Dark Places

7. The Tale Of The Bull

Boxed text, page 351, 1998 edition of Lonely Planet's Africa - The South:

The Bull

As this book went to press a rumour had spread like wildfire that there is a serial killer targeting backpackers in Southern Africa. It is true that there have been several murders of budget travelers in the region within the past few months, but our investigation leads us to believe that they are not connected.

The rumour states that a man who calls himself The Bull is roaming the region, finding lone travelers, accompanying them to out-of-the-way spots, and then murdering them and mutilating their eyes. The Bull is said to be a European backpacker, not an African resident, and is alleged to have left a trail of bodies from Cape Town to Malawi and back again.The facts are that four independent travelers have been found murdered within the last three months: two in South Africa, one in Mozambique, and one in Malawi. In both of the South African cases the eyes of the victims were in fact mutilated. However our investigation indicates that a murder on the Mozambican coast and a murder in rural Malawi took place on consecutive days in June of this year, which is difficult to reconcile with the work of a single individual. Furthermore, the fact that there is a name associated with the rumour, particularly one as colourful as "The Bull", leads us to believe that there is some myth mixed with the grim reality of these murders.

Lonely Planet urges all travelers to take all reasonable precautions wherever they go, to stay informed of local conditions via the Updates section on lonelyplanet.com and the word on the trail, to choose their travel companions carefully, and to avoid hitchhiking and traveling alone whenever possible. Even though we do not feel the evidence indicates that there is anything to the rumour of The Bull, Southern Africa includes politically unstable states and a significant minority of its population lives in desperate poverty. While South Africa is politically stable and relatively highly developed its crime rates in certain poverty-stricken areas are alarming. Travel safe.

   I read it three times. Then I read it again.
   Mutilating their eyes. The eyes of the victims were in fact mutilated.
   The Bull.

* * *

   I rented a boat and went paddling about on the pretty lake that adjoins Pokhara. It helped me expend some of my nervous energy. It helped me to think rationally again, to organize my thoughts into what I knew and what I suspected and what might be.
   The undisputed facts: Laura had been killed in Cameroon. Stanley Goebel had been killed in Nepal. Two other backpackers had been killed in South Africa. All of those killings involved eye mutilations. The two South African murders were already rumoured to be the work of a serial killer. A traveler, not a local.
   LP hadn't said specifically what kind of mutilation had been performed. But I had a pretty good guess. It hadn't said that the other two African killings had not involved mutilation — and those murders had occurred in Malawi and Mozambique, countries as poor and undeveloped as they come, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if this information simply wasn't available.And how many had not been reported murdered at all? How many Stanley Goebels were out there, officially suicides or accidents?
   It wouldn't be the first time a madman preyed on travelers. There had been that psychopath in Australia, not so long ago, who had tortured and murdered seventeen backpackers there before one got away and reported him to the police. But this would be the first one who actually went traveling to find his victims.
   No, that's not necessarily true; he might just be the first one who was noticed. It was so easy to commit murder in these circumstances. It was stunning how easy. Third World police who really don't care, an endless supply of victims who deliberately seek out remote locations on their own, amid a constantly shifting crowd of travelers who meet and leave each other, appear and disappear without word or notice, always en route to somewhere else. With a cool head and a cruel heart it would be the easiest thing in the world.
   Except Lonely Planet didn't believe it. Primarily because two murders had occurred on consecutive days. But was that really the case? They had occurred in Malawi and Mozambique — could the information that came out of there really be relied upon? Might one or the other in fact happened a few days earlier or later? Had someone confused the date of discovery with the date of the murder? It was possible. It was entirely possible.
   From Southern Africa to here. It occurred to me that I knew someone who had traveled from South Africa to Nepal, and had been intimately involved with this murder. Gavin. But no, that made no sense. He had the best alibi in the world; I doubted we had spent more than an hour or two apart from one another after we met and joined forces in Tal, five days before Gunsang. And he certainly couldn't have killed Stanley Goebel, he was with me all day. With an accomplice… ? The Scream solution? No. Ridiculously complicated, didn't make any sense. And besides, I knew Gavin. If he was sick in the head he sure concealed it well. He had struck me as one of the most moral people I had ever met.
   I shook my head violently as if to empty it of thoughts and tried to paddle around and around the little island in the lake without thinking. My best ideas usually came to me when I wasn't actively seeking them.

* * *

   Cameroon, I thought. That had to be the key. Nepal and Southern Africa were stuffed full of thousands of backpackers marching lockstep down the various backpacker trails. But Cameroon was in fucking Central Africa. Lonely Planet hadn't published a book on Central Africa for ten years because there wasn't much there except blood and bullets. Cameroon was relatively civilized compared to the Central African Republic or either of the Congos. In fact until Laura's death it had been shaping up as one of my all-time favourite travel experiences. But there were no hordes of Lonely Planeteers there, that was for sure. A few particularly adventurous French tourists, a bunch of grizzled oil expats, and the odd overland truck trip like ours.
   I tried to line up the dates in my mind. I remembered, because it had irritated me greatly, that the latest Africa - The South edition had come out just after I had left that area. That meant the June deaths mentioned therein had occurred while I was in Africa. In fact they had occurred while I was in Cameroon. In fact they must have occurred within a couple of weeks of Laura's murder, because we had found her body on the night of June 15.
   Which, first of all, made the whole serial-killer theory hard to swallow. Mozambique to Malawi to Cameroon? Three murders, in three very distant and undeveloped African countries, within the span of two weeks? Possible but very hard to believe. And, much to my relief, the timing made a more specific theory, that it had been someone on the truck, completely impossible. Nobody on the truck had left Cameroon before the end of June, of that I was certain. Which cleared the three candidates I had had in the back of my mind.
   Maybe there was no serial killer. Maybe The Bull was just a rumour after all. Maybe it was all just an awful coincidence and I was overwrought because I had had the terrible bad luck of discovering two dead bodies in two years. I told myself that that was probably the case. I told myself again and again. I was still telling myself that on the flight back to California.