What's on our mind? Serial killers, apparently.

Kirk Ericson | Sep 29, 20220

I was at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting many years ago when a fellow shared a story about baseball and beer.

The guy said that before watching a ballgame, he would buy a case of beer (24 containers) and then drink one at the top and one at the bottom of each inning, making for a minimum of 17 beers consumed per ball game. Someone asked what he would do with the extra beers, and the man replied, “In case of extra innings.”

When he quit drinking alcohol and tried to watch a baseball game sober, the man said, “I had no idea baseball was so boring.”

That story doesn’t have too much to do with this column, but it is a wonderful sports story with a happy ending. And, it’s a nice counterpoint to the depravity that follows.

I was home last week with a couple of friends watching the Seattle Mariners’ game against the Oakland A’s, the one that was 0-0 through the top of the seventh. The A’s eventually won 2-1. It was nine innings of ho-hum, so I invented a parlor game with my phone.

I’d type in a first name into the Google search bar on my Android phone’s home screen and ask my pals to guess which last name showed up first in Google’s suggested this-is-what-you-might-be-looking-for list.

Here’s what Google.com has to say about items that show up in such a list: “When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the highest quality and most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by hundreds of factors, which could include information such as the user’s location, language and device (desktop or phone). For example, searching for “bicycle repair shops” would show different results to a user in Paris than it would to a user in Hong Kong.”

I typed in some random first names, then started typing in the first names of the people in the house. I typed in “Gordon,” and No. 1 on the list was chef Gordon Ramsey. I typed in “Kirk,” and the first name listed was Kirk Cousins, an NFL quarterback. I typed in “John,” and the first name was John Wayne Gacy, the clown/serial killer from Illinois.

Having Google suggest I’d be most interested in learning about such an exceptionally sinister John seemed odd, especially when considering the other Johns that could have showed up as No. 1: Lennon, Depp, Mulaney, Cena, Appleseed, Legend, Fogerty, the Baptist, Kennedy, Locke, Stuart Mill, Wayne, Steinbeck, Oliver, Goodman, Candy, Malkovich, Krasinski, Stuart, Travolta, Cusack, Cleese, Leguizamo, Doe, Denver, Mayer, McCain.

Instead, I was encouraged to click on the last name that summons a man who was convicted of sodomy, and the murder of 33 young men and boys?

So we started thinking up other serial killers with common first names. Typing in “Charles” put Charles Manson as No. 2, after King/Prince Charles. “Richard” had Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez as No. 1. Ramirez was convicted of killing 13 people in California in the 1980s. “Ted” put Washington’s own Ted Bundy as No. 1.

“Henry” summoned Henry Louis Wallace, who I hadn’t heard of. He showed up as No. 4 in the “Henry” rankings. Wallace was convicted in 1997 of killing nine people in South and North Carolina. No. 6 was Henry Kissinger. Considering Mr. Kissinger’s rap sheet, his ranking seems a little low.

And coming in at No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10 in Google’s ranked listings under the name “Jeffrey” was cannibal, killer and joke punchline Jeffrey Dahmer. The only person who prevented him from sweeping in the “Jeffrey” category was Jeffrey Epstein. Having “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” being the top-watched show on Netflix likely aided Dahmer’s prominence.

To ensure Google hadn’t mistakenly thought that myself and my phone were inordinately interested in serial killers, I typed five first names into Mrs. Ericson’s phone — my wife might be the most un-serial-killerish person you’d want to meet. Here are the results from her phone: John: John Wayne Gacy, No. 1; Richard: Richard Ramirez, No. 2; Ted: Ted Bundy, No. 1; Charles: Charles Manson, No. 1; and Henry: Henry Louis Wallace, No. 3.

Serial killers all.

I emailed Nils “Nick” Marcks von Wurtemberg, a friend who lives in Sweden, to ask him to type the word “Jeffrey” into his phone’s Google search bar. I wanted to test whether our homegrown cannibal killer has international appeal. Here is his response:

“Hi Kirk, first is Jeffrey Epstein and two is Jeffrey Dahmer. A cannibal from Wisconsin? Will be interesting to read your column. Right now I’m watching a soccer game between Sweden and Slovenia. Still 0-0. Nick”

Let’s conclude with a quote from George Carlin, this column’s favorite comedian:

“When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. If you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.”