I never really got it.

He didn’t look like he would kill a puppy, never mind dozens.  But that’s what people would say.  It’s how the world works, I guess.  And the more I read about him, the less and less I believed any of it.  Missing dogs in the city then became missing children, missing women, missing men.  It was all there for us to see, basically.  This was when you could still read newspapers and they gave you news.  Not like now.

No one made the connections at first; these odd occurrences being months apart.  I was a little girl when I first started reading about this, when I first started hearing it.  Because it went on for many years, and, as I found out much later, it had gone on for years prior.  Again, how the world works: nothing is really new.

I kept up with the press coverage every since they published a drawing of the man “suspected” in all of these incidents.  He was spied by an elderly couple once, and they called police for help when they heard and saw him trying to steal a woman off the street.  What a weird way to think of it, “stealing a woman.”  The way knights would steal princesses in stories.  I was thirteen, then.  And the drawing all over the news was of a mid-to-late-thirties white man, short blondish hair, light beard, slim and tall, fit.  I never said so, but I always thought the man in the police drawing in the news looked like Brad Pitt.  It was the lips.

And they scoured the city.  Supposedly.  That’s what police say whenever something like this happens.  When someone goes missing, they’re always “scouring” places.  I learned that whenever they say that on the news or in newspapers, that never works, usually the person they’re searching for police find once they’re dead.  My mother used to scour her pots and pans and things like that.

So, years went on like that, missing people, missing animals.  None of them were ever found - not that I know of.  And what began happening were circumstantial things to connect everything to the Brad Pitt look-alike: the time of day of every abduction, the day of the week, the time of the month, the part of the year - things like that.  But no one could be sure.  When I was twenty-something, they made a bad movie about the guy and while they didn’t get Brad Pitt to play him, the actor they did get was very handsome but forgettable.  In the movie, this guy, he’s charismatic and non-violent, but in the end he winds up killing everyone and everything he steals…but you feel sorry for him.  This weird compulsion of his, and in the movie theater, I cried when the last scene showed him talking to two mothers in a park somewhere in the city, as the sun sets, and I cried not because you just knew he was going to steal one of them once the end credits rolled, but because I knew he didn’t mean it.  There was no sequel.

They never caught him, and too many years later, after so many disappeared, never to be seen again, he was all but forgotten.  It’s a little sad.

In my closet I’ve clippings that are about him.  Or, better, people think are about him.  And one of them is a newspaper copy of that police drawing of him, back from when I was a kid.  I have it in a plastic comic book bag and board to keep it safe.  I wondered a lot over the years who he was and why he did what he did, but that’s not really what matters, I guess.  I remember first seeing the police drawing on this man and thinking - resolutely, naively - back then that I wanted him to be my boyfriend.  But only for a week.