I'd Kill for You Read online

  Odd, the government had approved him for mental disability—and there were funds set up and headed his way, come December—yet he was “sane” enough to leave the institution and fend for himself on his own.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Kyle said he was told by the state: “Because of your mental health, you are going to have a hard time holding down a job.”

  It was the reason why they approved him.

  “They had already seen how I handled jobs in the past,” Kyle explained. “I got fired from each job I ever had.”

  There was not a doctor or therapist whom Kyle had spoken to over the years who did not know that demons whispered to Kyle, that he saw things “others couldn’t or wouldn’t,” and that the world spinning out of control inside Kyle Hulbert’s head was not a place where “happily ever after” resided. Kyle had talked about having “dreams or visions of the apocalypse.” Those “voices” inside his head would eventually (in totality) go by the name of “the 6.”

  A lot of this, Kyle realized, sounded foolish. Imaginary. Something from a person who should be locked up. Most would respond by saying he was crazy. But as a five-year-old kid, this sort of make-believe world he lived in became an everyday part of his life. It continued as Kyle grew into his teens. For Kyle Hulbert, he believed it was as real as the pet dragon he saw regularly and explained was as genuine as “one of my cats.”

  “I cannot identify the first [memory],” he said many years later, talking about that moment in childhood when these different visions and thoughts inside his head began, “and you must understand that one of the aspects of psychosis is an inability to distinguish ‘reality’ from ‘fantasy.’”

  To him, that chaos going on inside his adolescent mind—the dreams, hallucinations, and voices—were his absolute reality. It all seemed “perfectly natural ... even if they weren’t.”

  It did not take long for Kyle to become aware that he thought differently than the other kids around him and “there was something wrong” inside him. He knew that if he approached the other kids, talked to them about what he saw and heard, he would be shunned and ostracized, bullied, and likely beaten up, definitely laughed at. So he kept most of these things to himself, at least at first.

  The voices and visions did not scare him, he said later. Some kids might be frightened by what he saw; but to him it was a world he embraced. A secret he came to love.

  There was one day—Kyle was six years old—when he had what he recalled was his first “hallucination.” It is a term Kyle needed to put in quotes, he said later, because “hallucination” was not the best way to describe what he saw. Hallucination was merely “the quickest and most efficient way” of explaining what happened. People could comprehend what a hallucination is—yet he considered what happened to him to be real—even to this day.

  Another way to describe it, he reconciled, was to use the word “magic.”

  Inside his head, Kyle lived within a world of his own, literally. This was his world. He didn’t create it, he claimed. Or ask for it to appear before him. It wasn’t like that at all. It just happened. One day it wasn’t there, and then the next, well, it was—and the most important part of this for Kyle as he talked through it years later was that to him it wasn’t a fantasy or some type of dream. It wasn’t something that came and went: the bogeyman underneath the bed, the monster in the closet, the imaginary friend you sit with and share tea as a child.

  This was his life. His world.

  There was one—of many that would begin to accumulate—major issue with all of this for Kyle Hulbert as he sat years later and looked back on everything that happened.

  “The biggest problem I have encountered—and one we will have to address—is that I have a great deal of memory that conflicts with things I know to be true.... Consider everything I tell you to be as ‘true’ as I ‘know’ it all to be, and any inconsistencies are entirely unintended.”

  This statement, so incredibly honest and sincere, would come back to haunt Kyle Hulbert as he grew into an adult, and some of what he “saw” and “heard” would indeed become reality—however interspersed with brutal violence, blood, murder, and carnage as it would soon be.

  CHAPTER 3

  IN OCTOBER 2001, after a month of not doing much of anything, with the exception, he explained, “of spending a lot of time alone with my girlfriend,” Kyle Hulbert got an invitation to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Accepting this invitation would change Kyle’s life.

  The Maryland version of what is a nationwide celebration, generally called the Renaissance Faire or Festival, runs every August through October. It is set up to re-create “a sixteenth-century English village, with crafts, food, live performances. . . a jousting arena, and lots of games,” according to a PR description of the activities. It’s billed as a “fun family event” and held at a location about thirty miles outside of Washington, DC. The festival attracts people from all over the world, all walks of life. For sixteenth-century history buffs, it’s the ideal occasion. Families can go and have a blast. Same as what the Civil War reenactment events and festivals do for Civil War enthusiasts, the Renaissance Festival does for fans of knights in shining armor, maidens, belly dancers, fire-eaters, acrobats, and musicians. The allure for Kyle was that it fit with the chosen era of fantasy and the role-playing games (RPG) he had fallen into and embraced when growing up. Here was a chance to dress up, wear a costume, and be somebody else, live out some of those epic fantasies Kyle had had all his life.

  Kyle wore a cat mask made of latex that covered the top half of his face, which he had painted completely black underneath. He wore black clothes.

  As he walked around the festival, Kyle noticed he was getting lots of looks from the girls.

  “I liked that,” he said.

  What eighteen-year-old boy, cooped up all his life inside one institution after the other, moving from one foster home to the next when not institutionalized, wouldn’t enjoy all the attention? Kyle had a girlfriend (whom he did not bring with him to the festival). Being noticed by others felt good now. It fed his ego—his enormous sense of self. For Kyle, he had to be somebody all the time. Mostly, it was because he was so uncomfortable in his own skin or, more important, in his own mind. Being someone else, or something else, allowed him to develop and satisfy his fantasies. It allowed Kyle the opportunity to express those strange feelings he had—not to mention the visions and hallucinations—and live them out in the physical world around him. At the festival, the type of people Kyle met and hung around stayed in character throughout most of the day. Something caught Kyle’s attention as he walked around. There were dozens of various types of booths spread throughout the festival. Vendors were selling food, clothing, weapons, props, all sorts of items connected to the Renaissance that might be appealing to festivalgoers. So Kyle walked up to one particular tent. There was a girl behind the booth. She was a pretty girl—young, nice figure—and she smiled at him.

  “Brandy,” the girl said after he asked her name.

  “Nice name,” Kyle responded.

  They chatted. Small talk mostly. She seemed interested. They had things in common. They seemed to like each other.

  “Can I get your number?” Kyle asked.

  Brandy didn’t hesitate, Kyle said later. She got a piece of paper and wrote it down.

  “Call me soon,” Brandy said. They’d hang now, but she was working.

  From there, Kyle found his way into the weapons tent on the grounds of the festival. If there was one subject within the era that Kyle was infatuated with the most, it had to be weapons. He collected knives and swords. He fancied himself an expert knife and sword handler. He knew all there was to know about medieval weapons, especially knives and swords. And wherever Kyle Hulbert landed, he rarely went anywhere without his trusty twenty-seven-inch ninja-style sword he liked to keep as sharp as a razor blade.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I LOVE THE medieval period,” Kyle Hulbert explained. “And I love a
ll things fantasy, so these swords and weapons inside the shop there at the festival were just a natural extension for me.”

  Odd choice of words—“a natural extension for me”—but there you have it.

  Standing inside this weapons tent, Kyle looked around and felt at home. All of the weapons around him spoke to him on so many different levels.

  Kyle had met someone his age just before being “locked up,” as he called it, earlier that year, in March 2001. Kyle and Joey (pseudonym) had hit it off. Joey lived near a friend of Kyle’s. When Kyle was emancipated that September, post–hatching day, he had nowhere to go, so he rented a room from an old friend, an older man he described as a Vietnam veteran. Candice (pseudonym), who was a girl Kyle knew, lived right around the corner from the vet.

  “She’s a pagan,” Kyle said.

  They threw a party for Kyle one day in early October to celebrate the fact that he was back—and now free.

  To Kyle and his friends, being pagan meant that “they were practitioners of witchcraft, Wicca.” Kyle had even described himself as Wiccan at the time, he admitted. Later he would step away from calling himself Wiccan. “Primarily,” Kyle explained, “because I hate hypocrisy. And years later, I realized that not only did I not believe in the tenets of Wicca, I did not follow them.”

  Kyle, however, would still—to this day—describe himself as a pagan, but what he means by that is rather complex, like most of what Kyle Hulbert says.

  “I believe in multiple gods and goddesses,” he clarified. “But I also believe that all gods and goddesses are manifestations and aspects of the one true source—one God, so to speak.”

  That one God, though, would not be the popular God of the Bible.

  “All faiths,” Kyle commented, “. . . are all aspects of one God—we believe it. Think about it, we’ve got seven billion people in the world with seven billion cultural histories. Seven billion different points of view. It is impossible for everyone to see God the exact same way. We’re all looking for something. We’re all looking to understand something greater than ourselves.”

  At this party celebrating his emancipation, Joey introduced Kyle to Brittany (pseudonym), one of Joey’s close friends. Joey and Kyle had just met earlier that year, but by October they had become close friends. Maybe even best friends.

  “Joey liked my extensive knowledge in weaponry and the fact that I played the game Magic,” Kyle said.

  ONE OF THE first times Kyle and Joey were together, Kyle was at a friend’s house near the foster home he was living in at the time. They were doing something Kyle enjoyed: knife tossing. Joey happened to stop by. He watched for a moment.

  “How good is your aim?” Joey asked.

  “Pretty damn good,” Kyle had answered. “I generally hit what I’m aiming at.”

  Joey thought for a moment. “Well, if I stood over there”—Kyle was throwing at a wooden backboard twenty-five feet away—“do you think you could hit a target around my head?”

  Kyle was stunned. “You trust me to do that?”

  They had just met.

  The thing about Joey, Kyle said later, was that when he trusted someone, after he made that decision, he was all in.

  “Well, you had better wear a blindfold,” Kyle said, “because if you twitch or something, that could mean disaster. You’re going to wind up with a hole in your head.”

  “Nope,” Joey said. “I’m good.”

  Joey then walked over and stood in front of the board.

  Kyle stared at his target.

  “And I planted that knife about two inches to the left of his ear!”

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER, after Joey had introduced Kyle to Brittany at that party in Kyle’s honor, Joey pulled Kyle aside. Joey explained that he had been dating Brittany.

  “I need your help,” Joey said to Kyle.

  “Name it.”

  “Are you doing anything tonight?”

  “I’m up for it—what’s going on?”

  “Listen, Britt’s ex-boyfriend has been giving her some problems. I am going to be gone tonight. I want you to come over to the apartment and hang out with Britt just in case the dumb-ass decides to show up. I want someone there with her.”

  “No problem,” Kyle said.

  Kyle found Brittany. He wanted to tell her about himself, where he came from, what he did. They really didn’t know each other. He and Joey had told her what was going to happen that night, and Kyle wanted her to feel comfortable with him.

  “Look, if Joey trusts you implicitly, so do I,” she told Kyle. She didn’t need any rundown of Kyle’s accomplishments.

  Kyle wasn’t much of a fighter. Sizewise, he was below average weight for his height. He didn’t see himself as a combatant in any way, per se. “Scrapper,” he liked to label himself. “Grappling a little ... but fighting, hand to hand, I had no technique.”

  So how was this lanky, underweight kid going to protect this young woman if her overly aggressive ex-boyfriend started banging at the door?

  “Weapons,” Kyle explained. “I brought my sword with me that night.”

  Kyle also brought along a nightstick. “Because, let’s be honest, killing the dude might have caused me a few logistical problems at the time.”

  He hung out. They ate pizza. Kyle slept on the couch. The ex-boyfriend never showed.

  That night led to Kyle staying there as October came to pass. He had worn out his welcome, he thought, at the Vietnam vet’s apartment. The guy was letting him stay for free. Kyle’s Social Security wasn’t slated to kick in until December, so he was cash strapped. He had nothing, really.

  For the most part, from then on, Kyle started hopping from one friend’s flat to the other, never overstaying his welcome. He also had a tent he lived in, pitching it in the woods near a friend’s apartment, or anywhere he thought he wouldn’t be bothered.

  And then the Renaissance Festival came and he met Brandy.

  CHAPTER 5

  TO UNDERSTAND THE life of Kyle Hulbert is to look back at where he came from and understand how he wound up sleeping in a tent, staying with any friend who would allow him to crash on the couch in those days after he was emancipated. If you ask Kyle, this period—between his emancipation in September 2001 and that fateful day in October when he attended the Renaissance Festival and met Brandy—is the most precarious time of his life. It was when Kyle, who truly had lived within a fantasy world that had been kept pretty much stabilized by medication and treatment, allowed himself to begin to explore that realm out in the real world, without mind-altering prescribed medication infiltrating what was happening inside his head.

  Since he was a kindergartener, Kyle said, he had lived with foster families. This life was no “ideal family” situation all the time. Not to mention the fact that discipline was sometimes wielded out in the form of the foster child being sent away. It was March 2001, for example, when Kyle found himself in trouble with the foster family he had been living with then. He was soon locked up and staring at the walls of Poplar Springs Hospital, a behavioral-care specialist facility with twenty-five acres of “natural setting” and a host of other amenities. If one had to be institutionalized, this was basically a palace.

  The mission of the hospital, in part, has been to “improve the lives of those in our community who are experiencing psychiatric and addictive-disease concerns.” This was a far cry from the institutions of the 1950s and 1960s that many might recall images of; places like Poplar would be country clubs compared to these mental wards of the past. Forget about the Hollywood scenarios that conjure up bouts of electroshock therapy and Nurse Mildred Ratched types who rule over “crazy” people confined in the hospital, walking that paper-slipper shuffle down shiny waxed hallways, zoned out on enough meds to put down an elephant. Poplar aims to give tools to its patients in order to live as normally as they can. That was something Kyle Hulbert wanted desperately: to walk out one day and be free from those mental chains that had held him in bondage, he claimed, since he was six years
old.

  That last time Kyle had been committed to Poplar, in early spring 2001, his foster family claimed he was “manic” and suffering from “delusional thinking, delusions of grandeur, psychosis,” as Kyle put it, “and a whole host of other things.

  “They said there had been a steady decline in my behavior,” Kyle remarked. “This culminated in what they said was a threat by me then to blow up my school.”

  Serious accusations.

  Kyle was seventeen. He was “gearing up,” he said, for his eighteenth hatching day and looking forward to walking out of whatever facility, whatever foster home he was in, able and ready to go out and do what he wanted in life.

  According to Kyle, the bomb threat, or blowing up a school, was an entire “misunderstanding. I really mean that.”

  Kyle had missed the bus to school on the day before it happened. So he decided he wasn’t going to school that day. He had been up all night, anyway. Tired, grumpy, a bit impatient, that chaos of his mind swirling and running all together, he was in no condition to walk to school or call for a ride or deal with anyone who was going to question him about showing up late for the bus. The next day, determined not to miss the bus, Kyle arrived at the bus stop a half hour early, somewhere near 6:15 A.M. But the bus never showed up, Kyle claimed.

  So he walked back home.

  “I’ll drive you,” his foster mother said.

  This particular family Kyle was living with, the Moores (pseudonym), were the type of people “not to give up on a child,” according to Kyle’s counselor who described them before Kyle moved in. They stayed the course, generally. They weren’t going to toss him out because he acted up a few times. Kyle was an old veteran of living within the foster family system; he knew that this was rare—finding a family willing to love him, yes, but, maybe more than that, also put up with him. Kyle Hulbert knew he wasn’t easy to get along with, that he probably talked too much, too manic, often repeated himself, and said things most people found disturbing or at least offensive. But Miss Moore was going to help him. She was a woman in her early sixties when Kyle moved in. She had been a foster parent for decades. She knew the way the system worked; she was invested in helping children.