Mother of a killer

Yvette was a biker chick from the first time she ever got on a motorcycle. "I was hot as shit, I ain't gonna lie," she says over a steak at TGI Fridays. "Hair down to my ass. I was hot."

By all accounts this description of Yvette Rafferty is accurate. She arrived in northern Ohio from out of the American South as a woman from a dream issue of Easyriders magazine, skinny and willowy, with hair spun from ice cream and sunshine and a taste for denim and leather. She liked to party, and she was crazy, too. She met Mike when she was working at a bikini bar. That was not long before she became addicted to cocaine. She says she was sober while she was pregnant. But Rafferty wasn't three days old when she disappeared into a crack house with him still swaddled in a hospital blanket. Mike took Rafferty away after that, and they separated. She still seems like kind of a love mama, even though a good chunk of her humanity appears to have disappeared into addiction. She is a hug person, a kiss person, a person who loves to cry, the type of hippie biker chick who'd want to sleep with all her babies in a big family bed but also bungee them to a chopper for a ride to get formula. But in reality, she is now a 49-year-old woman who has to remove her new dentures before she eats a TGI Fridays steak with Jack Daniel's sauce. Who, after two beers, starts shivering and loses the gift of coherent speech for long stretches and tries to eat a wet napkin off her plate. Sits there chewing it like lettuce. Rafferty has known before memory that his mother is an addict. When he was ten, he found evidence on the internet that she'd prostituted herself. During the steak dinner she admits knowing what she'd become. Her face crumpled and she said: "I know all this is my fault. I know it is. If I hadn't have been an addict, none of this would have happened."

Devin Friedman, Wired. Behind the bizarre case of the Craigslist killers.