Rosalyn's Song
December 20, 1954
- Chicago -

Lawrence Voorhies was a wealthy man. He had a load of cash, a rowhouse on the Gold Coast, and a wife who was a real looker. He met Rosalyn King when she was nineteen years old. The debutante daughter of a business partner at the First Union Trust and Savings Bank, she was freshly out of her first year at a women's college and had the social pedigree he required in a spouse. She was a quick-minded girl and she had grown up soft, but not much was required of her, other than to look pretty and behave like a lady, two things at which Rose was quite talented.

She wasn't the perfect mate. For one thing, she was an incorrigible flirt. Rose also had a fascination with silver screen idols that he found silly. When Lawrence took her on dates, Rose preferred movies to the jazz clubs he frequented, and she often went on and on for hours about the dancing of Rita Hayworth or the intensity of James Cagney in so-and-such a role, but he entertained it. Frankly, he figured she'd grow out of her adoration in time and become what he wanted: a stunning brunette trophy for his arm, and an assurance of career success under her father's wing.

Rose thought Lawrence was an utter bore, devoid of any sexual magnetism or sense of humor, but he was good-looking, financially secure, and most importantly, her father promised he'd take good care of her, so she brushed aside any disappointments initially felt and went into the marriage hopeful, envisioning herself as a classy dame and future queen of the cocktail party circuit. In all the superficial ways, the promise her father made was kept, but Rose's interest in playing dutiful wife faded after a couple of years. For all his good qualities, Lawrence was a snooze in the sack and far more interested in reading the paper and going over his ledgers than listening to anything she had to say. Sure, he bought her a fur coat and kept her in pearls, but her imagination was going to sleep, and for that reason more than any other, Rose had a wandering eye.

They began as harmless flirtations at dinner parties. A wink at another woman's husband, a lingering touch to a strange man's cufflink. It would've been abnormal not to hope Lawrence would notice and become a bit jealous, but he either didn't notice or didn't mind enough to keep her in check. The less reaction her behavior garnered, the more Rosalyn ramped it up, and as the years passed, eventually she was letting Miles Harrell cop a feel in a restaurant coat room, and shimmying out of her sweater in the back seat of Burt White's Chevy Belaire.

She didn't mean to hurt anyone, their various wives included. She felt a tremendous disconnect from the snooty women of her social circle, who seemed like cold fish to her, and there was no evidence at hand that what she was doing could ever genuinely harm anyone, least of all herself.

One night in December 1954, when they’d been married eight years, her husband hosted a cocktail party for some of his business associates. It was snowing, and each time another guest came inside, the entranceway became slick as glass from the moisture that rolled off their wool overcoats and umbrellas.

She noticed Robert Hilliard right off. He was late to the gathering, coming in just as a few guests crowded around the baby grand for a song. He wore a fedora and a belted trench coat, and he reminded her of Paul Newman. Wandering over to her husband’s side, she put an elbow on his shoulder and asked, “Sweetie, who’s that?” An index finger dipped beneath her pearls and stroked her collarbone. She learned that Robert was new in town, a man that Lawrence met one night at the yacht club, and he’d been invited over to get acquainted with some friends.

Intrigued, Rose stole one of her husband’s cigars and went over on the flimsy excuse of needing a light. Robert was reserved, not much of a talker, but he seemed to hang on every word she spoke, and there was nothing Rosalyn liked better than an audience. While the guests banged madly away at the black and white keys, and Lawrence talked stocks and bonds, Rose offered to give her new friend a tour of the house, beginning with her husband’s study.

It was a masculine room with sturdy furniture, a big fireplace, and loads of dull books; in short, it was not at all fascinating. Rose circled round the desk, spying a financial book, and slapped it closed, resting her hip alongside it. She talked about nothing important, putting on the airs of Hollywood seduction, toying with a clip-on earring, puckering her mouth to smoke the cigar. Any experienced man would recognize that Rose, at twenty-seven years old, was still a girl dressed up in a society woman’s clothing, caught in the fantasies of her youth that neither marriage nor adulthood had stymied. But all Robert saw was her neck. It was long and white and pristine, the neck of a swan.

He wanted to tear a gash in it, at the source of that flowery perfume. He wanted to hear that breathy voice rise in a pitiful scream.

Rosalyn sensed him looking at her throat, and she thrilled on it, mistaking his interest as sexual. She imagined him leaning closer to smell her perfume, putting his hand on the small of her back, and sweeping her into a passionate kiss that she’d entertain for a couple of steamy moments. Just long enough to inject the light back into her life, give her something to think about at night while she combed her hair and listened to the premature snores of Lawrence, who fell asleep with his reading glasses sliding off his face.

It was a move she’d practiced a dozen times in front of her vanity mirror, a coquettish tilt of her head to the right. Rose’s eyes drifted shut, and she both felt and heard him coming closer to smell her perfume, just like she’d envisioned. The tip of Robert’s nose was very cold.

She heard the bones in his face changing, but only saw it from her peripheral vision. A distorted brow, the yellow-gold glow of a demon’s eye. There was a bite to her neck, another at her shoulder as she jerked away, that one ripping through her blouse. He didn’t stop to feed for long, or disengage his fangs before he retreated. He removed entire portions of her skin, seemingly for the joy of doing it. Rose’s fingers clawed at his face and neck, leaving long welts that didn’t phase him. She kicked and she screamed, a veritable hellcat scratching to get herself free from encircling arms. Her foot knocked over a fireplace poker, but neither that noise nor the sound of her yelling for help could compete with the rousing tune being sung in the formal living room.

On the third bite, she flung her hands out, searching blindly for something she could use as a weapon, grasping onto a ballpoint pen and stabbing it through Robert’s hand. He growled and let go. Rose flipped onto her knees in a desperate attempt to crawl across the desk, leaking blood all over her husband’s careful ledgers. The surface was red and slippery with it. But Robert caught her by the hair and dragged her back, her earring coming loose and bouncing on the floor.

What killed Rosalyn was the puncture to her jugular vein. Blood soaked and matted the front of her shirt. When he let go, she tumbled off the desk and landed on her cheekbone, dangerously close to the fireplace. The final memory of Rose’s life was of the sensation of drowning and of being pulled away from the fire, and a warmth she could no longer feel.

She never knew why Robert turned her. She couldn’t recall it happening, and he was the last man to be bothered with telling her why. The circumstances of a vampire’s turning could be pivotal in the kind of killer they became, and Rosalyn avoided the sadistic or macabre like the black plague, wanting nothing of her sire, who had wanted nothing much of her. What she didn’t realize was that, in choosing to romance male victims to their deaths, she was recreating pieces of her murder, fine-tuning them over the long and solitary years of her unlife, like a song she couldn’t stop playing.