While searching the internet for a serial killer referenced in Jack Webb's The Badge, my searches kept coming up with sites with online dating tips.

Turns out that Stephen Nash, a man convicted for the murder of a man and child (just two of the 11 he claimed to have killed; he withheld details of the other 9 victims in demand for payment which the state of California refused) in and around Los Angeles in 1956, shares his name with Stephen Nash, self-promoting dating coach and author.

My searches were waylaid by the fact that the advice of the modern Mr. Stephen Nash is apparently not nearly as hard to come by as the mythical girlfriend that he is promoting. A quick search indicates that his help can be provided through such sites as datingsecretsformen.com, eseduce.com, how-to-get-a-girlfriend.com, natural-pickup.com, seductiontuition.com, and thecompletetoolbox.com (which should really just drop the word "box" from it's name, as it compares its dating gurus to comic book super heroes, clearly indicating it's target audience: Me).

On thecompletetoolbox.com, Mr. Nash is compared to the X-Men member Iceman (who most X-Men fans will recognize as something of an immature, brat). However, if these people have to be compared to comic book characters, they should be compared not to heroes but to villains. You know, those that seek to dominate the world, but don't really have a very good plan for what they'd do with it once they've gotten it. They're like a super sexed-up Galactus, slathering themselves in industrial-strength hair product and Axe body-wash, "devouring" the Earth, and then dumping it via a text message while cruising galactic nightclubs looking for other planets to seduce.

These sites apparently represent the tip of the iceberg of the secretive alliance of PUAs. PUA stands for "Pick Up Artist," by the way. For some reason the "seduction community," or section of society that actively hunts female flesh in the same way that a Big Game Hunter (BGH) chases rhino horns, adores acronyms. Not that there's anything wrong with that, IMO.

And In case you were wondering, Google finally found that serial killer I was looking for here, in the Aug. 21, 1959, edition of the Eugene Register-Guard, among others in its newspaper archives. Thank you, Google.

P.S.: To be fair, one of those PUAs over on tehcompletetoolbox.com is compared to a villain: the Joker. Ah, to aspire to being a sociopathic mass-murderer. That should wow the ladies. I won't be surprised if that guy's name is found only after thorough holographic searches of archaic html documents in the year 2059.

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