. At best, they had put it on the back burner, but writer Pelisek, through her connection with the county Coroner, learned about it and began to write about what she had learned, thereby publicising it. It was she who nicknamed the apparent kiiler "The Grim Sleeper", and it was her relentless pushing of the story that caused the police to finally focus on it as a serial murder case. In past history, victims of serial murder have often been white, and the killer(s) white as well. But in this case the victims were all black women, and nobody in authority was paying as much heed. It is not fair or accurate to say that the cops didn't care, but because the killings happened in jaded, high crime South Central, the jaded police there wrote them off as just more of the same.
Christine Pelisek's stories in the LA Weekly, which I followed at the time beginning about ten years ago, wound up leading to the arrest of a man named Lonnie Franklin, who has since been convicted of "The Grim Sleeper" killings. He is a black man, making the case very rare, of a black serial killer with all black victims. Pelisek's angle wasn't so much race-based as it was about poverty. Not the poverty of the killer, who owned his own home and had a garbage collecting job with the city, but with the poverty and anonymity of the mostly faceless victims, most of whom were destitute.
In my younger years, from about age 17 to about age 40, I was an expert on serial killers. Not in the sense of an FBI profiler of course, but just through reading. In that time period I read every book I could get my hands on, about every crazed maniac who had been apprehended. I remember my sister Vickie, who is an awesome person and a great sister but who may not have had much insight into my interest in the subject, asking my Mom, "why does he read all that stuff"? She is very NewAge - or was, before the Age Of Trump, which has brought people back to the nitty-gritty - and at the time she equated my reading with a possible desire, on my part (in her mind) to be like the people I was reading about. That is the heart and soul of naivete.
I was reading about these people because I was fascinated by the Evil that people are capable of. I began my reading on this horrible subject when the book "Helter Skelter" was released, by Vincent Bugliosi, in 1977. Over the years I read up on every evil murderer from Lawrence Bittaker to Randy Craft to Son Of Sam to Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer and a host of others. Every last one you can name, really.
Right here in Northridge, on a street from my old paper route, is the final house that Richard Ramirez "The Night Stalker" ever broke into before he was caught. I drive by that house every single day on my way to Pearl's.
So, for whatever reason, this thing is in my system. I actually stopped reading books about serial killers after reading about BTK in 2005 or so. He was so awful (and memorialised in Steven Wilson's song "Index") that I swore off books on the subject. And I have not read one, nor been interested in reading, until "The Grim Sleeper" was recently published, and I think my interest was due to author Pelisek's relentless pursuit of the truth.
Grim says I should have been a Homicide detective, and I think I will be one in some future life.
As I've said many times, I really, really don't like it when Bad Guys - and especially Evil Guys - get away with their crimes. I have been a detective in my own life, and have thought that in some way it's a part of my calling. /////
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