Though Kendrick's Monster is a work of fiction, it is not pure fabrication. All the crimes described within have a firm foundation in factual modern experience. Consider:
- At the age of three, Theodore Bundy awakened his caregiver when he disturbed her while stashing large knives under her mattress. He killed for the first time when he was fourteen, at which time a local neighborhood girl disappeared to her death. Bundy often wandered the streets at night, playing with 'imaginary friends', which activity quickly developed into criminal voyeurism.
- Jesse Pomeroy regularly tortured and killed animals as a young child. He brutally murdered two young boys when he was only fourteen years of age. While the evidence against him was instantly damning (they found the mummified corpse of one young girl in the basement of his home), and despite his many confessions, Pomeroy eventually claimed he was innocent, because 'a voice in [his] head' told him to say so.
- As early as the age of eight, Arthur Shawcross developed 'imaginary' friends, with which he would speak using 'strange voices'. By his early teens, he spent hours walking in the woods yelling at inanimate objects and beating the undergrowth with a stick, as if in torment from unseen demons.
- David Berkowitz said of his crimes, "The demons never stopped. I couldn't sleep. I had no strength to fight. I could barely drive. Coming home from work one night, I almost killed myself in the car. I needed to sleep. The demons wouldn't give me any peace."
While these are merely anecdotal illustrations of a murderous psyche's development, they nonetheless beg a central question; are these individuals evil and what is the true nature of this evil?
Perhaps these are real, tangible demons born of an unknown, nether world. Worse still, perhaps they are fantastic, intangible demons, born of a tormented mind, fashioned from the fabric of the human nature, which is the fabric that binds us all.
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