Chapter One
“Okay, everybody, we have to get a move on if we’re gonna be on time for our next stop.” I motioned toward the tour van, then positioned myself to monitor the guests’ safety as they boarded.
A pasty, forty-something blond man who’d previously identified himself as Kevin sidled up to me, accompanied by Virginia, his blonde, skinny-jeaned wife whose pants were so tight they made me gasp for breath. “Hey. Is it true that you’re the granddaughter of—”
My hand shot up to cut off the question, and I pinned on my most charming smile. When I led any of my serial killer tours, it was a matter of when, not if, the question came up, and I’d learned early on how to deal with it adeptly. I bent toward them and lowered my voice. “It is true, and it’s actually part of the reason I started SF Killer Crime Tours. But let’s hold questions about that till the end so we can keep on schedule. We finish up at Lenny’s speakeasy and can chat over coffee or a cocktail if you’d like.”
Kevin’s pale blue eyes narrowed at me, judging if I were shining him on. Apparently he couldn’t decide, because he shoved his hands into his worn chino pockets and glanced over to Virginia.
She clapped her hands together. “Ooo! That sounds like the best conversation topic ever to have over a drink in a speakeasy!”
I kept my smile firmly in place and my resigned sigh firmly internal. Constantly revisiting the topic was like walking a twenty-mile hike with a burr in my sock, but I’d learned to focus on the bright side—this way I got to tell my grandfather’s side of it, and hopefully change a mind or two along the way. For now I needed to move on to the next tour talking point, so as soon as Kevin and his wife were safely belted in, I hurried to do so.
“Our next stop is the Tenderloin apartment where Richard Ramirez lived in 1984. He committed his first murder there—the first murder we know of, at least. I say that because the police didn’t even know he’d committed that murder until twenty years after he’d already been sent to jail, when DNA found at the scene was matched to his.” I glanced around to check everyone’s expressions, then continued on autopilot.
If you’d told me when I was seven that I’d make my living giving serial killer tours of San Francisco someday, I’d have looked at you like you were crazy and galloped off on my invisible zebra. But the eventual course of my life was set irrevocably into motion when, one day when I was an eight-year-old standing in line for my turn at tetherball, a girl named Stacey informed me my grandfather was a serial killer. Not in those exact words—hers were more along the lines of “Your grandpa was a psycho who murdered people”—but she got her meaning across just fine without the advanced terminology.
I didn’t believe her, of course. She was mean, the sort of girl who smiled biggest when other kids were crying, and I knew well enough to steer clear of her. So I turned my back and kept talking to my friends. But I mentally flinched when, rather than get louder and more in-my-face, Stacey just laughed. “Ask your parents. They’ll tell you,” she said, then walked away. Even back then I had enough emotional intelligence to realize her willingness to temporarily drop the issue did not bode well.
For the rest of the day, her words rang through my head and flopped in my stomach. Despite telling myself repeatedly I shouldn’t even waste breath bringing her nasty gossip to my parents, I didn’t last a full five minutes after my mother got home from work before blurting the whole thing out to her and breaking down into tears. I watched her face, waiting for anger at such a vicious lie to wrinkle her brow, or shock at such audacity to drop her jaw. Instead, her eyes studied my face the same way she looked at my knees when I scraped them, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt Stacey’d been telling the truth.
My mother sat me down and pulled out her tin of amaretti cookies, and if I hadn’t already realized the situation was dire, that would have clued me right in. Amaretti cookies were reserved for special occasions—birthdays, visits from relatives, dinner parties, holidays—and the only other time I’d ever been given one was when I fell off my bicycle so hard I broke my arm. So I wasn’t surprised when, as I nibbled on the crunchy almond mound, she patted my hand and told me that my father’s father, William Sanzio, was in jail for killing several women.
I picked up on her phrasing—even at eight I was good with words. “He is in jail. I thought Grampa Sanzio was dead?”
She sighed and shifted in her wooden kitchen chair. “No, honey, he’s not. Your father was planning to tell you the truth when you were older.”
I pushed away the rest of my cookie; that was an awful lot of reality for an eight-year-old to process, and my stomach twisted and churned as I slid all the pieces into place.
She reached for my hand. “How are you feeling?”
My mother had always been big on feelings. Exploring them, validating them, putting them under the microscope, until the only thing you were feeling was fed up with feelings.
I ignored her question. “Grampa killed people?”
She grabbed one of the cookies for herself and unwrapped it. “He says he didn’t. But the jury believed there was enough evidence to convict him.”
I latched on to the faint hope with every bit of my soul. “What evidence?”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t know exactly. It happened before I met your father.”
I glanced up at the oversized clock hanging above our refrigerator. “That’s okay, Dad’ll be home soon. I’ll ask him—”
She tensed, and gripped my hand. “Honey, the thing is—well—your father doesn’t like to talk about any of this. It upsets him.”
I blinked at her, because what else was new? Everything upset my father. If my mother excelled at laid-back and peace-loving, my father’s expertise was in high-strung and intense. When the Giants struck out, he got upset. When we ran out of salami, he got upset. If his remote wasn’t on the arm of his chair when he got home, he got upset. And his upset generally involved yelling at something or someone: the television, the refrigerator, my brother or me. But I couldn’t just leave it like this, not knowing the truth, with everything I ever thought I knew about my family destroyed and with no idea what that made me—
She must have read the stubborn on my face because her jaw clenched—a rare, certain sign I was bordering on trouble. “It’s better if you don’t ask him about it. He wasn’t much older than you are now when his father was arrested, and he’s had to live in the shadow of it ever since. He’s been beaten up over it, he’s lost jobs because of it, he almost changed his name to get away from it. That’s how bad it is.”
“But if you don’t know and I can’t ask him, how am I going to find out?” A thought occurred to me. “Wait, if Grampa’s still alive, can I go visit him?”
All the blood drained from her face. “Don’t even think such a thing around your father.”
The blood that left her face rushed into mine, and my voice turned petulant. “But he’s my grandfather. I want to meet him. And if he says he didn’t do it, maybe there’s something we can do to help—”
The sound of my father’s car pulling into the driveway interrupted me. I jumped up and ran out the door, ignoring my mother’s voice ringing out behind me. When I reached him, I blurted out what Stacey had told me—and that I wanted to go visit my grandfather.
I really should have listened to my mother.
My father didn’t yell. He calmly—far too calmly—told me to go to my room and stay there. An hour later, he came and told me that as long as I was living under his roof, I was never to mention William Sanzio’s name again. That he was a bad man who had lost the privilege of knowing me or anyone else in the family when he destroyed our good name.
I fought back my tears. “But Mom said he said he didn’t do it!”
His jaw clenched and unclenched. “Jails are filled with men who won’t take responsibility for their actions, and the world is filled with gullible people who want to believe them.”
“But Stacey—”
His hand flew up. “I’d hoped after all these years people would forget, but I was kidding myself. Stacey may be the first person to ask you about your grandfather, but she won’t be the last. So you might as well learn sooner than later to ignore people like her.” He stood and crossed to the door before sending a parting shot back over his shoulder. “And that’s an end to it.”
But of course it wasn’t. All his stricture accomplished was making sure I was obsessed with the notion that my grandfather had been wrongly convicted. I couldn’t do much about it at age eight other than cry myself to sleep, and back in a time before the internet’s all-seeing eye roved over the world, gathering information of that nature was next to impossible. I learned a little, but not much: only that William Sanzio had been known as Overkill Bill because he bashed his three victims on the head, stabbed them to death, then sliced their throats after the fact. To make up for that dearth of information, I read everything I could find about other serial killers, hoping to glean some sort of insight into what my grandfather had done, or hadn’t done, and why. My desperation to learn more ultimately led me to a bachelor’s degree in journalism—but it didn’t lead to any closure about whether my grandfather was guilty.
“Um, Capri?”
The voice startled me back into the here and now. Ryan Navarro, driver of vans, master of IT, and unlikely friend given he was twenty years younger than my forty-nine, widened his green eyes and flicked them back toward the passengers. I’d finished my orienting information about Richard Ramirez’s Tenderloin apartment, but hadn’t transitioned into my background on Mei Leung, his first victim, a nine-year-old girl found murdered in the basement of her apartment building. I chastised myself mentally and jumped in, refocusing my energy on her. Because I might not be able to find out the truth about my grandfather, but I could damn well make sure as many murder victims as possible weren’t forgotten.
* * *
An hour and a half later, Kevin stretched over his O’Doul’s near-beer and peered closely at my face. “I knew it was true. You look just like him.”
I leaned in conspiratorially and lowered my voice. Lenny’s speakeasy always made me feel like a character in a 1940s noir film, which is exactly what it was designed to do—it was done up as a fictional detective agency, from the metal-grated faux window with Lenny’s name stenciled backward to the file cabinets and war-era desks that functioned as tables. The menu came in a manila case-file folder and the lighting came from period lamps, which lent the space an odd mix of anonymity and danger that managed to be both welcoming and exhilarating. “A lot of people tell me that,” I replied.
To this day it wryly amuses me when people comment on my resemblance to Overkill Bill. Not because they’re wrong—we have the same jet-black hair (although mine is longer), the same deep blue eyes, and the same high cheekbones above the same slightly pointed chin—but because after the ten thousandth time people scour your face trying to find a serial killer, it takes work not to develop a complex about it. So I remind myself they mean no harm and wait, because usually it only takes a few seconds for the person to realize the implication of what they’ve said to me and—
Right on schedule, Virginia’s face plummeted and she whispered something to Kevin.
Kevin turned red and stammered. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to say you look like a killer—”
I waved off his objection and picked up my dirty martini. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me because I don’t believe he was a killer. I believe he was innocent.”
Kevin’s face twitched as it shifted away from embarrassed, and I waited to see which emotion he’d land on. He’d either be intrigued by my claim and ask about my alternate theory with a true-crime twinkle in his eye, or he’d feel sorry for the middle-aged woman deluding herself about her family’s lurid history and sit back with a wary cast to his expression.
“Oh, really?” Now he dropped his voice and leaned conspiratorially toward me. “Why do you say that?”
“Partly because his alibis were incredibly detailed. Not the sort of thing you make up and stick by with any sort of consistency.”
Kevin’s brow creased. “Oh, yeah. Something about being out with prostitutes, right?” He turned as Virginia tugged his sleeve. “What?”
I smiled at her. “No, don’t worry, it’s okay. He was very open about the fact that he wasn’t faithful to my grandmother. Being unfaithful doesn’t make you a serial killer. But unfortunately for him, the women he claimed to be with during the first two murders were themselves subsequent murder victims, and the one who was alive and able to testify was vilified by the defense attorney. The jury decided she wasn’t a reliable witness.”
Virginia didn’t like the sound of that. “They wouldn’t believe her just because she was a prostitute?”
The anger tinging her voice resonated with me, but I took a sip of my drink to keep my reaction measured. “Women, especially women of color, are routinely ignored and discredited even today, especially if they do drugs or have any sort of a record. The Cleveland Strangler had victims literally escape his rape-murder den and report him directly to the police, but the cops believed his story over theirs—even though he’d previously served fifteen years for rape and attempted murder.”
Virginia’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth formed a gentle O.
Kevin shifted in his chair. “But wasn’t there something about Overkill B—William Sanzio paying her to provide an alibi?”
“That’s what the DA claimed, without any proof. Both William and the witness denied it, but the suggestion was enough for the jury.”
He nodded, but the twinkle in his eye diminished, another reaction I’d seen a thousand times. She just wants to believe the best of her grandfather, it said. It’s not exactly a stretch that someone willing to sell her body would sell her testimony, it said. And I’m sure that’s exactly what the members of my grandfather’s jury thought, too.
I shook it off, despite the indignant little girl screaming in the back of my brain. If the situation were reversed and Kevin was trying to convince me of his cheating grandfather’s innocence, would I be skeptical? You betcha. And I wasn’t so egotistical as to believe I knew the truth for certain. “At the end of the day, there’s no way to know for sure. Forensics back then weren’t what they are today.”
He sipped his near-beer, watching my face. My cell phone chimed, and I checked the notification. No matter what it was, it would be an excellent segue to end the conversation. I clicked to find a missed call from my daughter, Morgan. My pulse sped, and I cursed the underground-basement bunker’s spotty cell reception. My twenty-four-year-old daughter, die-hard Gen-Z-er that she was, never made actual phone calls when texts would do.
I smiled up at Kevin and Victoria. “Looks like an urgent matter needs my attention. I’m so sorry to cut this short. It’s been great talking to you.”
I stood and gestured to Ryan. We called to the tour-group members now scattered over several tables and I gave my standard spiel officially ending the tour and thanking them for spending the afternoon and early evening with us. We gathered our tips, said our goodbyes, and headed out.
Ryan’s expression changed as soon as we pushed through the upstairs exit and into the chilly evening air. “Short after-party. You okay?”
I flashed him Morgan’s missed call.
His brows shot up. “Not good.”
“No,” I agreed as I called her back. “Not good at all.”
Copyright © 2024 by M. M. Chouinard
