The Nothing Man

by Catherine Ryan Howard

To John and Claire, who have to share, because to put one before the other just wouldn’t be fair.

There are three sides to every story, they say: yours, mine, and the truth.

I lost the boyfriend, my few friends, and too much weight,

I wasn’t even sure the pills were doing anything for me but at the same time I was absolutely terrified that they were. I didn’t want to find out if what felt like rock bottom was merely halfway down.

Eventually I began to forget myself, falling into whatever book I’d selected as a prop. I found I had an attention span again. Soon after that I was borrowing, bringing books home to read into the evening or even bring with me on my walks. Then came cooking: simple, wholesome meals from scratch. Taking care of the rooms in which I lived. Taking care of myself. I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, but I was doing for myself what Nannie had once done for me: keeping a simple, quiet life that would help to heal me. I had always assumed we were merely hiding.

fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth.

naked and bleeding directly onto the page.

So ask me again. Am I the girl who . . . ? Because this time—these days—I’ll tell you the truth: no, but I was. I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man. Now I am the woman who is going to catch him.

I was twelve, an age when you have zero interest in who your parents are or ever were outside of their being your parents.

I wanted to be a professional dancer, and also a scientist who got to work in the Antarctic, and also a hairdresser on a cruise ship because my friend’s mum had done that when she was younger and was always talking about how much fun it was. So when I looked at my parents—living in the city they grew up in, doing normal jobs, being normal people—I couldn’t help but feel unimpressed. Why had they done nothing with this, their one wild and precious life? Why didn’t they desperately want anything? Why didn’t they have dreams and adventures and wishes and goals? I didn’t know anything about their desires, that was the problem. Without that missing piece, it was hard for my parents to live as fully formed people in my mind. But recently I’ve started to wonder if they wanted nothing because they already had it, if our family life was their dream. I like to think so. I’ve decided that from now on, I will.

make-believe never seemed to involve princesses or mermaids or superheroes, but air stewards and office workers and librarians. She was so eager to play in the adult world she couldn’t wait to stop being a child. Her pretending, as it turned out, was all she would ever get to experience of it.

Drew Barrymore’s character is home alone when she receives a phone call that at first seems like a playful prank. But the caller is soon revealed to be a masked murderer who gains entry to the house and kills her.

like the voice of a great friend you’d lost touch with: you couldn’t remember it at all but once you were reminded of it, you couldn’t believe you’d ever forgotten it.

in a world where when we enter our homes at night and close the door behind us, we believe that we have slid into place a barrier that divides everything warm and secure and familiar from everything cold and dangerous and unknown. And then in the next, a phone begins to ring.

Christine was attacked and everything took on a new, horrible meaning. The knife had reminded Maggie of DIY stores but now it made her think of stabbing motions. The rope had seemed like something climbers might use but in her mind’s eye, Maggie could see it wrapped tightly around delicate wrists and ankles.

Perhaps I could relieve myself of some of my own guilt about saying nothing if I knew that saying something wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.

There was a part of Linda that just refused to believe what was happening. She had lived for ten years in a major American city famously plagued by petty crime. San Francisco could lay claim to the highest rate of vehicle break-ins and burglaries in the whole of the United States. Now here she was in a little Irish country town where the word crime only had to stretch to cover incidents of public drunkenness and drink-driving, and she was being raped by a masked man in her own bed.

Sometimes he wished he’d put more effort into cultivating friends or hobbies, or even just pretending to, so that he could announce he was off on a golf weekend or going out for a couple of hours to meet someone for coffee.

Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.

he was standing at a crossroads and if he didn’t move soon—if he didn’t make a decision, a drastic change in his life—something would burst out of the shadows and run him over, and after that there’d be no coming back.

Mental health wasn’t something the force even acknowledged back then, let alone prioritized. Members who’d had to deal with horrific scenes and frightening situations worked through what many of them would later come to suspect was PTSD over pints in the pub, and even then . . . As one member put it, the prevailing mood at the time was not one of support, but one-upmanship. “You think that’s bad? Wait until I tell you what I saw today!”

He found himself wondering what it would be like to move away, to go back to college, to become a psychologist. But every morning he got up and went into work and every night he went to bed having done nothing about it.

my grief felt like the effort required to live your entire life with your back pressed against bulging closet doors because if you move from them and they open, everything will come spilling out.

Even though she knew exactly who I was and what I’d been through, she didn’t tread on eggshells. She talked to me like I was a normal person. I liked her instantly.

He does not look like he has danced with darkness. He does not look like the leading authority on the Nothing Man. But he has and he is. And he is more than that. He is the Nothing Man’s nemesis.

while I was still in the bathroom, my brain was preparing for my survival, opening the deepest vault in my memory bank so it could send the worst of what I was about to see straight in there. When the vault started to approach capacity, it just dumped some stuff straight out. This is how I’ve come to understand the effects of trauma on the mind of a child. That night is a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces and some parts of it have clearly been put together wrong.

Here he was, standing in a room listening to Eve Black read aloud to him from her book about him, while Ed Healy, who’d helped lead the Nothing Man investigation (to nowhere), stood nearby. And Noreen hovered right beside him. The feeling he had was what he imagined skydivers felt as they sat in the open door of the plane thousands of feet above the ground, dangled their legs over the side and waited for the Go signal: more alive than ever thanks to the threat of imminent death.

“This is always my fear,” Eve continued, “when I meet someone new, because I am. I am the girl who. I was twelve years old when a man broke into our home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and forever . . .” Jim surveyed the assembled crowd and wondered what the reaction would be if they somehow suddenly realized that the Nothing Man was here, among them, in this very room. Would they run? Or would they turn toward him instead, asking him the questions, waiting to hear his story?

Even though the Nothing Man had spent less than an hour in their lives, the trauma of it was an incurable infection. They could never feel completely safe again.

All around us were squeals of delight, tears and even a few handmade Welcome Home signs. I was holding a sign that said the name of a man I’d never met and I was waiting to talk to him about a murderer who’d changed the course of both of our lives. This was typical of what being the victim of a violent crime often felt like to me. I looked fine; I looked normal; I could blend in with everyone else. But I had a secret that set me apart, that made me an Other. The lives of the people around me were so different to mine they may as well have been science fiction. I would never stand in an Arrivals hall to wait for my family. I had lost all the family I’d had. And if I somehow found a way in the future to make a family of my own—something that, when I thought about all the steps I would need to take to make that happen, seemed utterly impossible—I would never let them go anywhere without me. I’d be too scared to. Because even when you were at home, altogether, you still weren’t safe. I had seen the proof of this firsthand.

This was how everyone else must have learned to live in the world, Jim thought. This is how they managed to move around it calmly, with a smile on their face, taking shit day in, day out. They had found an outlet, a remedy, an antidote. It was the only explanation. And now he had found his.

an absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Ed Gein. Fred West. Peter Sutcliffe. Harold Shipman. “The Nothing Man,” one student said, “but we don’t know who he is yet,” and I silently thanked her for that yet. After those names, barely half the raised hands were still up. Then came the ones whose nicknames were better known than their given ones. Gary Ridgway a.k.a. the Green River Killer. Richard Ramirez a.k.a. the Night Stalker. Dennis Rader a.k.a. BTK. Ted Kaczynski a.k.a. the Unabomber. Now, only three hands remained. When Dr. Weir called on them, she got Arthur Leigh Allen, suspected of being the Zodiac Killer; Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot and killed Gianni Versace; and Aileen Wuornos, executed in 2002 for the murders of six men and famously played by Charlize Theron in the movie Monster.

“It’s fine to be fascinated by serial killers,” she tells me in her office after the lecture. “I am myself, obviously. They are fascinating because even though they look just like the rest of us, they do things the rest of us would never, ever do. But they are not especially intelligent. They don’t outsmart authorities. You know David Berkowitz? Son of Sam? They caught him because he got himself a parking ticket at the scene of one of his crimes. They are boring, ordinary failures of men—not always men, of course, but predominately—who can’t even manage to live, love, and process their feelings in a world where the rest of us have all managed to master it by the time we’re in our teens. These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.”

Serial killings are exceptionally rare, accounting for less than one per cent of all homicides in any given year, but because of the public’s endless fascination with them, they draw the most publicity.

because serial killings are so rare, there’s relatively little scientific data available about them. The general public get their serial killer info from Hollywood movies, Netflix, and the Crime section of their local bookshop, and that’s okay, because the general public is only looking for entertainment. The problem is that, consciously or unconsciously, rank-and-file police officers get their serial killer info from the same place—and that’s not okay because they’re looking for the actual perpetrators.

There’s a big difference between drive and compulsion. So as they get older, and more tired and slower, it’s entirely plausible that they just stop wanting to kill people. In the same way I once used to want to party all night but now that I’m five minutes from fifty, I’m desperate to be in bed by ten. It’s not sexy, it’s not Hollywood and it’s not very dramatic—but it’s almost certainly the truth.”

an era of armchair sleuths and amateur detectives.

we may not have his name yet, but we do know these: Alice O’Sullivan. Christine Kiernan. Linda O’Neill. Marie Meara. Martin Connolly. My father, Ross, and my mother, Deirdre. My little sister, Anna. Remember them, please.

Katie is no longer afraid of men. It feels pointless to be. She’s already seen the worst of them and called him her father.

paperbacks that have been evidently tarnished by sea water and sunscreen.

stubbing out her breakfast in the ashtray.

When I was twelve years old a man broke into my home and murdered my mother, father, and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and forever. When I was thirty years old, I wrote a book about it. Eight days after it was published, on September 6, 2019, that same man broke into that same house and tried to murder me. He was shot and killed by Gardaí. His name was Jim Doyle.

You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself.

To lose family members to illness, accident, or time, while just as painful, is a different kind of pain to losing a loved one to a violent crime. This one is more complex. Nowhere near as many people can relate to it and so it separates you from everyone else. I’ve been separated since I was twelve years old. I don’t know what it feels like to not be.

How can I call myself a victim or a survivor when nothing happened to me, when I wasn’t even hurt?

Nearly nineteen years ago, Jim Doyle bought me a ticket to a planet where I had to live by myself. I didn’t want to go but I had no choice in the matter. I was too young and too numb to recall the journey, leaving me utterly lost, disoriented, and unable to find my way back. I’m still here. Until recently, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would be forever. But something unexpected has happened. A visitor has arrived and he knows the way back. He says he’ll take me with him. We leave soon. I’m finally getting to go home.