Christmas Killer, Volume I: Laces and Skates

It’s Christmas time on a frigid Michigan winter day. With hockey stick in hand and skates riding his shoulder, one behind and one in front, seventeen-year-old George Parker is walking home from a pickup game on Lake Saint Claire. Fifteen feet off the walkway, he sees a small untied shoe peeking out of the snow. Ahead, huddled on a concrete slab behind a row house, Hank Williams — a small, shivering five-year-old — is bent over trying, with tiny frozen fingers, to tie the laces. He has only one shoe.

George gazes down at the frightened, trembling, little boy. “I do believe this is yours.” At that moment, without realizing it, their lives become connected.

From their ages to their interests, George and Hank have little in common; what they do have in common are brutal, dysfunctional families. That brief encounter and simple kindness links them together in ways they could never have imagined.

Decades later a series of brutal murders would lead one of them to be hunted by the other.