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pounced first, using the element of surprise and attempting to get the potential offender out of the build ing and back out into the street before he knew exactly what was happening to him. I always say that most sexual killers and serial rapists become skilled in domination, manipulation, and control—the same skills I was trying to master in a different context. But at least I was learning.
    When I graduated from high school, I still wanted to be a vet, but my grades weren’t nearly good enough for Cornell. The best I could do to get a similar type of program was Montana State. So in September of 1963, the Brooklyn and Long Island boy headed out to the heart of Big Sky country.
    The culture shock upon arriving in Bozeman couldn’t have been greater.
    "Greetings from Montana," I wrote in one of my early letters home, "where men are men and sheep are nervous." Just as Montana seemed to embody all the stereotypes and clichés of western and frontier life to me, that is how I came across to the people I met there as an easterner. I joined the local chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon, which was composed almost exclusively of local boys, so I stood out like a sore thumb. I took to wearing a black hat, black cloth ing, and black boots and sported long sideburns like a character out of
West Side Story,
which was very much how New Yorkers like me were perceived in those days.
    So I made the most of it. At all the social gatherings, the locals would be wearing western garb and dancing the two-step, while I had spent the last several years religiously watching Chubby Checker on TV and knew every conceiv able variation of the twist. Because my sister, Arlene, was four years older than I was, she’d long before enlisted me as her practice dance partner, so I quickly became the dance instructor for the entire college community. I felt like a missionary going into some remote area that had never before heard English spoken.
    I had never had much of a reputation as a scholar, but now my grades hit an all-time low as I concentrated on everything but. I’d already worked as a bouncer in a bar in New York, but here in Montana, the drinking age was twenty-one, which was a real comedown to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t let that stop me.
    My first run-in with the law happened when one of my fraternity brothers and I had taken out these two swell girls who had met in a home for unwed mothers. They were mature for their age. We stopped at a bar and I went in to buy a six-pack.
    The bartender says, "Show me your ID." So I show him this phony Selective Service card, carefully done. From my bouncer experience, I’d learned some of the pitfalls and mistakes of false identifi ca tion.
    The guy looks at the card and says, "Brooklyn, huh? You guys back East are big bastards, aren’t you?" I kind of laugh self-consciously, but everyone in the bar has turned around, so I know there are witnesses now. I get back out to the parking lot and we drive away drinking this beer, and unbeknownst to me, one of the girls put the beer cans on the trunk of the car.
    All of a sudden, I hear a police siren. A cop stops us. "Get out of the car."
    So we get out of the car. He starts searching us, and even at the time I know this is an illegal search, but I’m certainly not going to mouth off to him. As he gets down, he’s exposing his gun and billy club to me, and I get this crazy flash that in a split second, I could take the club, crunch him on the head, grab the gun, and take off. Fortu nately for my future, I didn’t. But knowing he’s getting to me, I take my ID out of my wallet and stuff it down into my under shorts.
    He takes all four of us back to the station, separates us, and I’m really sweating because I know what they’re doing and I’m afraid the other guy is going to cop out on me.
    One of the officers says to me, "Now, son, you tell us. If that guy back at the bar didn’t ask for your ID, we’ll go back there. We’ve had trouble with him