My best friend told me as a child that murder is easy to get away with. I'm afraid he wasn't just bragging now…

There has always been something wrong with my friend Matthew. He was always the kind of kid you knew would do something bad and end up in the news. I remember when Daniel Petric's story came out. That was the kid who, in 2007, took his dad's gun from the safe after they took Halo 3 away from him. As they watched TV on the couch, he walked up behind them and shot both of them in the back of the head. He said he had a "surprise" for them. Not long after the Petric story came out, Matthew laughed and told me, "Dummy was caught almost right away." I would be smarter about doing something like that if I ever did it."

Since our homes were only three houses apart, we often got together. We watched a lot of true crime shows because Matthew was crazy about them. He was interested in the worst things. Like Katherine Knight, who killed her husband in 2000, cooked him, and then hung the skin up to dry. When the police came to her house, they touched the skin because they thought it was a curtain.

Of course, this wasn't suitable for 12-year-olds, but neither of our parents were very active.

Matthew may have thought that evil was pretty much everywhere because of all of this. "Dude," he chattered. It looks like a lot of people are caught. How many do you think get away with it?

I told them, "Not many," with confidence. "The news would tell us about it if they…