But Aldrich also says that it wasn’t all fags he hated, just the ones he called the perverts, the ones who prey on children the way he says he was preyed on by an older relative. Aldrich can offer no independent corroboration, but he says he was repeatedly forced to perform oral and anal sex on a relative for three or four years from the time he was nine years old. Aldrich describes himself as being defenseless because of a seven-year age difference. But he also paints an image of himself as a raucous and wild fighter at the time of the alleged abuse. (Aldrich says that on one occasion, when he was 11 or 12, he was in a fight with two twins who lived in the same trailer park in Rockwall, then squared off with the twins’ father and used a baseball bat to break his collarbone, his arm, and several of his ribs.)

Turning to the subject of the murder of Nicholas West, Aldrich begins by explaining that he didn’t have a phone where he lived in Tyler, so he liked using the one in the middle of Bergfeld Park between the rest rooms and the picnic tables. He used it to make late-night calls to his fiancée. He loved to call and croon his favorite Garth Brooks lyrics while she played the CD at home. But in the middle of his calls, those damned fags would often come on to him. Sure, Aldrich knew, as just about everyone in Tyler knew, that the park had become a meeting place for gays after dark. But this was a matter of principle.

“It got to where I wanted to carry a gun up there and every time one of ’em came near me I was gonna shoot ’em for coming near me. You know, here I am, I’m not gay. I’m in a public park using a public phone and yet I’m going to get harassed by these homosexuals, but when I do something against them I’m breakin’ the law.”

Aldrich says that the whole idea of “fag-bashing” for fun and profit wasn’t his, but was first suggested by the 13-year-old sister of one of the Tyler teenagers whom Aldrich had hooked up with after his release from prison. Once the suggestion was made, it seemed too damned good to pass up, given the general reluctance of queers to report crimes to the police.

The group, according to Aldrich, started its spree of gay-bashings in Tyler sometime before the spring of 1993, when he became involved. More often than not, Aldrich acted as the lure who reeled in the victims under the pretense of a pickup. In some of the fag-bashings the primary motive was robbery. In others it was bodily harm, like the time Aldrich and his gang went out with baseball bats and clubs and crowbars, or the time they held a man at bay in a freezing lake for several hours while they fired shots over his head, as if they had created their own human version of duck hunting. The intention, Aldrich says, was to instill fear, to see that pure, unadulterated look of terror on the victim, who didn’t know if he was going to live or die or get tortured. Don Aldrich isn’t shy about describing what he felt at these moments. “You could say I got a little bit of pleasure out of it.”

Then came the Nicholas West incident. Aldrich had been working that night with two teenagers named Henry Dunn, then 19, and David McMillan, then 17. According to Aldrich, the two teens, interested in West’s red Mazda truck with its pulsating stereo system, had been trying all night to get their potential victim into Bergfeld Park under the guise of a pickup. But he just wouldn’t take the bait, says Aldrich. Then something wonderful happened. “West clearly came on to me after I got off the phone with my fiancée. When West came on to me, I’m, like, Why, don’t this just make it easy?”