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Welcome to the Bob Berdella forum
Back in '80-'85 I was a small-town English teacher at a high school a couple hours from K.C., and, weekends, I'd regularly hook up with my pal from hometown days who by then lived two blocks north of Westport. Zany good fun, those brisk walks or drunken drives, leading us onward to a small cornucopia of used book- and record stores plus Penny Lane and Kelly's. And this is not an "after the fact" remembrance: the several times we chanced into Berdella's shop--generally after parking and breezing our way through it toward other venues--there definitely was....something....about....Bob. And not a good something. He'd be sat behind a counter whilst we sometimes perused (briskly) his offerings, lots of stuff I liked, yes, but the atmosphere of his shop--and his brooding presence--was such that I never bought a thing, just generally said hi to the guy who loomed in his own shadow, watching us silently. When the end came and Berdella's image dominated the K.C. Times & Star, neither of us were a bit surprised that the guy--it's hard to pin down just what it was about him; I may have spent fifteen minutes, tops, in his presence--almost broadcast the inevitable ending he would make of it. And it wasn't merely that Berdella was less than sunny on account of our no-purchases penury; no, one got the feeling, upon walking into his shop, that a depressing miasma hung like a shroud over the place and, sitting at its center, was a touch of a darkness and of local color: Bob Berdella. |
