Forgive Us Our Sins
by Philip Luber
Chapter One: THE MASSACRE
The President was at his oceanside retreat, still recovering from thyroid
treatments, when they photographed him reading a copy of my book. Sales took
off nicely after that.
The shopping mall massacre occurred three weeks later.
Book sales skyrocketed.
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If you look very, very closely, you can still see a bullet hole and a
nickel-sized blood stain. They're in a recession in the wall near the entrance
to the Thom McCan shoe store.
An Austin Sanitation Department supervisor pointed them out to me months after
the massacre. "They wanted us to get rid of every trace of what happened
that day," he said. "Like out in San Diego, when they bulldozed the
McDonald's where that psycho killed all those people back in '84. They weren't
gonna bulldoze this whole shopping mall, though. So they settled for the next
best thing. Putty in every bullet hole, sand it down and paint it. Mop up every
stain, sandblast the ones they can't mop up.
"But it just didn't seem right to me," he continued. "One of the
victims was a neighbor of mine." He fell silent for a moment and studied
the back of his hand. "So I made sure we left that bullet hole, over
there, and this patch of blood down here. I thought there should be something
left, some reminder of what happened that day."
What happened that day: Karl Fenner was wearing Army fatigues when he burst
through the west entrance of Austin's Highland Mall. It was noontime on the
third Monday of February, 1992, and the mall was packed with people for its
annual Presidents' Day sale.
Just inside the mall entrance, he bowled over two people. The first shopper was
carrying several bags. The second shopper was carrying her infant daughter.
Fenner carried a rifle: a .223 caliber Colt AR-15, loaded with a twenty-shot
clip.
He raced up a stairway and moved to a position half-way down the upper level
walkway, directly in front of Scarborough's department store. He leaned against
the railing for support and took aim at the lower level doorway of Highland
Music City. Three teenagers were on their way out of the store.
The first shot caught Rebecca Billingham a half-inch below her right eye. The
bullet's momentum jerked her head back and lifted her body off the ground. She
fell backward into the store, arms outstretched, half of her face dissolved
into pulp, blood pumping onto a display rack of blank audio cassettes.
Gloria Wells stood frozen as her friend lay dying. She covered her ears with
her hands and screamed. Her cries were cut short by Fenner's second shot. The
bullet pierced her left side near her armpit, splintered a rib, traveled a
slightly downward trajectory, and punctured her heart.
Theresa Cummings dropped her Garth Brooks compact disk and bolted from the
record store. She didn't get far. Fenner's third shot passed through her thigh
and lodged in the front wall of the Thom McCan store. The next bullet
penetrated deep into her belly, and another one splattered several grams of
brain tissue across the lower level floor.
Fenner pivoted slightly and aimed once more at the entrance to the record
store. Just then a young clerk from Scarborough's ran out to discover the
source of all the commotion. He slipped on the walkway and bumped into Karl
Fenner.
The killer spun around and faced the young man. "All he said was,
`Devil,'" the clerk reported later. "His eyes looked crazy. Then I saw
the rifle, and I smelled the cordite. I don't even remember what happened
next."
What happened next: The clerk jammed the edge of his clipboard into the space
between Fenner's nostrils and upper lip. Fenner's head rolled back slightly,
and the clerk jabbed the clipboard into the killer's Adam's apple over and over
again. The rifle discharged. The bullet grazed the clerk's arm, and the recoil
pressed Fenner against the railing. The clerk swung wildly with his clipboard,
catching Fenner flush on the forehead.
The killer teetered on the railing for a moment, then plunged head-first to the
lower level walkway. His dead body lay face up on the ground, his torso bent
toward his feet at an impossible angle. The impact had caused him to bite
completely through his lower lip, and his shattered teeth showed through the
bloody gash like pebbles in a muddy stream.
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"The man was a real creep," one of Karl Fenner's factory co-workers
told a wire-service reporter. "He scared the hell out of all of us."
Fenner's next-door neighbor was more blunt. "I hated the son of a bitch.
I'm glad he's dead."
Fenner was a Vietnam veteran with a psychiatric discharge who returned to
Austin after his military service to lead an isolated, desultory existence. In
the aftermath of the shopping mall massacre, no one could be found who had a
kind word to say about him. He was a nuisance, he was a misfit, he was odd and
frightening. He was a hating and hateful man. And now -- to nobody's expressed
regret -- he was dead.
The police found Fenner's van parked outside the west entrance of the shopping
mall. On the front seat was the morning newspaper, folded over to an
advertisement for the Presidents' Day sale at Highland Music City.
Fenner had a one-room apartment near the airport. When the police searched it,
they discovered a copy of my novel, Soldier and Son, on the window
ledge.
Soldier and Son, my third book, was inspired by my work years earlier as
a psychiatrist at a Veterans Administration Hospital. It tells the story of an
Army inductee from Austin who is sent to fight in Vietnam. After six months of
search-and- destroy missions, he suffers a nervous breakdown and is returned
home with a psychiatric discharge. But the war follows him, stuck inside his
mind like a videotape on perpetual replay. He is depressed, he is anxious, he
sees danger in every stranger's face. On page 275 of the book he dresses in
Army fatigues and takes his .223 caliber Colt AR-15 rifle to an Austin shopping
mall. He kills the owner of a record store and a customer, and he takes several
persons hostage. He is mortally wounded in a hail of police bullets.
A three-week old newspaper photo was attached with a paper clip to page 275 of
Fenner's copy of my book. It was a picture of the President relaxing in Maine.
He was sitting in front of a fire with his wife at his side, a cup of cocoa in
his hand, and a copy of Soldier and Son propped open in front of him.
Among Fenner's belongings were some newly-purchased compact disks, with various
lyrics on the album inserts circled in red ink; pornographic magazines, with
several graphic pictures defaced or torn; mail-order literature from a
half-dozen T.V. evangelists; a dog-eared New Testament; and a photocopy of a
letter he had written one month earlier. The letter began:
Luferac
eb tsum ew, semit lla ta su hctaw yeht, uoy morf egassem terces a, od ot em
tnaw uoy od tahw, won em llet, ereh spots kcub eht
The
unintelligible words continued for several paragraphs. Someone discovered that
the message made better sense when it was rewritten from the end to the
beginning. Thus decoded, the letter read:
January
15 The President
The White House
Washington (I cannot tell a lie), D.C.
Dear Sir:
Fire rules the human brain, a devil-fire brought forth upon this continent,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are sinners
against the Lord
Conceived, conception, copulation
Proposition, proposition, prostitution
Listen to the song, Lucifer's coat, play it backwards, the words "we fuck
for Satan, we fuck for Satan, we fuck for Satan, we fuck for Satan" are
plainly heard: a devil-message aimed at the heart of the little cunts and
whores
I am armed, but dangerous only to the flesh merchants and devil songsters who
aim at the cunt of the little hearts and whores, a soldier waiting for an order
from his Commander-in-Chief
The buck stops here, tell me now, what do you want me to do, a secret message
from you, they watch us at all times, we must be careful
Karl Fenner, A Christian Soldier
The phrase "Lucifer's coat" was apparently a reference to
"Lucy's Fur Coat", a hit recording by a group called the Syntonics.
Fenner had discerned a devil-worship message when he played the song backwards.
Needless to say, audiophiles near and far listened for the message after
Fenner's letter was released; and, needless to say, none found it.
In Newsweek, a renowned psychologist speculated thus: Fenner had sent
the President a coded, psychotic dispatch -- a warning about a Satanic message
on the Syntonics recording, and a veiled offer to take up arms at the
President's direction. Within days, Fenner saw something that he interpreted as
a secret return communication: the newsphoto of the President reading Soldier
and Son.
Fenner bought my book and read about a fellow Vietnam veteran who, armed with a
rifle just like his, launched an attack against a shopping mall record store in
Austin. And then Fenner found an ad for a sale -- a Presidents' Day sale
-- at the record store in an Austin mall. Featured prominently in the ad -- and
circled in red ink on the copy the police found in Fenner's van -- was a photo
of the Syntonics album.
Karl Fenner knew exactly what he had to do.
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