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Portrait of a Killer: Sex, Drugs and Dismemberment

Growing up isn't easy for anyone. It was doubly hard for Nathan Miksch. A smart, cute boy who might have flourished under better care, was instead forced to survive and surrender to sexual abuse and perpetual trauma from a young age— at the hands of his mom, a female babysitter and, finally, a long list of men. That is, until one eerie October night in Provincetown, MA when he met up with one abuser too many.

Robert Phelps, the only writer to interview Miksch since he confessed to murdering a former lover and drug supplier, looks the killer straight in the eye and makes you wonder: Could this double tragedy have been avoided.

Portrait of a Killer: Sex, Drugs and Dismemberment

by Rob Phelps

The Killing Room

Provincetown can be a lonely place right before Halloween. Summer crowds have come and gone. In a few days the streets will fill one last time in celebration of the “high holidays,” as some in the local bar scene call the spooky weekend. But then it’s all over.

A few off-season gatherings still mark the calendar. Single Men’s Weekend. Holly Folly Christmas celebration. New Year’s Eve. But these are fleeting indoor events. By late October the long, raw winter hangs in the air. Shops and eateries close for the season. Guesthouse vacancy signs creak in the wind. At night, pavement wet with harbor fog glistens under streetlights. Some mornings and nights, you might walk the length of town and see not a soul.

On such a night, shortly after midnight on October 28, 2003, the police were summoned to a house near the cemetery, hundreds of yards of rambling acreage tucked away from everything else. There, at 27b Conwell Street, they found a body missing one arm stuffed into the closet of a rented room. Marks around the body’s neck seemed to indicate strangulation by “some sort of a garrote,” said Cape & Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe the next day. The arm, wrapped in a plastic garbage bag, would soon be retrieved from a nearby dumpster. It was indeed a Halloween spook story, as gruesome and grisly and disturbing as any Hollywood movie.

Housemates at 27b identified the body as that of Timothy Maguire, 36, a reclusive young man who rented the room where he appeared to have been killed. The room was small and narrow, with one window facing the street, on the second floor. Someone had blocked the closet door next to the bed with plastic storage containers and laundry. The dusty vinyl window shade was down. Red-brown stains splattered the mattress, a poster on the wall, and the exterior of a trashcan. The same red-brown substance pooled on the closet floor. A thick odor, described by one housemate like “rotting steak and lobster,” pervaded the house. The stench had crept from behind the closed bedroom door not long after Maguire had last been seen a few days earlier.

Next to the bed, Coke and whiskey bottles littered the floor.

A bloodstained shot glass lay under the box spring. On the bed, someone had laid out a leather jacket, a shirt, a glove, a box of cigarettes, matches, and two plastic tote bags. Another glove was found on the floor by the closet door. Another hastily packed tote had been left on the floor at the foot of the bed. The bag contained a can of SPAM, butane, keys, a dildo, and an Officer Suisse folding knife, its hilt stained the same red-brown. Two cans of beans, also stained, sat on the dresser by the door. Someone, apparently of strange, if not bad eating habits, had considered fleeing farther than the crime scene but changed his or her mind.

Autumnal Omens

A few nights prior, at around 10 p.m. on Saturday, October 25, Queen Cab received a call to pick up someone at 27b Conwell. It was another eerie night in Provincetown, the fishing-village-turned-resort-spot at the very end of Cape Cod—which old timers call the “end of the world.”

When the cab arrived, Maguire’s friend Nathan Miksch came out of the house. Miksch, 28, looked exhausted and wired at the same time. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks hollow. Never a pretty party boy, per se (his sweet, artless attitude rendered him devoid of pretension), he was, all the same, a little cutie—a gamin of the gay after-hours scene. At 5-feet-6-inches tall, with bright hazel eyes, a smooth, compact body, and that gentle manner, he was a charmer. But 25 pounds underweight now, his smile seemed skeletal. His skull poked out the papery white skin of his face. He climbed into the cab and told the driver, “I really need a drink.”

He asked to be taken to Perry’s Liquors in the west end of town. The store was closed when they got there. Craving alcohol, Miksch cabbed onward, to the Little Bar at the Atlantic House. There, he got “shit-faced,” he said, and spent the next couple of hours crying on shoulders of friends in the flickering light of the fireplace. His friends said they could not tell what was wrong and that, anyway, he tended to become emotional when he drank a lot. They said they hadn’t seen him out and about for a while. Maybe he was feeling especially sentimental about that.

After the bar closed, Miksch, in no shape to leave by himself, went home with a friend. Tim Hazel was director of the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod’s assisted living facility, where Miksch resided. In taking Miksch to his house and not the residence, Hazel appeared to cross a line between professional and personal relationship with a client. But that line, often tenuous in a small town where everyone knows each other and boundaries are seamless, had already been crossed. The two were close. Miksch hung out at Hazel’s house a lot, where Hazel’s sweet, motley pack of dogs accepted him as one of their own. Hazel said he could tell just by looking at Miksch that he was in some sort of serious crisis that night. Hazel didn’t ask any questions. He would have had to have been much harder on his friend had he taken the official route. Miksch needed time to rest first, and Hazel gave him just that.

“I took him under my wing,” he said.

Three days later, on the afternoon after the police found Maguire’s body, state detectives and local cops appeared on Hazel’s doorstep. There, they arrested Miksch on charges of Murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and larceny of property under $250. Hazel was immediately suspended from his job and fired a week later.

Rumors flew like leaves in the October wind. Even before Miksch arrived at the police station on Shankpainter Road for questioning, people were talking. Somehow, everyone in the small town knew about the strangulation. Autoerotic asphyxiation was a common assumption. A night of wild sex gone wrong. Miksch was a nice guy but he could be reckless: On the gay sex chat line Manhunt.com, both Miksch’s and Maguire’s profiles announced they were open to pretty much anything, and plenty of guys in town had stories to prove it. This sort of thing was horrible but bound to happen occasionally, went the common thinking. For many guys, it was a wake-up call, a chance to do a quick risk assessment of their own behavior. But even as townies sadly reassured themselves of this tragic explanation for Maguire’s death, Miksch was telling a different story.

A Childhood of Abuse

A history of child abuse. An addiction to crystal meth. Two sources of trauma stored in the same part of the brain that, when stirred up, can trigger a violent reaction impossible to control, according to recent research about the effects of repeated trauma on the brain. Miksch did not offer this neuropsychiatric insight.

He just told the police, and later this reporter, the story of how he came to kill Maguire. But once the experts testify at the trial, his description may prove a textbook example of how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can wreak havoc if left untreated, and how crystal meth abuse can disturb, as one psychiatrist put it, “the most ancient structures of [the brain] we humans share … with alligators and other primitive, unfriendly creatures.” (Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., Guilty By Reason of Insanity.)

If he’d told a tale of autoerotic asphyxiation, Miksch might have walked on involuntary manslaughter. The missing arm still would have been a problem, but even that could be written off as wild sex gone wrong, albeit very wild and very wrong. He might simply have hauled his SPAM, beans and sexual accoutrement out of town instead of hanging out at Hazel’s place. Three days would have been plenty of time to cross the Canadian border or disappear into the netherworlds of Florida or the Midwest. He might have waited for a court-appointed lawyer to do the talking for him.

Miksch wasn’t thinking clearly. The only sleep he’d gotten for over a week had been at Hazel’s house, and his brain was affected, if not significantly damaged by hard drugs and a lifetime of repressed trauma. But he was clear about one thing. Horrified by his own actions, tormented by a past he had no choice now but to face, Nathan Miksch wanted—needed—to tell the truth.

This is the story he told:

Just before Miksch was born in California on March 11, 1975, his mother Kathie had to make an important decision. Both Miksch’s natural father and a man named Ervin Miksch proposed to her. She married Ervin. It was the first of many bad choices that she would make for her son.

Ervin Miksch was physically abusive. On their wedding night, he beat Kathie. He beat her for seven years, even while the two had more children, Matthew and Joshua James. He could do what he wanted to her, but she made sure the kids were off limits. Period. Maybe it was her love for the boys that kept her own fight alive. At last, tiring of the life she’d created for herself, she took the children all the way across the country to Virginia Beach, near the naval base, where she waited tables and tended bar.

Working at military hangouts, she met a series of new men and brought them into her small family. Miksch would later say he had a lot of fathers in his life, but no dad. And in many ways, as much as he detested the string of men in and out of his home, he would duplicate the behavior almost man for man.

Still, Kathie never let another man abuse her the way Ervin had, though some tried. And though she would marry again, she would never let any of these “fathers” close enough to get at her sons, if that’s what any of these men had a mind to do. Kathie could be fierce. She drank. She had a shrill scream. She often “let the belt do the talking” on Miksch and his brothers, but nobody else could use it on the boys.

Nine was a big year for Miksch. He got to visit his real father in California. There, he met the family that could have been his. His father was married with children now. Miksch said they were nice people. One night that same year his mother came home drunk and found the babysitter’s hand down her eldest son’s pants. As the enraged woman approached the babysitter, the teenage girl fled to her home a few doors down the street. Kathie then turned gently to her son. She asked Miksch to tell her what was going on. The babysitter had been fondling the boy, engaging him in little games. She’d been doing this since Miksch was seven and a half. Hearing this, his mother hauled Miksch out the door, screaming her shrill scream that brought the neighbors outdoors, and made her way to the babysitter’s house. While Miksch watched, she pulled the babysitter from her house and “beat the living shit out of her, shouting ‘Bitch! How dare you touch my son!’” in front of the whole neighborhood. Then Kathie pressed charges. The babysitter left town shortly after serving 120 hours of community service.

Age nine was also the year Miksch remembers being raped for the first time. A 19-year-old, whom Miksch idolized, led the little boy to the bedroom in the house where the teenager lived with his parents. As the teen stripped off his clothes, Miksch began to feel uneasy, but it was too late. He was down on the bed. At some point, Miksch must have passed out because he recalls waking up alone in the room with blood all over the bed. The teenager split town. His parents never learned why he left. Only Miksch knew, and he kept the secret for years. He went home, threw out his clothes, took a bath and wadded up toilet paper to block the bleeding. He was afraid to tell his mother. He didn’t want the news broadcast to the neighborhood, as she’d done with the babysitter. He didn’t want the whole world to know it was a guy who did it to him this time. He didn’t want to provoke the shrill screaming.

Soon afterwards, Kathie moved her sons to Swansboro, North Carolina. It is a small seaside town with a commercial fishing history and tourist business that resembles Provincetown, minus the gay-friendliness and, more recently, its high-end real estate cache. Miksch made friends. He was a good student in elementary school. He seemed to put the past behind him.

The shrill screaming went on, though. His mother seemed to be drunk all the time. He recalls her sitting before her make-up mirror, where slowly, deliberately she applied black mascara to her eyes as she described just exactly how she was about to go out and “beat the shit out of some woman.” He recalls at age 12 being at a party at someone’s house and seeing his mother take another woman by the back of the head and pound her face into the wall, over and over again until her nose was a bloody pulp and the men, who had been standing around laughing, finally stepped in.

Miksch’s best friend was Billy. The two boys often slept in the same bed, and though Miksch found himself attracted to his friend, he never touched him. He could tell that Billy wouldn’t like that and he just liked Billy too much to mess things up. Billy had a black belt in tae kwan do. He was also blind in one eye. Billy has written and sent pictures to Miksch in jail. He’s now married with children, his life having turned out, well, about as normal as the next guy’s.

One night when Miksch was about 16 and Billy was over to spend the night, Miksch’s mother came home unexpectedly early. She was drunk. She saw the two boys together and called Miksch a “faggot.” Billy called his dad and asked to be taken home. When Billy’s father arrived he took one look at Kathie and told Miksch to pack a suitcase. Miksch stayed with Billy’s family for about four months.

Then one day, unbelievably, Miksch saw his old babysitter at the grocery store. She had married a Marine and they happened to move to Swansboro, also a military town. Memories came back. Bad memories. Miksch started to cry. He couldn’t stop. He cried for days. He recalled everything his babysitter had done to him, and then he remembered something else. Once, his mother, drunk, had shown him some pornographic magazines and put her own hand down his pants. He’d swatted her away and told her never to do that again. His mother, he said, appeared truly shocked by what she’d done and never tried that again. But the memory of it and everything else was too much for Miksch. He was hospitalized. When the crying stopped, he was returned to his mother. The crying resumed. Miksch was hospitalized again and returned to his mother again.

Halfway through junior year, he dropped out of high school and got his GED. Kathie Sipe was bartending at a gay bar. She had lots of homosexual friends, but when Miksch told her he was gay, she would not accept it. Another mixed message, another set of problems that sent home life spiraling to a new low. He wanted to stay and shield his little brothers from his mother. He found strength from doing this from as far back as he could remember. But for his own sake, he knew he had to go.

Sex as Savior

Miksch picked up the phone and called a gay sex chat line.

He chatted with a man named Bill. When Bill pulled up to Kathie’s house he looked handsome with the car door closed, but when he opened the door Miksch saw that he was overweight. Still, the man seemed nice, Miksch was desperate to leave home, and the man had driven for over an hour to get him. Miksch felt he owed him something for that. So he climbed in. Bill turned out to be a mean drinker. Once, when he suspected Miksch had been fooling around with another guy, he tackled Miksch on the front lawn and throttled him until his neck bled, all right in front of Bill’s brothers, who pulled the two apart after they’d had a good laugh. Miksch ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. He was so furious and he had that knife in his hand. He had to use it. When Bill came after him, he slashed the curtains, looking Bill right in the eye while he did it.

Bill wouldn’t pay for long distance service. So one day Miksch slipped Bill’s phone card from his wallet. When Bill went out, Miksch dialed the phone sex line. He cried his heart out to a man who would listen, and the man came and took him to a teen shelter. The man didn’t try to have sex with him. Miksch was flabbergasted. The guy was cute, it would have been okay and Miksch wasn’t used to having someone give him something expecting nothing in return.

But one stranger’s kindness would not be enough to steer Miksch off his self-destructive course. He soon met, then moved in with another troubled man. His name was David. He too was an alcoholic, but at least he wasn’t mean. Miksch thought a change of scenery might help David clean himself up. Miksch had an aunt in Ohio who he hoped would help them get a fresh start. They made the move, but David couldn’t stop drinking. Miksch moved on.

Ohio was wild. Miksch, who liked to dye his hair flamboyant colors, discovered drag. His “drag mother,” Diana, did Diana Ross impersonations, so Miksch called himself Diane. He didn’t perform in shows but turned a few tricks pretending to be a woman. Soon he found he had a talent for meeting cute guys with credit cards to keep him in expensive gowns. Diane tore up the streets of Dayton and Akron until her drag mother, who she was living with at the time, came apart. Diana, a transsexual, was living with a man who had been in prison for insurance fraud. He set fire to their attic, where Diana stored her expensive gowns, but the insurance company was onto him this time. He blew his head off with a gun, having taken Diana out first. Miksch thinks of it more as a double suicide. He is pretty sure that Diana was in on the scam, and the last time she performed her audience had given her hundreds of dollars to help her rebuild her wardrobe. Miksch recalls how sadly she took the money from the loving crowd. He believes that his drag mother could not live with the guilt.

At 19, he fell in love with a man in his 30s named Kevin who led a relatively quiet life in Youngsville, a suburb of Akron. Kevin collected unemployment, watched TV, played video games and smoked pot nonstop. Kevin was cute. They had great sex. Miksch found a job at a nursing home. His paycheck went for food and rent. Kevin’s checks went for the weed that kept them having fun and enraptured. One morning in early March, Miksch woke up and realized that everything he’d once loved about Kevin he now hated. He crept out of bed, dressed and told Kevin goodbye. The last Miksch saw of Kevin was his reflection in the rearview, barefoot in a snow bank, waving for him to come back.

This was about a week before Miksch’s 21st birthday. Two of his friends had gone on vacation to Key West. Miksch decided to surprise them. He drove down and called them from a payphone about a block from the hotel where they were staying. He asked them if they wanted to buy him a birthday drink, having turned legal drinking age that day. They said sure, but that would be difficult given the distance between them. Miksch said take a look out your window. They hung out together for a week, but then one of the guys had to go back. Miksch and the other friend stayed in Key West for another year.

They found jobs at a nursing home and partied their brains out—for Miksch a magic carpet that took him away from all his troubles and added more imbalance to his already whacked-out body chemistry. They moved to another island where it was cheaper and came into Key West for fun. Miksch’s buddy turned onto coke but Miksch was happy just drinking in those days. Eventually, the buddy stole Miksch’s money to buy drugs and their living arrangements changed. Miksch moved back to Key West, where he “fluffed” strippers. The strip club’s manager let him stay with him for free. He drank and partied until there was nothing left. It was time to move on again.

On to P’Town

When Miksch turned 21, he decided to give up drag for good because of the kind of men he’d been attracting, but he still loved hanging out with drag queens. One of his best friends, who did Bette Midler, knew of a place Miksch might like: Provincetown. Why not move with her, at least through the end of the summer, she suggested. He’d love it, she assured him.

Miksch stayed at Miss Victoria’s house. Miss Victoria did, among other things, Lucille Ball’s Vita-meata-veg-min routine at the old Stormy Harbor restaurant across from Town Hall. Victoria, says Miksch, was “nine feet tall in heels. She was a great performer and a lousy human being,” a bad combination that got her run out of a town that tolerates much from many. But that’s what happens when you don’t play nice with other girls who are competing for tip dollars to survive. The nails come out, manicured or not.

That first summer Miksch moved around a lot until he got a job as a guesthouse houseboy. He soon fell into his groove working restaurants and guesthouses, where he could also live for free. He had the time of his life that first summer. Young, cute and sweet-natured, he seemed to make friends easily. Only he felt differently about that. Miksch felt painfully shy. Worse, he heard his mother’s shrill scream constantly echoing in his head, telling him he was a worthless faggot.

He’d started drinking heavily in Key West and kept it up in Provincetown. Drunk, he felt he could more easily meet people in bars. He didn’t think anyone would like him when they got to know him. When he was drunk or high, he’d come home with seven or eight phone numbers. He figured later he could connect with them when he was sober. He’d found it easy to be with his former lovers when they were either drinking or smoking pot. It was a habit worn into him like a groove in an old album. Miksch learned early how booze and drugs can make a person feel better, at least for a little while. As a kid, he’d escape his troubles visiting a friend of his mother’s, an adult who played Scrabble and smoked pot with him. She kept her pot in a fancy ceramic container. Miksch loved this woman. She was always happy. Their times together are some of his favorite memories of his childhood.

The Metaphor of Illness

For many, Provincetown is a place they come or end up in to untwist the kinks of a high-stress world. Some residents jokingly refer to their home as “The Island of Misfit Toys.” Professionals abandon lucrative professions and transform themselves into artists. Others write. Some simply contemplate the next move. The light, the energy, the ocean—all of it adds up, as many attest, to one of the healing places in the world.

For Miksch, if there was a “Get Help Here” sign on one of his friends or the low-rise buildings that spot the town, he didn’t see it. He wasn’t seeing clearly. Locals joke that in the winter there are only two things to do in Provincetown: go to bars or go to AA meetings. The Provincetown Banner runs an entire page of support group listings every week. What’s more, Miksch belonged to the AIDS support group, even lived in its housing facility.

Mark Baker, former executive director of the support group, accepts that a significant amount of the responsibility belongs to the housing program. Baker, who had come to the support group not long before the incident occurred, didn’t know Miksch personally but was told he was a “ sweet kid who had just lost his way.” Baker was in the process of reorganizing the housing facility at the time. He believed that it needed to be considerably more hands-on. “People who would otherwise be homeless,” he said, “yearn for a strong hand, a guiding force. Without that, it’s too easy for them to go astray.”

James Cancienne, a psychology PhD and the director of the support group’s harm reduction program at that time, said, “Even though Nathan was in the system, in housing, we still couldn’t reach him. A lot of people tried. Nathan was tough. The ability to get people to care enough about themselves is the biggest hurdle.”

The blur of his traumatic past obscured his present. The future—like so many thoughts of being loved, accepted, wanted, needed, and of his history of rapes, assaults and other tragedies to simply disappear – was, well, just a dream. Traumatized and virtually a walking dead man living in a netherworld made for him by others, Miksch made bad choices when it came to many things, and especially when it came to sex.

Miksch remembers when he became HIV positive. The moment. The instant. The tricks at the party. He was working as a houseboy one winter at the Gallery Inn on Johnson Street. A salty old structure a block from the harbor, the place looks like just another ramshackle house on the street except for the sign on the front door. Without many off-season guests, the Gallery is a perfect spot for a houseboy who’s not exactly there for the work. At the end of each summer, when the tide of seasonal workers heads out, there’s always a number of such young men left high and not-so-dry seeking shelter and spending money to survive the winter.

That afternoon, the Gallery was almost empty. Another houseboy had a friend staying with him. The friend was hot and the two stayed upstairs having sex. Finally, the friend ventured downstairs and asked Miksch to join them. Miksch got high, of course, and the idea of using condoms was up in smoke. Shortly after, he spiked a high fever and his muscles locked up. He was sick for a week. He never got tested. As with so many other pains life threw at him, he buried the memory of it. But, in a way, he didn’t expect to escape life without the illness. From childhood on, he’d built up little or no immunity to the virulent side of human nature. Why should it be any different when an actual virus came along? Wasn’t he the perfect host?

For some, contracting a disease—any disease, from cancer to herpes to HIV, is a stop sign—or at least a blinking yellow light.

Not for Miksch. He was blind. And drinking made him sloppy and depressed. And he wanted—needed—to be “up.” He needed to be sharp to wait tables, and he truly loved being a waiter. At Fat Jack’s, he worked his way up to waiter from busboy. Once, two tough-looking bikers walked in with two even tougher-looking chicks. The bikers ordered froufrou frozen cocktails. The chicks ordered beers. When Miksch handed the first girl her beer, he asked if she’d like a glass with that. The tougher of the two bikers asked Miksch if she looked like she needed a glass with that. Miksch turned to the biker and snapped, “I wasn’t asking you, smart ass.” After a long silence, the girls started to laugh. Then everyone was laughing. The party stayed all afternoon, through lunch and dinner. That was Miksch’s kind of table. A waiter had to be “on” to work like that. Cocaine soon became his drug of choice.

A New Day, A New Drug

The drag queen Ginger Vitis taught Miksch how to smoke cocaine. With a shaved head, but for a few long strands sprouting from the top, her eyes made up like the late drag star Divine and a knitting needle piercing her nose, Ginger raised money for the AIDS support group by charging tourists to have their pictures taken with her. After Ginger pocketed the proceeds from an entire summer and skipped town with tens of thousands of dollars, Miksch went back to drinking and smoking pot until another queen known as “Miss Crank” turned him onto crystal.

In an insidious way, crystal meth was the perfect drug for Miksch. Its immediate effects increase energy, sharpen focus, boost self-esteem and lubricate socially and sexually. Basically, meth disassociates a person from their problems. And Miksch was all for disassociating from his miserable life. He did it naturally. As a survival instinct. How else could he get out of bed? Brush his teeth? Say hello to anyone? He was already doing the disassociating thing. Now he found something that not just helped him do it for himself, but actually did it for him.

Meth’s long-term effects include skin disorders and rotting teeth, lung, cardiovascular and heart disease, and paranoia and extreme depression that can lead to suicide and violent death. Coincidentally, it affects the same part of the brain that gets damaged by trauma, such as child abuse and rape, according to Harvard’s Bessel van der Kolk, considered the leading expert on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Researchers like Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who works with murderers on death row, have shown that trauma can shut down the portion of the brain that tempers violent impulses in extreme circumstances. In other words, a combination of PTSD and crystal meth can be expected to produce fatal results given the right circumstances.

By the time Miksch had moved from Fat Jack’s to waiting at Gallerani’s, he would slip into the bathroom and light up a rock of crystal in a tinfoil pipe he kept in his pocket. Then he’d get the big tips. The more outrageous he behaved, the more he got tipped.

In the summer of 1998, Miksch was working at Gallerani’s and living at the Ranch guesthouse, often called “The Raunch,” and for good reason. In those days, the Ranch was the height of wild. There is a room up on the third floor that opens onto a deck. Miksch recalls hanging out with a guy who rented the room and then left the drapes open so anyone could watch them having sex. Before long, there was a line out the door of guys waiting to have a go at Miksch. His own room was in the basement and he wasn’t allowed by the management to fraternize with the clientele, so at dawn Miksch shimmied down the outside of the building in his briefs to slip in a basement window, right in front of anyone who happened to be strolling down Commercial Street at that hour. In Province-town in the summertime, there are always more than a few early walkers.

Miksch said he didn’t mind “being treated like a piece of meat now and then. In fact, that can be kind of fun when, and only when, I choose to.” But one night, sometime between midnight and 6 a.m., a man slipped into his room when Miksch had passed out while having sex with someone else. His door could be padlocked when he left, but when he was inside it was unlocked. He came to after the first man had left and now this other man was on top of him. Miksch went berserk as he had a flashback and recalled waking up after being raped as a child.

Coming to his senses, he threw the man out, and reported what happened to the manager on duty. The manager contacted the owner, who called the police. But when the police arrived, Miksch felt they treated him like it was his fault. He said the police called him a “piece of shit” that deserved what he got. He went to Cape Cod Hospital and had a rape kit procedure. From the results, which he received in the mail, he learned that he was HIV positive. Feeling like the police might be right about him, he turned more seriously to drugs.

His friends at Gallerani’s, who knew what had happened at the Ranch, but did not know much about the childhood traumas of Miksch’s past, tried to joke with him, bring him around. Miksch joked along with them but inside he was hurting. He drank and partied and pretended until the pain went out with the tide.

Living Under the Influence

In the summer of 2000 at about two in the morning someone strolling down Commercial Street mentioned to a couple of cops that two guys were having sex in an alleyway next to the Atlantic House. The cops arrested Miksch and the other guy for committing “unnatural acts,” according to the report.

Before the murder charge, this was the extent of Miksch’s police record. But caught or not, heavy crystal meth use can make a person do crazy things. Miksch recalls having sex with a couple of guys who he robbed while he thought they were sleeping. Just before one rolled over, Miksch saw him take his billfold off the night table and slip it under the mattress. So Miksch put his arm around the guy, feigning a snuggle and reached for leather. He went to the bathroom and shoved the bills inside him, then came out and said he had to work the next day so he had to leave. The party was over. Or at least this one was. With the $300 he could start another one, with a whole lot of drugs. The next morning one of the guys showed up where Miksch was living and demanded his money back. Miksch told him the other guy must have taken it. The guy didn’t believe him, but couldn’t prove otherwise. Anyway, the money was already spent. Miksch had to have those drugs. Meth was calling the shots now.

Miksch was spending a lot of time on Manhunt.com. He had also started “slamming,” injecting methamphetamine directly into his veins with a needle. He started using to get that high that helped him forget about his mother, the beatings, the rape, the sexual