He writes in the afterword of Full Dark, No Stars that he trusts the word of Rader’s wife that she didn’t know that her husband was BTK, but the circumstance got his imagination spinning – specifically wondering what might have happened if she actually did make the discovery before the police did.Īs first introduced in “A Good Marriage,” Darcy and Bob Anderson are a picture perfect couple, having spent 27 years together and raised two happy and successful children, but that is just an illusion that is shattered one random night when Bob is out of town visiting a client for the couple’s mail order rare coin business. Reading about the case and the family, Stephen King was fascinated by the fact that Dennis Rader was able to successfully hide such a massive part of his life from the people to whom he was closest. It was determined that he kept his murderous habits a secret from everyone in his life, including his family, and at the age of 77 he is presently serving 10 consecutive life sentences at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. It wasn’t until 2005 that the police discovered that the killer’s real name was Dennis Rader – a husband and father of two children who was active in the community as the council president of his Lutheran church and a Cub Scout leader. Through these messages he gave himself a nickname based on his methodology: Bind, Torture, Kill a.k.a. Between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, police investigated a total of 10 homicides that showcased a pattern of sadistic behavior, and the criminal responsible taunted the detectives on the case with photos and letters about what he had done. In 1974, reports came out of Wichita, Kansas that four members of a family had been brutally murdered by an unknown assailant, and it turned out to be the first work of a dangerous serial killer. The story and the characters are fiction, but the novella itself is heavily inspired by a true monster from the real world.

Stephen King has spent decades terrifying Constant Readers with villains and mayhem conjured from his own imagination, but “A Good Marriage” can be called a deviation.

(Image credit: Screen Media Films) What “A Good Marriage” Is About

A good marriage by stephen king