Julia: It’s always the infighting that breaks up the band.

Helen: A few years later in Los Angeles, the Hillside Stranglers were active. Cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono raped, tortured, and killed ten women and girls. This is another case where the older individual—here Angelo Buono—might have influenced his younger partner. After their tenth murder, Bianchi followed his ex-girlfriend to Washington State. Less than a year later, he kidnapped and killed two university students, and the police caught him.

Julia: But all of these serial killers are men, and we’re talking about a husband and wife.

Helen: Don’t worry, my friend, we’ve got precedents for men and women killing together all over the world. Gerald and Charlene Gallego murdered ten people in California in the late seventies. Rodolfo Infante and Ana María Ruíz Villeda killed eight women in the early nineties in Mexico. David and Catherine Birnie murdered four women in the mideighties in Australia. And in England the most famous serial-killing couple has to be the Moors Murderers—Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. And the debate is always power dynamics, whether the husband or wife was driving the action.

Julia: If there was a sexual component, I’d have to say the husband. Also, ick. Super ick.

Helen: And that’s certainly something that defense attorneys have claimed. Charlene Adell Gallego testified against her husband; Ana Villeda claimed she only watched the murders.

Julia: The couple that preys together, stays together? So if she said, “No more killing; I’m out,” maybe she’d be her husband’s next victim.

CHAPTER

11

I DIDN’T SLEEP AGAIN, instead filling the box on the sofa with multipointed stars. My little stack of glossy paper was getting low. I’d been experimenting with how many points I could put on a star and whether I could adjust them after I’d popped them into shape. Somehow, despite my experience as an art historian and museum employee, art had been something I’d only studied, not anything I’d thought I could make.

But these little paper pieces, sort of “proto-art” or maybe even just a “craft,” were easy for me, comforting to my hands, and the more of them I made, the more natural it felt to manipulate them and deviate from the pattern.

And they dissipated my anxiety.

My fingers folded and creased as I let my mind roam.

Michael and I had talked in a general way about having a baby. Initially, while we were dating, we’d had the “do you want kids” talk. When we bought this house, it had been obvious to assume one of the two extra bedrooms would be the nursery.