William Royden

And then he'd pretend to kill them in various ways by burning them, stabbing them, hanging them.

He was trying to stop himself from doing the real thing.

But finally, after several hostile psychiatric sessions with Steen, in which Steen got Settle to admit to a history of necrophilia, he snapped.

and abducted the man before that night he'd dolled up and painted so many mannequins to look like Steen that they kept accidentally digging them up all over Robinson for another two years Cording told me they executed Settle in 1997 one of the last things he said in court supposedly was that he wished he was different but the town had made him sick Cording pointed up the hill toward Settle's house

I could actually see the edge of it through the trees, which during the prior two weeks had lost most of their leaves.

I knew the story of what the settle had done.

As a 12-year-old, I'd once gone with some friends to the property and dared them to go inside the house, which had been abandoned since he'd been put in jail.

We never set foot inside.

We'd been too scared.

When Cording was finished speaking, giving me no context for the story, he turned and walked on.

We went for another twenty minutes or so until we came to Mount Halcyon Cemetery on Ridge Road.

It slopes gently up a long hill and is bordered by a cremation garden.

Cording walked very slowly through it.

I got the sense that he was headed toward a certain grave.

We went on a long straight line toward the very opposite edge of the cemetery.

There, the acreage petered out into a quiet field, screened by trees from Bowler Avenue.

The graves became more scattered and more understated.

Cording walked up to one of them.

The headstone was not even marked with a last name.

Just a first name and a date.