Well there it was. The makings of my fictional Journey into a new genre. But there was one very big problem problem. The story involving Nielsen was not fictional and I didn't write it; it actually occurred during this past Labor Day weekend and local and national papers carried headlines like the following: "Cook held in Maine B&B murder spree." The above is a composite from different sources. The real scary part, however, is that I had scoped out a story but got only as as far my title, "Savage Killings In Rural Maine." How was I to know that Christian Nielsen would be the one to work around it and fill in the gaps. The story already had been completed, albeit in tragic and horrible fashion. The entire experience was chilling.

Well, I'm back at it again and it's Wednesday, September 13, 2006 and I plan to write about either a mass murderer or a serial killer. The unsolved New Bedford, MA serial kllings would be my backdrop if I decided to go in that direction. From April to September of 1988 a serial murderer haunted New Bedford dumping his victims alongside highways outside of the city. The slain women were prostitutes and drug addicts, the last of which was not found until April 1989. All told eleven women were believed to have perished at this slayer's hands, two remained missing. Adding to the mystery was the fact that several of the victims could be linked to one another. There was one suspevt who committed suicid and another who moved to Florida after which the murders ceased and this, too, intrigued me.

Interestingly, there was speculation, though I didn't buy it, that this killer and Europe's "Lisbon Ripper" were the same person. The Ripper was a Portuguese serial slayer suspected of the killings of prostitutes and drug addicts in Portugal and other European countries that began about the time the New Bedford killings ended. Curiously, New Bedford does have a very sizable Portuguese population.

But the backdrop that most intrigued me was a mass murder that occurred on December 6, 1989, when Marc Lepine killed 14 engineering students at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Lepine, a moody, 25-year-old loner who blamed "feminists" for a series of failed career starts and lost jobs, gunned a bloody trail through the classrooms and cafeterias. When he finally shot himself with his Sturm Ruger 223-calibre semi-automatic rifle, the toll reached 15 dead and 13 wounded, all in just 20 minutes. It was a horror that shocked Canada and triggered deep soul-searching about the roots of violence against women The mass murder prompted tighter gun laws, which included the creation of the controversial national firearms registry. It also prompted Parliament to create the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women in 1991 to coincide with the December anniversary of the tragedy.