At a high school dance in 1964, 17 year-old Sondra London met a bright, handsome, well mannered Catholic boy, 18 year-old Gerard John Schaefer. They hung out all the time and soon fell in love. But after a year, as young lovers will, they went their separate ways. She thought she'd never see him again.

Then in 1972 came the screaming headlines: “6 Dead, 28 May Be,” and the ghoulish stories about the smiling cop turned sadistic killer and corpse-loving fiend, hoarding mementos of his mutilated victims, and writing it all up in feverish prose. Absolutely unbelievable! She was appalled that crimes like this could be committed by anyone, much less someone she had known intimately. Remember, those were the days before the term “serial killer” existed, before Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer so irrevocably showed us what it meant. In those days, Schaefer’s type of crime was not only unnamed, it was unheard-of.
Between March and July of 1989, Schaefer sent her the stories included in two sections of Killer Fiction, “Whores” and “Starke Stories.” Selections from the stories and drawings used as evidence in his 1973 murder trial are included in the section, “Actual Fantasies.” A limited edition of the volume comprising these three sections was copyrighted and published in June of 1989.
“I’m not writing non-fiction,” explained the literary madman. “It’s killer fiction: a new genre, where the writer takes violence as an artistic medium and instead of glorifying it, makes the reader see it as the cruel and horrid act it is in reality. I don’t represent violence as good or bad, merely as it is. I let the reader conclude that violence is a socially negative force, not to be revelled in.” Thus he expounded his grim postmodern aesthetic.
The truth about his crimes did not matter to her as much as the chance to take a look into his deranged mind. Somehow she managed to overcome her revulsion to his sexually violent obsessions enough to continue documenting them. His sexism, his racism, his fury at every living being in the world, including himself… his boasts of rape, sodomy, murder, even necrophilia… these she managed to tolerate by reminding herself that this was important data.

And so she decided to set aside her own personal distaste for the ugliness of the work, and focus on presenting it in all its twisted glory and leave it to the audience to tell her what it was. KILLER FICTION: Stories That Convicted the Ex-Cop of Murder-Sondra London