Who was the “inspiration” for the serial killer in “Zombie”?
Was he modeled after Jack the Ripper? No, I don’t really know much about Jack the Ripper. When I lived in the Detroit area in 1976, I taught at the University of Detroit and I had a whole lifetime of living in Michigan — you can get a whole lifetime very quickly living in Detroit, just a few years there adds up to a long time — but I was living there and there was a serial killer who began to operate in the very affluent northern suburbs of Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Franklin Hills. Altogether, he took about eight young teenagers and children, sometime in broad daylight. They’d be missing for several days, and each caused an uproar of hysteria and terror. He was never apprehended. I had wanted to write a novel about the terror and the despair of living in the community where this was going on and being so helpless. But time went on, and months went by, and finally, he simply ceased to operate, and nobody knows whether he just left and went to some other part of the country. Pr
