Meet the Serial Killers Next Door

“Who lives next door to you?” asks psychologist and true crime expert Emma Kenny in “The Serial Killer Next Door: Chilling True Stories of the Killers Hidden Among Us” (Mobius).“Perhaps a friendly postman or a businessman in a sharp suit? These are the faces you recognize, individuals as ‘ordinary’ as you or me.But it’s in the very depths of this ordinariness that a frightening anomaly could lurk. “For within some of these seemingly normal souls lie desires so dark, they are almost impossible for the majority of us to comprehend.”“The Serial Killer Next Door” revisits the stories of 15 notorious mass murderers, from the more familiar, like Ted Bundy, to others such as Dorothea Puente, who killed nine elderly and disabled residents in her boarding house in Sacramento Calif., and Jerry Brudos, the ‘Shoe Fetish Slayer’ from Salem, Oreg. “Unravelling the minds of serial killers requires a fortitude to delve into the darkest recesses of human nature,” writes Kenny.From the outset, the book is graphic and distressing in equal measure.The story of David Parker Ray, the so-called “Toy-Box Killer,” is a case in point.

A sexual torturer and serial killer suspected of more than 60 murders that began in the 1950s and ended in the late 1990s, Ray kidnapped women before chaining them up in a windowless and soundproofed trailer at his home in Elephant Butte, NM, and subjecting them to unimaginable abuse for months at a time.Many died, their bodies then filled with cement so he could throw them in the local reservoir or river knowing they would never float to the surface. Those that survived were “plied with a cocktail of drugs designed to confuse them and create a state of amnesia,” writes Kenny.“This would ensure that they would be unable to implicate Ray to the police.”It was only when 22-year-old Cynthia Jaramillo escaped his clutches in 1999 that the full extent of Ray’s depravity became known.

“His innocuous-looking traile...