Felicity Altiman is a dreary 42-year-old Sudbury woman who resides on society’s filthy outer edge.
It is a world marinated in violence, booze and dope. In that particular milieu, situations can go south mundo rapido.
And south they went on Dec. 25, 2020, in a room at a fleabag hotel absurdly called the International. Altiman was a frequent flier at the hotel.
Robert Keskinen was a resident.
On Boxing Day 2020, relatives discovered his lifeless body carved into a mosaic of blood. An autopsy revealed he had been stabbed more than 100 times.
And in a twisted touch, his sexual organs had been mutilated.
Altiman? She is now in a world of hurt. She was convicted of second-degree murder on Thursday after the jury deliberated for a day. She is now facing the prospect of spending the rest of her lousy life in prison.
We will likely never hear from her again.
I couldn’t help contrast the sordid implosion of Altiman’s life with better-known monsters who are our eternal nightmares.
Count schoolgirl killer Paul Bernardo in the mix, along with Ted Bundy, killer clown John Wayne Gacy and billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Their depravities live on via TV, podcasts, and newspaper stories.
Epstein, 66, pegged out in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking. Five years later, I’m still writing about him.
Two weeks ago I interviewed Julia Phillips who had been sexually assaulted by the fiendish financier decades ago.
He was back in the news on Thursday when another former model claimed Donald Trump groped and sexually touched while Epstein watched. She said the two men were playing a “twisted game.”
Team Trump fired back that the latest allegations were delivered by someone who is “a former activist for Barack Obama.”
Epstein, who raped hundreds of underage girls, owns eternal infamy.
Even his second-banana, one-time paramour, groomer, teen recruiter and sometimes participant in three-ways with underage girls, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a footnote this week.
Maxwell, 62, is serving a 20-year jolt in a federal prison in Tallahassee. Photos of Maxwell with Vice President Kamala Harris’ wallet, tech widow Laurene Powell Jobs, emerged of the pair lounging in their bikinis.
The disgraced socialite is also steeped in eternal infamy.
Also, leaving his killer’s sarcophagus this week was serial killer Gacy, whose reign of terror in the 1970s Chicago left at least 33 young men and boys dead. Twenty-six were buried under the crawl space of his suburban bungalow.
Every year there are new developments on Gacy — who got the big adios in 1994 — and there remain five unidentified victims. I have interviewed men who escaped his clutches long ago, the cops, the lawyers and countless others.
And now, actor Jack Merrill has written that he was abducted and raped by Gacy. There will be more stories in the months and years ahead.
Gacy remains the embodiment of nightmares.
Not so for Felicity Altiman, who was a frequent drinking companion of her victim. When he’d pass out from over-imbiding, she would rob him.
She will need to serve a minimum of 10 years in prison before she’s eligible to apply for parole.
Monsters like Gacy, Epstein, Bernardo and Bundy are frightening anomalies. Rare even in the neon slime of criminality and society’s fringe.
The Felicity Altimans are far more common.
Their banality makes them all the more terrifying. Encountering a Gacy is unlikely. On the other hand, an Altiman is a more probable interaction.
And that’s pretty scary.