Fire is the Devil's Best Friend

Joe Stiller doesn’t remember exactly when he started hating women. The hatred probably began in his childhood when he was six years old living in a small desert town with his parents and four sisters. Of the five kids, just like in a litter of newborn puppies, Joe was the runt and so his sisters picked on him constantly, at home, on the playground and even at school in front of his friends. One time, they all held him down on the ground while his sister Sue painted his toenails bright red with fingernail polish. The twins, Pat and Pam, laughed their heads off as he struggled to get up while his youngest sister, Candy, just stood by with a smirk on her face.

When Joe was a child, he simply wanted to be called Joe. Joe was not short for Joseph or Joey; no, it simply was Joe. His dad called him “Joe Blow,” after the pink Joe Palooka bubble gum popular at the time that was always wrapped in a cartoon wrapper. His mom called him “My Little Joey.” Joe loved his mother dearly but every time she was talking with a girlfriend or neighbor in the kitchen, or the yard and he walked in, his mom would say, “oh, here is my little Joey.” “No!” Joe shouted in his mind, “I am a big boy! My name is Joe!”

Despite their pet names for him, he forgave his parents for their casual name calling. His sisters Sue, Pat and Candy always called him Joe. Just Joe. But his sister Pam, whom he would have many personal issues with all his life called him Joey. Joe thought being called Joey was demeaning to him—as in “Joey the little runt!” - and so whenever Pam called him Joey, he often just ignored her until, frustrated that he would not respond to that name, waited for her to give in, and call him Joe. “Joe, not Joey!” he often yelled back at her.

Maybe Joe’s real hatred for women, besides his sister Pam, began later in his life when he was a young teenager. No matter how hard he tried, he could not get a movie date with any of the girls in his eighth-grade class and if he happened to ask one of them to go to a dance or the school prom, they smiled at him like his evil sisters had and turned him down, laughing as they walked away.

When Joe was 18 years old, he had a girlfriend at his high school. Her name was Karen. Karen was very nice to him but also about an inch or so taller than he was and if she wore heels, she was a giant next to him. There was not much he could do about their height difference even though he secretly tried putting plastic risers in his shoes to gain an inch or two but all they did was give him blisters and make his heel sore. So, Joe, shorter than Karen and terribly self-conscious about it, eventually resented Karen for towering over him and making him feel small in her eyes and in his. Without much fanfare, Joe broke off his relationship with Karen and when he saw her in class or in the hallway, ignored her or just walked past her without saying a word.

When Joe graduated high school, he wanted to join the Navy and maybe work on airplanes on the deck of an aircraft carrier, but his recruiter told Joe he was too short, and the Navy would not accept him. As he recalls, he went into the Navy recruiting office at the local mall and the recruiter was a woman First Class Petty Officer with six white stripes down her uniform sleeve, one white stripe each for four years of service.

“A lifer,” Joe thought to himself when he saw her time served stripes running down her sleeve. When the woman petty officer told Joe he was too short and therefore unfit to serve in the Navy, she turned to the Marine recruiter sitting in the desk next to her, smiled at him, then turned to Joe, and said, “Maybe you should try joining the Boy Scouts!” and they both laughed. Joe walked out of the recruiter’s office seething with anger about yet another woman humiliating him for no reason at all.

Joe did not have a lot of career options in his life. He was a high school graduate and didn’t have any money to go to college. All his sisters were married now and living in several states far from his own. His mother had died when Joe was only 15—and he secretly hated her for leaving him alone in a cruel world—and his dad ran off with another woman when Joe was 16. With nowhere else to go, Joe lived with friends of the family, the Gibson’s, until he was 18, when he graduated high school and tried to join the Navy.

Feeling lost, Joe managed to get a job at a local restaurant where he worked as a wait person. He made a decent hourly wage and because the restaurant was popular with the locals, it was always packed with people and so Joe made good tips.

One day, two ladies came into the restaurant, sat down in his section, and ordered one white wine and one red wine with a charcuterie board of meats, cheeses, and olives. When Joe brought the meal to the two women, he accidentally spilled the white wine into the lap of one of the women, apologized profusely and offered to get her another glass compliments of the restaurant.

The woman sneered at Joe, called him several names he could not repeat in public and started yelling at him that he was” a stupid little snot and a clumsy fool!” Joe took this criticism to heart, and in that moment, flashed back to when his sisters treated him the same way when he did something to displease them. After bringing the woman a new glass of white wine and again apologizing, he asked the manager if he could go home early and since the restaurant was not busy, the manager agreed.

Joe did not go home. The sun was just settling in the West and the light, like it normally did at twilight, splashed over the buildings and the street with its golden colors. Joe stood on the corner across the street from his restaurant and waited for the two women to emerge. When they did and split up going their own separate ways, Joe followed the “nasty little bitch”—that is what he thought of her now-- who had screamed at him and humiliated him in front of his fellow workers and his other customers.

Joe followed closely behind the woman for several blocks and then watched her climb a set of stairs into a multi-story apartment building. Since the woman had paid the tab at the restaurant, Joe knew her name was Beth Givens and her name appeared alongside a white button outside the apartment entrance. After the apartment complex door had shut and locked behind the woman, Joe ran up the entrance stairs and looked in the side window as Beth was climbing the stairs to her second-floor apartment. Joe waited a few minutes for her door to close, then he rang the button with her name on it and listened to it buzz.

Beth answered the bell and asked who it was.

Joe said, “I have an Amazon delivery for Beth Givens.” 

“I did not order anything from Amazon. Please go away,” replied Beth still out of breath from her long climb up the stairs.

“The package says, Beth Givens on it, and I think that is your name.” Joe explained.

“OK, I will buzz you in.” Beth said with an irritated voice.

Joe walked up the steps. Beth opened the door and saw Joe standing in front of her. She immediately recognized Joe from the restaurant but before she could say a word, Joe pushed her hard back into the apartment.

Then he started screaming at her, “So, you nasty bitch, you think I am little snot,” as he moved menacingly closer toward her, “and stupid” and as Joe passed a table next to her door, he saw a foot high bronze statue of a woman and grabbed it, “and a clumsy fool!”

As Joe yelled out her last insult, he raised the heavy bronze statue above his head and hit Beth in the shoulder. Grabbing her shoulder with a painful grimace on her face, Beth fell to the floor in her kitchen. Then Joe hit her in the head and as she cried and pleaded and raised her hands to stop his blows, he hit her repeatedly with the statue, finally crushing her skull. Beth fell back onto the floor, a small pool of blood pouring out from her head. Joe stood over her, a smile on his face finally killing one of the female demons who had laughed at him, and menaced him, and demeaned him, and humiliated him all his life. Now he was Joe Stiller the Killer, and Joe smiled with satisfaction that he had gotten the last laugh from this nasty bitch.

Beth’s kitchen floor was covered in a soft white marble and her blood now was filling the cracks between the marble tiles. Joe decided to hide the evidence that he had been there and was the killer. His fingerprints were on the bronze statue which he placed next to Beth’s smashed head. Although dead, Beth’s unseeing eyes were still open and even in her death, she mocked Joe. Joe walked over to the kitchen cabinet above the stove and took out a bottle of olive oil and poured it over Beth’s lifeless body and the bronze statue. He laid the empty olive oil bottle with his fingerprints on it on her chest. Then he took matches from the gas stove and lit Beth on fire. As soon as the flames licked over her entire body, Joe walked out the door. He ran down the stairs and out the front entrance and, thankfully and at least for Joe’s sake, nobody saw him leave.

When Beth’s neighbors smelled smoke and burning flesh, they called the fire department who arrived in a few minutes from Fire House 71 just down the street. They called out at Beth’s door to see if any one was home. After seeing smoke pouring out under the door and not getting any response, they broke into Beth’s apartment and found her body engulfed in flames on the kitchen floor. Magically, the marble floor had contained the flames and nothing else in the kitchen caught fire. The firemen extinguished the flames then called the police. When the police arrived and forensics took over the investigation, Beth’s apartment became a crime scene, although all that was left of Beth was black ashes and blackened bones, a burned and shriveled olive oil bottle on her chest, and lying next to her head, a bronze statue of a woman. Joe’s fingerprints and any DNA he might have left disappeared in the fire.

Joe Spiller slept like a baby that night. Before he fell asleep, he laid his head on his pillow with his hands behind his head staring up at the ceiling and relived the attack on Beth. Joe smiled. For once in his tormented life, he had shown a nasty, bitchy woman who he really was. Not Joe the shrimp. Not Joe the weak. Not Joe the runt. Not Joe the clumsy idiot. But Joe Stiller the Killer. The killer of women who wronged him, who humiliated him, who thought less of him than they did their own fathers, or brothers or husbands or boyfriends or male friends. Beth Givens deserved to die. For Joe, Beth was just the beginning.