Dahmer

Even now, 20 years later, who can forget the week of March 4, 1974? That was the week three historic events took place in the nation:* Seven Nixon aides were indicted on Watergate cover-up charges.* Reggie Jackson signed a one-year contract with the Oakland A's for $135,000.* The first issue of People magazine hit the stands.Long gone, of course, are President Nixon and his roving band of merry followers.And long gone are superstar baseball salaries in less than seven digits.Still here, however, is People magazine which on the eve of celebrating its 20th anniversary can lay claim to being one of the world's most successful publications.

Traveling along the back roads of the Deep South, a landscape rich in legend and history, one can still hear stories of black men meeting horrible deaths at the hands of white mobs, of men tossed from bridges, beaten with beanpoles or shattered by car bombs.In scattered tiny towns, aging white men are living out their days shielded, even embraced, by their communities, despite suspicion and sometimes evidence that they committed these killings against blacks during the civil rights era.Their presence, living freely and unpunished all these years, has magnified the grief of friends and relatives who mourn the black victims.

"Zombie," by Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton Press. 181 pages. $24The morning after reading the latest product from the JoycCarol Oates fiction factory, I awoke to the radio news of the French teen-ager who had bludgeoned his family to death, then proceeded to slaughter eight other people. Granted, this youth was a mass murderer as opposed to the sort of serial killer Ms. Oates dissects in "Zombie." But the esthetics are the same."Zombie" takes the reader into the mind of a 31-year-old man possessed by the demons of ultimate control and domination.

FAIRFAX, Va. -- Lawyers for sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo will present an insanity defense at the teen-ager's trial next month, contending that Malvo was brainwashed by his alleged accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, and could not tell right from wrong. "This case is so bizarre and the degree of indoctrination is so great that we would be remiss if we didn't let a jury consider this issue," Craig S. Cooley, one of Malvo's two lead attorneys, said outside the Fairfax courthouse while the insanity plea was being filed.

Title: "The Killer Department."Author: Robert Cullen.Publisher: Pantheon.Length, price: 258 pages, $22.In southwestern Russia, city planners often left small parcels of woodlands undisturbed when cities moved outward. Maybe 50 yards wide, they were called lesopolosa, an amalgamation of words for "forest" and "strip," and they were intended to be little breaks from urban sprawl.It didn't work out that way. Weary workers began using them for city dumps, a place to toss their trash.In 1982, someone began using the lesopolosa for his own brand of garbage -- the mutilated corpses of young women and children.

In 1994, Loyola College theologian Charles Marsh left Baltimore to return to his childhood home in Mississippi. It was a trip made, at least initially, as a scholarly enterprise.Marsh was journeying back to the Deep South to write a book about different images of God that once battled beneath the surface of the civil rights movement. His focus was 1964, the year the first Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of Ku Klux Klan was crowned and the civil rights movement saw one of its deadliest summers.

Any way you cut it, 1991 has been a grim year for America'spolice departments.The amateur videotape of four Los Angeles police officers brutally beating motorist Rodney King, broadcast across Los Angeles and then the world, prompted critics to charge there's a substratum of vicious brutality in big-city police forces coast-to-coast.Milwaukee's police were subsequently revealed to have returned naked, bleeding 14-year-old Laotian boy to Jeffrey Dahmer -- the deviant who had 15 bodies of murdered youths, mostly black and gay, in his apartment.

The last person you may ever want to spend an evening with is Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer of boys and young men. Although the world learned what went on behind the door of Apt. 213 on N. 25th St. in Milwaukee after a would-be victim escaped in 1991, no one has ever really learned what went on in Dahmer's head. Joseph W. Ritsch, co-founder of the recently formed Iron Crow Theatre, has attempted to peer into that psyche. His new play, "Apartment 213," is an absorbing, if not entirely satisfying, work.

Alexander Kinyua, the 21-year-old accused of killing a man and eating his organs, has been formally indicted on charges of first-degree murder and assault and has been sent to a Maryland state mental hospital. Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said in a statement Tuesday that the indictment follows a hearing Monday in District Court in which a judge ordered that Kinyua be transferred to Clifton T. Perkins Hospital for a competency evaluation, following a request from his attorneys.

YOUR next-door neighbor just shot up a school/office/day-care center. Any comment?" "I thought he was pretty nice . . . But then again, I knew that his beliefs were way out of line. They were good neighbors, but, well, I got blue eyes, so I guess that helps." -- Meda VanDyke on her neighbor, neo-Nazi murderer Buford Furrow"He used to say, `They're watching me through your satellite dish.' I'd tell him, `No, no, Rusty, no, they aren't watching you.' I tried to convince him, but it made no difference.