My first introduction to the horror genre came when I was probably about eight years old. I had pestered my mother for days to let me stay up past my bedtime, on a school night, to watch Dracula on television. This was the classic movie with Bela Lugosi in the lead role. I barely remember anything after the first fifteen or twenty minutes, because, after that, I begged for her to turn it off. Unlike movies of today that rely on graphic violence or a sappy storyline involving star-crossed lovers , the original Dracula exploited the audience's imagination and their deepest fears to keep their attention. Just seeing Lugosi standing there alone in the bowels of his castle, staring at the camera with a hint of a smirk on his face, never uttering a single word, was enough to turn me into a temporary insomniac. Edgar Allen Poe had the same effect on me. His prose and poetry was so beautifully horrific. He explanied every detail of a character's psychology (good and bad) in such explicit and implicit detail that I could actually feel what they felt. He was the best in his trade. My experience literally spans the globe. I spent twenty-one years in the military working in a number of different jobs. I was a law enforcement supervisor, ran a jail, worked in customs and immigration, and I was responsible for the protection of classified information and high value mission essential resources at both the base and command level. I spent over ten years (off and on) in Japan while in the Air Force. After I retired from the military, I went to work as an industrial security specialist for the largest defense contractor in the free world. I later served as the assistant director of security for a luxury hotel in downtown St. Louis. For the past eighteen years, I worked for the second largest health insurance company in the country in the sales and marketing arena.       

I earned the Meritorius Service Medal along with the Air Force Commendation Medal. There were also numerous other awards and certifications that I earned during my career in the military.