Remember the haunting Bad Company song “Shooting Star?” It starts out: “Johnny was a school boy he heard his first Beatles song. Love Me Do, I think it was, and from there it didn’t take him long.”I feature a very different Johnny in my forthcoming true crime book, The Darkest Glare. Johnny Williams was, by most definitions, a mass killer. He also was the assassin in the spectacular, rainy night murder @ the heart of this surreal, darkly funny story. I’m not saying this Johnny was a shooting star, bound for a tragic end after rocketing to six-string fame. I’m saying he wasn’t born evil, from what I’ve gleaned. Much like some football players with CTE, Johnny suffered a traumatic head injury as a kid that seemed to have warped him from a child with an elite IQ and photographic memory into a semi-sociopath blasé about the consequences of his grisly actions. You’ll have to read the book to learn how it happened. Though prosecutors would later conclude that Johnny was brain damaged, it may have been an act, courtroom theater if you will, to help spare him the death penalty. No one ever questioned his criminal ingenuity. Many sure paid for it, though. If only taken up a Stratocaster instead of a M-1 rifle things would’ve been a whole lot different.