As a lad, he always wanted to be a hobo.
All kids have fads. In his young mind he saw the life of a tramp as a life where the world was open to you, to go wherever you liked and whenever you liked. Nobody told you what to do or when to do it. The freedom of the open road and the choice of places you could visit was awesome. Whenever he played dress ups with his friends he always put on his old, tattered jacket and worn-out trousers, and the scruffy trainers that his mother was always trying to get him to throw out. He would see tramps whenever he went to the city, shopping with his mother. Sometimes people would give them money, he thought that was pretty amazing!
However, this highly romanticized idea of what a vagrant’s life was all about began to fade when the killings started. It was on television and in the papers. There was a serial killer at work. Homeless people were being murdered. He was taunting the police with messages about how he was doing the community a service by getting rid of them. His attitude was that such people were a blight on society. There was a lot of talk about it. The whole thing got a lot worse, particularly for the boy, when the news reports said that the police suspected that the murders were being carried out by one of their own. In other words, it was a tramp killing tramps.
It was around this time that the boy’s attention was drawn to second-hand car salesman.