Paul Pender - The Butler Did It: My True and Terrifying Encounters with a Serial Killer

Paul Pender is a Scots-born writer who now lives and works in Hollywood. He wrote and co-produced the movie Evelyn starring Pierce Brosnan and is currently head of television at Infinity Media, the company that produced the Oscar-winning film Capote.

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Epub ISBN: 9781780574554

Version 1.0

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Copyright Paul Pender, 2012

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING company

(EDINBURGH) LTD

7 Albany Street

Edinburgh EH1 3UG

ISBN 9781780575612

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases, names of people, places, dates, sequences or the details of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publisher that, except in such cases, not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of the book are true.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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CONTENTS

You can always rely on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

T HIS BOOK IS IN one sense the record of a friendship, if friendship can be held to include death threats. To this day I cannot sharpen a pencil and as a writer I sharpen a lot of pencils without experiencing a frisson of fear. Roy is once again thrusting the pencils needle-sharp point towards my retina, threatening to ram it through my eye and into my brain, as he helpfully informs me Thisll kill you outright, you cunt!

Medical experts I have subsequently consulted tell me he was right: that is indeed a very effective way of killing someone. One of the many strange things about Roy is that though he may have been a pathological liar, in his own peculiar fashion he was a stickler for the truth.

Despite the fact that a sharp object through my eye would have been a very literary way to go (oh so Christopher Marlowe), I realised even then that the finality of the act would greatly outweigh any posthumous glamour.

That was to be the first of many threats Roy would make, either in person or through surrogates. Other threats were less anatomically precise but no less frightening. Once, late at night, I saw that the light on my home phones answering machine was blinking. I had a message. I pressed the play button, only to hear Pender, Ill have your balls for garters! delivered in a rasping, guttural and strangely otherworldly voice, reminiscent of the Devil in The Exorcist. Fear mingled with admiration as I marvelled that Beelzebub had somehow managed to adapt his cloven hoof to the delicate art of dialling.

I do not wish to tax your patience, dear reader, by speculating on the feasibility of converting balls into garters. Fortunately, at the time of writing my testicles are mercifully intact. Suffice it to say that such threats take on extra credibility when they are made by a man who, with no sign of remorse, has killed and killed again.

Why was it, then, that ten years later, safely ensconced in California, at the other end of an ocean and a decade, I felt genuinely saddened when I read of Roys death? I had expected to feel only relief, yet I remembered him with something like affection.

I realised that I missed our conversations, which were quite unlike those I have had with anyone else, before or since. California was in the midst of a heatwave, and as I looked out on the parched landscape, Roys death made me reflect that in our society of spin, doublespeak and political correctness, an authentic conversation between two people is as rare and as welcome as desert rain.

I left my office and walked along Santa Monica beach, where I picked up a large flat stone, thinking fondly of our discussions about skimming the stones we called skiters in Rothesay Bay on Scotlands Isle of Bute, the lost paradise of Roys childhood and of mine. The fun wed had, generations apart, the simple joy of making those stones dance defiantly across the waves.

This is for you, Roy, I thought, as I threw the stone with all my might. It skimmed the surface of the Pacific, hopping and skipping several times before it sank.

You danced across the waves, Roy! I said to myself with a smile. Just like you said you would.

I turned back to my office and went to my writing desk.

I had a promise to keep.

I braced myself and sharpened a pencil.

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

A S THE TAXI MEANDERED through a leafy English lane in the sleepy cathedral town of York, I felt my pulse racing. Soon I would be face to face with him. I was excited and a little nervous. Id never met a murderer before.

I hope you found those opening sentences arresting, dear reader. Arrests and sentences feature largely in the narrative that follows. But I jump ahead of myself. I hate to drag that sweet English rose Julie Andrews into this tale of death, deceit and debauchery, but as she so memorably trilled, Lets start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

As in all good books, in the beginning was the Word.

When this adventure began, words were my bread and butter. I was gainfully employed as a television script editor in the drama department of BBC Scotland, where my job was to work with writers, unknown and established, in an effort to get their scripts into shape for broadcast as TV drama. Having written some plays myself, I was to an extent a poacher turned gamekeeper: the job enabled me to revive my own dormant career as a writer.

I had spent the low dishonest decade of the 1980s in a squalid London bedsit trying to write the Great Novel. It was to be about the rise of Hitler, and humanitys apparent inability to resist the glamour of evil. When Id spent longer researching the book than Hitler took to lose the war, I began to suspect that, like him, I was fighting a losing battle. But I persevered, trying to convince myself, like the little moustachioed man in the bunker, that tomorrow belonged to me. I would be the great writer or bust.

For the bulk of the decade, I was on the verge of going bust. When I ran out of money for the electricity meter (a regular occurrence), I would sit freezing in the dark, pondering the unsolved mystery of why my bedsit smelled of cats piss and gas leak, even though the room was all-electric and I didnt have a cat.