Page 8 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

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.

“Attention is attention,” Anand says to that. “And we’ve incorporated brutal psychopaths into our everyday routines. We listen to podcasts about them as we do laundry, we unwind with a glass of wine at the end of the day and turn on our favorite docuseries. They’re in our lives, they’re in our hierarchies.”

When I asked Isabel what she thought of her fans, she grinned. “They would be fun to kill.”