25-09-2026, 03:47 PM
CHAPTER 15: MEETING PAULA DONNALLY
The Welaka Cannibal who had cut portions off his victims while they were still alive, and had made a very credible threat to someday come back and cut my beating heart out of my still living body had been a tall, stoop shouldered, near-sighted former college crossing guard who had played Santa Clause at charity events for years before his true nature came to light.
The near-sightedness gave his features a kind of softness, as he had to squint when he wasn’t wearing his glasses and he usually didn’t wear them except when he was working as a college librarian at an elementary college library.
The step mother of the two-year-old whose dismembered body had been thought to have been grabbed by a pack of feral dogs until we discovered cigarette burns on his body, was a pretty, if slightly overweight, Sunday college teacher. She almost got away with it except that searchers found the remains before wild dogs out near Cecil Field in Clay County had eaten all the remains.
Enough of the body was left that forensics showed definite evidence of cigarette burns, which meant that while the dogs might have killed the little boy, they weren’t crushing out lit cigarettes on his chest and buttocks. And as sharp as some of their claws and teeth were, they didn’t leave the characteristic slashes of razors, found on one arm that remained uneaten.
His step-mother swore to God that she had nothing to do with the little boy’s death, until we matched her teeth to marks found on his back where something had gouged out a hunk of his young flesh.
When we finally broke her down, we learned the mechanics of what she had done. We were never able to figure out exactly why she had done it. Even Dr. Ernst Teller, the Third Circuit’s primary criminal psychiatrist, after four lengthy interview sessions finally gave up and said no one would probably ever know why she had tortured the little boy to death.
“Evil has no easy explanation,” was all he finally wrote in his report to me.
And Paul Donnally was a man who had literally superhuman strength of a kind that I would not have believed possible if I hadn’t seen it firsthand and viewed tapes of him manhandling three men. And he had nearly strangled his wife to death.
But if I’d sat down in a Doctor’s waiting room and we had engaged in casual conversation, I would never have gotten the slightest warning tingle that this was a dangerous man.
Evil, danger, would not be so frightening, if we could see it coming. Usually we don’t.
The Welaka Cannibal who had cut portions off his victims while they were still alive, and had made a very credible threat to someday come back and cut my beating heart out of my still living body had been a tall, stoop shouldered, near-sighted former college crossing guard who had played Santa Clause at charity events for years before his true nature came to light.
The near-sightedness gave his features a kind of softness, as he had to squint when he wasn’t wearing his glasses and he usually didn’t wear them except when he was working as a college librarian at an elementary college library.
The step mother of the two-year-old whose dismembered body had been thought to have been grabbed by a pack of feral dogs until we discovered cigarette burns on his body, was a pretty, if slightly overweight, Sunday college teacher. She almost got away with it except that searchers found the remains before wild dogs out near Cecil Field in Clay County had eaten all the remains.
Enough of the body was left that forensics showed definite evidence of cigarette burns, which meant that while the dogs might have killed the little boy, they weren’t crushing out lit cigarettes on his chest and buttocks. And as sharp as some of their claws and teeth were, they didn’t leave the characteristic slashes of razors, found on one arm that remained uneaten.
His step-mother swore to God that she had nothing to do with the little boy’s death, until we matched her teeth to marks found on his back where something had gouged out a hunk of his young flesh.
When we finally broke her down, we learned the mechanics of what she had done. We were never able to figure out exactly why she had done it. Even Dr. Ernst Teller, the Third Circuit’s primary criminal psychiatrist, after four lengthy interview sessions finally gave up and said no one would probably ever know why she had tortured the little boy to death.
“Evil has no easy explanation,” was all he finally wrote in his report to me.
And Paul Donnally was a man who had literally superhuman strength of a kind that I would not have believed possible if I hadn’t seen it firsthand and viewed tapes of him manhandling three men. And he had nearly strangled his wife to death.
But if I’d sat down in a Doctor’s waiting room and we had engaged in casual conversation, I would never have gotten the slightest warning tingle that this was a dangerous man.
Evil, danger, would not be so frightening, if we could see it coming. Usually we don’t.
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