Why Did Lisa McVey Write a Suicide Note Hours Before Bobby Joe Long Grabbed Her?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Hours before a serial killer grabbed her off her bicycle, Lisa McVey wrote an unaliving note. She was 17 years old. She planned to finish her shift at Krispy Kreme, ride home and die. That was the plan. November 3rd, 1984, Tapa, Florida, 2.3 in the morning. She never made it. This is History's Hidden Killers. And a five part series this week about surviving serial killers. Five people who lived through encounters with serial killers, not because the system protected them, but because they protected themselves. At least McVey didn't just protect herself. She out thought a man who had already taken the lives of eight women.
Let's just set it up plain. Lisa grew up without a floor under her. Her mother struggled with addiction and couldn't keep her. They bounced between the streets and temporary housing for years. When Lisa was 14, she moved in with her grandmother in Tampa Bay. That should have been the safe harbor. It wasn't. The grandmother's boyfriend started hurting her for three years with the grandmother's full knowledge and cooperation. Her grandmother actually told her at 14 years old that this man was going to teach her how to please a man. What a lovely thing for grandma to say to their granddaughter. Oh, my God.
He held a gun that we had during encounters. Same gun to the temple that Bobby Joe Long would replicate years later. Lisa already knew what cold steel felt like against her skin.
Three years of that. Nobody stepped in. Nobody asked questions. Nobody cared enough to look. And by November of 1984, Lisa was done. In her own words, I felt disgusting, I felt betrayed, I felt like a nobody. I was so tired of living, so tired of being hurt. I didn't know a way out. Who could I tell? I had no one to trust. She wrote that on the note. She went to her double shift at the Krispy Kreme. And then she planned to come home and follow through.
A man came out of the darkness near a church parking lot and grabbed her by the neck, dragged her off her bicycle, pressed a gun to her temple and threw her into a red Dodge Magnum. And the girl who decided to die that night decided in the back of that car that she wanted to live. Her words, it's like God was saying, not on my watch, you're not going to do this. This is what we're going to do and what we're going to go through together. Bobby Joe Long had already killed at least eight women in a nine month spree across the Tampa Bay area in 1984 Before the murders, he was the classified ad in Fort Lauderdale in Miami. More than 50 attacks on women he found through newspaper classifieds. He'd been convicted in 1981 when a new trial on appeal had the charges dropped, moved to Tampa and started killing within a year. Eight dead women in nine months all across the Tampa Bay area. The bodies kept turning up and nobody could identify who was doing it. Tampa was terrified of the 17 year old girl on a bicycle road straight into the middle of it. Long drove her to his apartment and blindfolded her, bound her. And here's where the story becomes something that nobody could have predicted. When Long tied the blindfold around the head, Lisa clenched her jaw. Just enough slack that when she relaxed later, a tiny gap opened along her cheek. She could see through that sliver, red carpet on the car floor, white leather seats, the word Magnum written across the dashboard. She catalogued the turns in the road, she counted the time between stops, she listened for traffic patterns, trains, anything that could tell an investigator where she'd been taken. She was mapping her own kidnapping while it was actively happening.
Inside the apartment, Long did things to her over 26 hours that I'm not going to detail. What matters is what she did back because that's the actual story. Nobody taught LisaMcVey how to do what she did next. She figured it out at 17, blindfolded in a serial killer's apartment. She listened to how he talked. She noticed that when he threatened to kill her, he said he'd be forced.
Forced to. Not, I want to or I will. Forced. Like something outside himself was making him do it. Like he didn't entirely want to. Lisa caught that single word and understood exactly what it meant about his psychology. She found the crack in him and drove into it. She started asking him questions, getting him talk. Building rapport, inch by inch. She tried, as she put it later, to get inside his head and to get him to see that I was a compassionate person. And even though what he was doing to me wasn't right, I had to show that I was a real person. When Long told her he'd done this to other women, she asked him why. He said he wanted to get back at women in general after some had bad breakups. So, she offered to be his secret girlfriend. Told him nobody would ever know how they met. She told him her father was terminally ill and she was his only caretaker. Completely invented. Designed to give Long a reason not to kill her. She was constructing a way out in real time. Giving a serial killer an excuse to let her go.