Carol Edward Cole always knew that something was wrong with him.

Born in 1938, Carol, who would go by Eddie or Ed as an adult, quickly understood, even as a very young child, that something was really, really not right about the way his brain worked.

Sometimes he thought that what was wrong with him was inherent to who he was, that it was something he must have been born with. When an older boy came into his bathroom, shut the door, and proceeded to teach

him how to masturbate, for example, Eddie thought the kid must have sensed something about him,

must have known that something was wrong with his masculinity. Other times, Eddie blamed his

mother for his dark fantasies.

Though she appeared to most strangers, like any other suburban Californian mother,

raising a family in the middle of the 20th century, when her husband was drafted into World War II,

Vesta Cole started stepping out on him, dramatically. She didn't merely reunite with an old boyfriend.

She didn't start having an affair with a neighbor. She started attending actual sex parties in nearby

apartment buildings, and she brought along her son Eddie with her, only to punish him later for,

well, no one really knows why. Vesta would also beat her son for other

reasons or force him to wear his sister's dresses and then mock him, and she took great

pleasure in frequently reminding Eddie and the family at large who was really in charge,

her. And perhaps in large part, thanks to her horrific influence as eddy's feelings about sex masculinity

and power developed so did his violent urges towards women but unlike so many other dirtbags we have

covered here before eddie would actually try to get help for these urges over and over and over

again eddie told all sorts of people, people like guards

at jails where he was imprisoned on minor charges, police officers who just happened to run into him

on the street, that he had violent fantasies about women, that he wanted to strangle them, to kill them,

to rape them, and that he wanted help so he could get rid of these thoughts. And then often

try and get him that help. He'd spend a lot of time and a lot of different psychiatric facilities

...