They call her The Savant Continued from page 123
public safety. She became a police
officer, going undercover as a sex
worker or desperate druggie looking
for a hit. “I had this piece-of-crap
pickup truck with a baby seat in the
front that had a camera in it,” says K.
She got hooked too, on the adrena-
line. “The chase of getting the bad
guy? Oh man, that feels good.”
Eventually, K took a job working
for a state-run agency that reinvesti-
gated capital-murder cases. This
required her to meet with death-row
inmates, Clarice Starling–style,
alone in a small box-shaped room
with nothing but stale air and a cold
table between them. The gig was a
master class on staying stoic in the
face of evil. One guy recounted his
crimes “in a tone someone might use
to talk about a trip to the park,”
recalls K. “He had stabbed a woman
to death and wanted to rape her but
told me he couldn’t because she was
t o o s l ip p e r y w it h blo o d. S o he we nt
and got her granddaughter. This
time, he raped her first and then
killed her.” K pauses. “If you freak
out, they’ll stop talking,” she says.
“So I would just nod, listen, and keep
my f a c e de void of a r e a c t ion .”
Only one man ever got aggressive:
“He told me he could throw me
100 feet, stood up, and shoved the
table at me. He had killed a woman
with a hammer.”
You’d think she would be angry
at men after all this. But at one point,
she tells me she doesn’t even con-
sider herself a feminist. “There are
shitty men and there are shitty
women,” she says with a shrug. (It’s
j u s t t h a t s h it t y wome n a r e n’t of t e n
t he one s plo t t i n g t o blow p e o ple up.)
But after her stint on murderers’
row, it all started to weigh on her.
She’d had her kid by that point and
needed a break. She tried briefly to
become an artist, but that lasted
three months, until she learned
that the ADL was looking for some-
one to monitor extremist groups.
The job would require going head-it’s that she literally never
forgets a face. Once she encounters
a hateful man online, “she remem-
bers their name and everything
about them,” says the friend who
works in a similar field. “She’s got
this phenomenal ability.”
After Charlottesville’s infamous
Unite the Right rally in 2017, at which
Heather Heyer was killed by a white
nationalist, the authorities struggled
to determine which extremists had
been present. K identified 305 of
them from pictures and video
floating around on the internet.
Some were charged with crimes.
Others are now being monitored by
law enforcement.
She grew up poor,
in a trailer she shared with her par-
ents and two older siblings, where
buckets caught rain that came
through holes in the roof. She rode
the bench on her high school basket-
ball team and played drums in the
band. She was the last person anyone
would have guessed would become a
deep-cover investigator. It happened
kind of accidentally, after she
enrolled in the Marine Corps so she
could afford college.
K was a good marine—focused.
This despite all the men trying to get
a peek at her during their 10-minute
s howe r t i me on t he b a s e i n Kor e a ,
where she was one of few women.
One of her superiors on base made
jokes about killing his wife. Once,
when he grabbed K in a sexual way,
she clocked him. “He was wearing a
flight suit that had all these pockets
full of crap, so unfortunately, when I
hit him I actually hit something in
his pocket,” she recalls. “I thought I
broke my hand.”
“If you touch me, I’ll knock you
out,” she told him. She was 19. He
never bothered her again.
When she transferred to a base
back in the U.S., she started night
school and got a degree in justice and
to-head with some of the worst
men in the world. K knew she could
do it, because she’d been doing it for
years. And honestly, she kind of
missed it.A few weeks
after my visit,
I get an email: “He seems to fit
squarely into the incel category,”
writes K. The “he” is a 40-year-old
white man who walked into a yoga
studio in Tallahassee, Florida, and
shot six women, killing two. A self-
proclaimed misogynist who’d called
women “whores” on YouTube and
sang about wanting to “blow off” the
head of a “cunt” on SoundCloud, he’d
been arrested twice for groping.
K hadn’t had him on her List.
“When I miss something, I feel terri-
ble. It’s heartbreaking, devastating,”
she says. Her entire career has
t au g ht he r t o b e go o d a t c omp a r t-
mentalizing—at functioning in the
world despite what she knows. But
when she feels responsible for not
catching a murderer, “it just makes
me feel exhausted, angry, sad,
depleted. It takes a few days to
recover mentally.”
It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t
really sleep these days. “The eupho-
ria among extremists right now is
really depressing,” she says. “I’ve
never felt hopeless until the past 18
months.” Her work is “just a drop in
the ocean,” she says. “I’m stretched
t h i n t r y i n g t o s t ay on t o p of it a l l .”
She tells me about one of the
deeply troubling guys she’s been fol-
lowing lately, who posts rants about
how he won’t let his wife watch tele-
vision because it makes her too
“feminist.” He shares degrading
photos of naked women and fanta-
sizes about electrocuting them—
and seriously hurting others too. He
recently hinted that these don’t
need to stay fantasies.
He thinks he can get away with it.
He, at least, is wrong.142
Cosmopolitan September 2019