(Extraction from the book: Serial Killers by author Joel Norris)
For seven months he had been on a wild spree of rape and murder that loosely followed the cycle for the full moon.
When the eleven-year-old Bobby Joe Long was reaching puberty, he realized that his breasts were growing. It was embarrassing for him to look down and see his enlarged breasts filling out his shirt as if he were a young girl. All of his clothing became tight, and his figure started to change shape as well. Other members of his family had experienced this congenital dysfunction of the endocrine system and his doctor prescribed surgery. Long’s mother recalls that the surgeon removed more than six pounds of tissue from her son’s chest. That seemed to remedy the problem, but it didn’t keep Bobby Long from experiencing a lunar proto menstrual cycle for the rest of his life.
‘Even now,’ he recalls, ‘I can always tell when it’s the full moon. I get crazy when the moon is full; I can’t sit still’ I have to pace; even the smallest things set me off. And I’m not the only one. All over the row, you can tell when it’s the full moon, even if you can’t see it from this hole. People start screaming and carrying on, you just know that it’s a full moon.’
Long’s fear of being transformed into a woman when he was reaching puberty paralleled the many problems he had relating to women throughout his life. When he was still a very young child his mother divorced his father and took the boy to Florida. They were very poor, Long recalls. They rented single rooms in boarding houses where they both had to sleep in the same bed. Bob’s perception and his mother Louella’s memory vary greatly. His mother worked nights and dated a lot of different men, some of whom Bob claimed regularly visited her at the boarding house. Even though Louella Long, Bobby’s mother, denies this, they both agree that she changed jobs frequently and kept them on the move from place to place wherever she could pick up new work. Therefore he was never in one community long enough to make any lasting friendships. He was always the new kid in the neighborhood and was forced to rely on his mother for most of his companionship. For Bobby Joe Long, this situation aroused extreme rage in him, especially when the attractive and seductive Louella Long had relationships with grown men. When his mother wasn’t working nights, Long remembers, he asked her to spend time with him at home. Instead, ‘she would never stay home. She would always go out. I used to ask her why she couldn’t spend her nights off with me. Take me out once in a while. But she would go out and leave me with one of the neighbors.’
Worse than the loneliness, however, was the fact that Long and his mother shared the same bed until he was twelve, at which time she married her second husband. For Long, it was awkward and embarrassing; for his mother, it was an economic necessity. ‘I never undressed in front of him or did anything anyone would consider indecent,’ his mother explains. ‘We just didn’t have the money to rent two bedrooms.’ She also remembers that, because she worked nights and didn’t get home until five or six in the morning, ‘by the time I was getting undressed to go to bed, Bobby was getting up to go to school.’ According to her, the two were actually using the same room in shifts: he would sleep at night and she during the day. She also denies ever bringing men over to where the two lived. ‘We were very poor and had to live on the tips I could make waitressing or car hopping. There were times when I didn’t even know where I would get the money for the next meal, not to mention the rent, and I was afraid we’d be living in the street. But no matter what Bobby Joe or anyone says, I was never a prostitute, and I tried to be a good mother.’
Bobby’s father saw his son only rarely between 1956, when Louella left West Virginia with their son, and in 1968, when she divorced her second husband. ‘They would come back to Kenova on Christmas or some other times, and I would see them. But for the most part, I didn’t see Bobby joe at all when he was growing up.’
During Bobby’s trial, it was disclosed that during his young life, on several occasions, Bob Long, Sr., while visiting the family in Florida, would become violent and sexually attack Louella, sometimes using a knife. Even today, he speaks of his son from a state of severe grief. But it was Bobby’s mother who raised him and who became the dominant influence in his life. She remembers him as the ‘perfect, cute little boy. He made good grades at school. Then he met Cindy.’
When he was thirteen, Bobby Joe began dating Cindy Jean Guthrie, the girl who lived with her aunt just a few blocks away from Bobby and his mother and the person he would marry seven years later. She became the other woman who exercised control over his life. ‘Cindy and I were inseparable from the first times we began dating,’ Bobby recalls. ‘She would be over at our house, or I would be at hers. We were always together.’ From time to time they would break up, date other people, but get back together again. Five years and two children later they were divorced. Cindy behaved like Bobby Joe’s mother. She was forceful and told him what to do.
The two women also look very much alike. Both are thin and fair, they have similar voices, and both are aggressive and able to manipulate the men they want. And Bobby Joe had found Cindy at just the time his mother had married her second husband. In his own mind, it was a natural transition from one mother-son relationship to the next. Louella had established herself with a new partner, and so did her son. His romance with Cindy would last throughout the stormy times in Louella’s second marriage, the trips back to West Virginia to visit her first husband, and constant fights the two teenagers had. It lasted through Bobby’s first brush with the law on a breaking and entering charge that was eventually dropped and throughout high school and his enlistment in the Army.
Louella didn’t like the attention Bobby gave Cindy, and even today the two women are bitter about one another. ‘She was manipulative,’ Louella Long says of Cindy. ‘She was one of the cruelest people I ever knew. She never really had a mother or a family for that matter and was jealous of the family that Bobby had. I tried to be a mother to her and to help her with the children, but she never liked me.’ She remembers that her son’s performance in school, which had always been affected by his changing residences every few months, had still been above average until he met Cindy. Then his grades fell apart completely, and he never finished high school. In fact Louella even blames Cindy in part for her son’s crimes. ‘You have no idea how she changed him and how what she did ruined his whole life.’
The motorcycle accident, more than any other single even, transformed Long’s life. 'Anybody who knew me before the accident and knows me now would say that it’s like I was two different people,’ Long explains. ‘I knew there was something wrong with my head when I was in the hospital after the accident, I started thinking about sex. That’s all I could think about day and night. I thought about it with my wife, with her friends, with people I knew from before. It started driving me crazy.’
He had fantasies of making love to his wife’s sister and her friends. He had fantasies of group sex and overpowering women.
‘I tried to tell the doctors at the hospital that there was something still wrong with me. I couldn’t get these thoughts of sex out of my mind, and Cindy and I had gone from having sex two or three times a week to at least two times a day. And I was still masturbating to get relief. I thought about having sex with just every girl I met or got to know. Then there were the headaches that wouldn’t go away, and the feeling that the side of my face was dead. And there were the noises. The slightest sound would seem like an explosion. I would scream at my son to be quiet, when he wasn’t really making much noise at all. It only sounded like a lot of noise to me. To this day, I can’t take loud noises - they make me get mad and crazy.’’
The injuries to Long’s brain from the motorcycle accident compounded possible damage received from four previous documented head traumas he sustained before he was ten. At the age of five he fell from a swing, lost consciousness, and awoke to find that a stick had punctured his eye and was embedded in the medical portion of his left eyelid. A year later he injured his head when he was thrown from his bike, and a year after that he was knocked unconscious when hit by a car bumper. He lost several teeth and was diagnosed as having received a severe concussion. A year after that he was thrown by a pony and was dizzy and nauseous for the next several weeks. ‘That was the sickest I had ever been in my entire life,’ Long says about the event, ‘I couldn’t even stand up straight without getting dizzy,’ The left side of Long’s face is still numb as a result of the accident, and he still walks with a limp.
Often violence would come over him like a thunderstorm, with little or no provocation, and just leave just as suddenly. When a violent outburst of temper had passed, Long would have no memory of it whatsoever. His mother remembers one such incident when she had borrowed his car to pick up the keys, he reached out and grabbed her, put her over her knees, and spanked her very hard on the buttocks for several minutes. He had raised several painful bruises. He then stormed out of the house. When he returned he couldn't remember the incident. Even today, Long claims not to remember spanking his mother, and she had never confronted him directly about it since it happened.
After two years of difficult recovery from his motorcycle accident, his career in the Army came to an end when he claimed the Army violated his enlistment contract by not providing a complete medical diagnosis of his injuries.
He worked sporadically as an X-ray technician but was fired from job after job for making advances toward female patients, and in one instance, for showing obscene material to a young girl.
He served two days in jail on that charge and lost his job as well. After returning to West Virginia to work at a hospital there, he lost his job because he made the female patients undress before taking their X rays.
Long was never hostile or overtly threatening, but there was something menacing about him nevertheless.
Bobby was watching the movie ‘’Missing in Action’’ with Chuck Norris in the cinema when he was arrested by a bunch of undercover cops in the theater dressed as Motorcycle Gang Members.
It was after he was put on trial, however, that he realized that his case had become a political issue. ‘What kills me the most is that the girls I raped were all dope addicts and whores. Not that anybody really deserves to get killed, but they weren’t saints. I’m sick. I know there’s something wrong with my brain. I knew it from the first times in the hospital when I felt what I felt. I told doctor after doctor what I felt, but it made no difference. I’m no killer, not like the other guys here in the row. But it made no difference to the court or to the governor. Bloody Bob Graham needs me to die because he has to get reelected. He kept on signing death warrants for Bundy and putting him on death watch even though he knew that the court was going to step in. Everybody knew it. But it made no difference because we’re here just to die so that people can get elected back into office. As far as I’m concerned. they’re the real killers because they’re not sick and are using the state to kill so that they can get ahead in their careers. I’m sick and I’m going to be fried alive. After I’m dead, they’re going to open up my head and find that just like we’ve been saying a part of my brain is black and dry and dead. But they’re not going to give a fuck.’
