From the Mouth of the Monster by Robert Mladinich

Author:Robert Mladinich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

JOEL TOOK A CASUAL DRIVE BACK HOME to Long Island with the body of Iris Sanchez by his side, still uncertain about what he was going to do with the corpse. He drove his mother’s Toyota across the Brooklyn Bridge, then headed east on Atlantic Avenue for about twenty miles. As he left Brooklyn and entered Queens, he reached an area he described as the the back end of Kennedy Airport.

“There is a waterway and a vacant lot, a big, long lot,” he recalled. “There is a strip mall on one side and a vacant lot on the other side. And I saw some guys fishing and their cars were in there. So I just bopped right up the highway into the lot with Mom’s car. There was like a six-inch curb. Crunched [the car]. Drove in there, found a mattress, dumped her under the mattress. Got home around eleven [in the morning]. Mom comes out of the house screaming at me, ‘Where the hell have you been? Your boss called like three times.’ ”

Because it was Mother’s Day weekend, business was brisk at the liquor store where Joel worked part time and he had been desperately needed. “We had a line out the back door of people buying stuff for dinner and the holiday and that kind of stuff,” he said. “We had only two floor walkers at that time, and I was one of them. So he [the owner] was pretty pissed.”

As exhausted as he was, Joel showed up at noon and worked until the store closed at nine. “He just yelled at me a lot, but didn’t fire me,” said Joel, who by now was displaying flair for living simultaneously on the edge of two opposite worlds. He was so adept at it, he carried Sanchez’s ring, watch, and bracelet in his pants pockets for his entire shift. Despite being surrounded by mothers and families all day long, he never considered that Sanchez might have been a mother herself, or that she might have actually wanted to get home to her children that day. When Joel led NYPD and Port Authority detectives to her remains after his arrest fourteen months later, the skeletal body was still frighteningly adorned with one sock and a dress with large polka dots.

Joel uses the death of Sanchez and several of his other victims as twisted examples of why he had never become, in his mind at least, an expert killer. The way he sees it, he was nothing more than a confused, temporarily insane man who struck when the urge hit him, ramifications be damned. With Sanchez he managed to secure the carotid artery in his death grip and she was dead within ten seconds.

Even after all this time, Joel continues to underrate his proficiency as a killer. Never, he insists, did he grow completely confident or comfortable as a murderer. “I tried to explain [this] to one of the psychiatrists, [but] he missed what I was trying to say,” he explained as he launched into one of his frequent athletic analogies.

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