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“Ah, true,” Kilkenny said.
“But you’re probably right,” Raisa conceded. “I’m actually surprised the confirmed victims’ relatives let her take the lead.”
Even within grief support groups, there were hierarchies to conform to.
“Yeah, I thought that, too,” he said, as they headed north, out of Gig Harbor. “But then I watched a few of her interviews.”
“Let me guess, both charismatic and pretty,” Raisa said.
“Very,” Kilkenny said, and then he actually blushed. “I meant about the charisma.”
“Rizz, I think the kids are calling it these days,” Raisa said, amused. It actually was part of her job to keep up with current slang, and she enjoyed it. Kilkenny always got a little stuffy about language—far more than she did, despite the fact that people probably would have guessed she was the pedantic one out of the two of them.
As predicted, his nose wrinkled. “That’s the worst possible bastardization of that very beautiful word.”
“Verybeautiful, like Essi Halla?” Raisa teased.
He grunted. “I’m not living that one down, am I?”
“Never.” She paused, then glanced over at him, considering. “Why have you been following along with all that? The pro- and anti-Isabel stuff?”
Kilkenny had been traumatized by Isabel as well. Raisa had thought they’d both blocked any news or updates about her after she’d been sentenced.
Here he was, though, in the know about Isabel’s—for lack of a better word—fandom.
He stared at her as if the answer were obvious, and when he said it, of course, it was.
“So you didn’t have to.”
Excerpt fromCult of Celebrity Meets True Crime: Our Worst Instincts Collide
By Sadie Richardson
Isabel Parker is underwhelming in person. Fan art of the prolific serial killer proliferates social media sites, and if it were to be believed, you would expect to meet a cross between Wonder Woman, Xena, and Tony Stark. If they’d all met a box of neon pink hair dye they couldn’t pass up.
Here, at the women’s correctional facility in Gig Harbor where Isabel Parker is serving multiple life sentences, the fluorescent lights have turned her gray, the faded pink only remains at the very tips of her otherwise mousy hair, and her teeth are yellowed from incessant chain-smoking.
And yet, it’s still easy to understand why so many people are intrigued with her—so much so that she’s inspired a fandom of online supporters who want nothing more than to see her unleashed back into society. Well, they’d also like her to hook up with and/or marry various male and female celebrities of their choosing. But it’s mostly the first one they talk about.
“There’s a rush,” Isabel purrs now, blowing a perfect ring of smoke from cracked lips, “in taking down the predator. Everyone wishes they could do it. I actually did.”
She’s referring to the lore that’s grown around her ever since her trial revealed that several of her victims were what some would call deserving of the capital punishment that she doled out. It’s why many of those fan artists draw her into a superhero costume.
When I asked about Janelle Stevens, a widowed mother of two who worked the register at a gas station in Wichita, Isabel sneered.
“She was a little cunt.”
Parker’s fans don’t see this side of her—the petty psychopath who didn’t look at killing as a moral calling but rather as a way to rid herself of irritants.
So how did this woman inspire thousands to create a FreeBell hashtag? How did she inspire over a hundred works of fan fiction and fan art?
The concept isn’t new. Hybristophilia is the diagnosis given to women who are sexually attracted to people who commit crimes. It’s why serial killers have always received marriage proposals in the mail by the dozens.
But these fans’ obsession with Isabel Parker seems more complex than that.
“Our DNA primes us to fall victim to the cult of celebrity,” said Dr. Rohan Anand, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. “We’re social creatures, and they are at the apex of our social hierarchy.”
Isabel Parker is a unique sort of celebrity, though. She’s the infamous kind. In ten years’ time, her name might be as well-known as Ted Bundy’s.