Psycho Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est

There’s no doubt that convicted kidnapper and suspected serial rapist John Regan is a pretty bad dude. But how bad still seems up for debate, as the former Waterbury, Conn., man is sent up the river for the next decade or so.

For those living in a cocoon over the past nine months, Regan is the fellow who said he was “trying to ask for directions” from the cargo bay of his van when he “accidentally” threw his arms around the waist of a 17-year-old all-state cross country runner in the Saratoga Spring High School parking lot.

Note to Regan: Police generally don’t buy these excuses when they find a tarp, a rope with a slip knot, a shovel and a camera filled with pictures of young women in the back of what some would call a child molester van. Needless to say, he had little choice but to fess up to his crime, especially after he learned that hanging himself wasn’t a way out that the authorities would let him take.

From all published accounts, the former roofing salesman was sort of a character chameleon, one who seemed like a quiet and unassuming family guy on the outside, but was a raving sex-charged misogynist on the inside. Were this all to the story, it could be put to rest until Regan pleas for leniency before a state parole board.

But there are still questions that remain unanswered about Regan’s motives and his capacity as a criminal. Many have speculated publicly about Regan’s involvement in other missing persons cases, a curiosity that is spurred on by the sheer audacity of his abduction attempt. The details that have been released about the case suggest a calculated plan to abduct a young woman and one he may have tried before.

Just four months prior to Regan’s arrest, 20-year-old Christina White of Milton was reported missing by her mother. By most accounts, she was a quiet part-time community college student who hung with the area Goths, a crew of black cape-wearing vampire-looking folk known for their dusk skulkings around the Rock City Road vicinity.

In hindsight, White was a red flag for an attack; she lived a fairly anonymous lower-middle class life in the Saratoga Stockade Trailer Park, a predominantly rural area of the county. She was of slight build weighing less than 100 pounds and was reported to have bi-polar disorder. She wasn’t regularly employed and was also known for disappearing at times, often for several days at a spell.

In short, only her family and close friends would've ever recognized her disappearance.

Perhaps that’s something her killer learned through passive observation. Nine months after her disappearance, White’s bleached bones were found in a pine-tree outcropping by a hiker, 100 feet into the 550-acre Daketown Forest preserve -six-miles north from where her mother last saw her.

Forensic investigators later determined through markings on White’s skeletal remains that she had been stabbed to death. They estimated she died shortly after her disappearance in late June 2005, her cell phone and bank account remained untouched after she vanished. Saratoga County Sheriff’s Department investigators repeatedly declined to identify what else may have been found at the scene or where she had been stabbed.

Four months after the grisly discovery of White’s remains, both the media and the investigators have fallen silent on the case. But lodged in her missing persons photo, there’s an odd haunting; a quiet pleading in the young girl’s soft eyes that aught to be permanently fused into the minds of investigators until they find her savage killer.

It’s possible the authorities are waiting for a jail-side confession from Regan, who might begin to talk as his convictions mount. The nightmarish alternative is that White’s killer still walks among us, searching out the next perfect target. Given this, it’s amazing that more pressure isn’t being placed on the authorities to find and arrest a suspect, who could be in waiting for the right moment to strike again.

Then again, White wasn’t an all-star standout athlete from a high school on the affluent side of the tracks.