Will to Power synopsis

Inside Paradise City Correctional Medical Facility, where the State's most violent and insane convicts are kept and where Death Row inmates go to be certified sane for execution, there is a man different from the others, and yet simultaneously the very paragon of his nature, the worst and best of his kind. A man whose sheer ferocity and fundamental fury frighten even his psychopathic peers. A man whose heartfelt motto is "Rob 'em all, rape 'em all, kill 'em all." A man who's suffered more than anyone knows or cares. A man with a story no one has heard. 1

No one but the guard at his cell. Until the guard writes it down.2

This is the life history of rage personified.3

This is the biography of hatred.4

This is where nightmares begin.5

It starts with the guard meeting the killer, Anton Vukovic, in prison and showing him the first act of genuine kindness he's ever known from a "screw", a prison guard. (Really, from anyone.) Surprised and honestly touched, Vukovic becomes fond, as much as he's capable of being, of the guard, and begins to tell him his life story. "I have a story, like everyone else. They're gonna hang me soon. I want my story heard and known, even if just by one fucking screw."6

So Caleb, the guard, begins bringing a notebook to work, and every day brings a new story from the killer's past. Some are dark and terrible, but others are thoughtful, introspective, even amusing or playful... relatively so, anyway, considering the source.7

Over time, Caleb begins to realize that this was once, if only in earliest childhood, a normal human being just like himself, a person so brutalized by heredity and life that brutality is all he knows and thus all he can express. Respect, even affection of a strange kind, begins to blossom between the two men.8

But Vukovic is at PCCMF for a reason, and it's not for treatment. By law, criminals sentenced to die must spend no less than one year and no more than two years in a facility like PCCMF for sanity certification. If the legal minimum of mental capacity cannot be achieved within two years, the offender's sentence is commuted to life in a maximum-security mental-health prison. Such as PCCMF.9

As Vukovic's year in PCCMF begins to run out, Caleb decides (or "realizes", to his mind,) based on his notes from the killer's stories, that Anton could easily be found insane -- if his real history were known. He knows that Vukovic hates, mistrusts, and routinely lies to his doctors, claiming to have never suffered any mental illness and to have no symptoms now except hatred of everyone (self included.) Caleb firmly believes that he has evidence of more profound mental illness than sociopathy in his notes, but is unwilling to risk damaging his fragile rapport with the killer. So instead of trying to get Anton to tell his doctors the truth, Caleb simply goes around him and begins surreptitiously trying to contact the psychiatric staff. 10

But as a junior guard with no psychological credentials, it takes a long time for him to get anyone to even give him a hearing. And by that time, only days remain until Vukovic is to be transferred to Death Row. At that point, without overt and obvious symptoms of mental illness, it's too late.11

Will he be able to save his "friend" from what even he, if uninvolved, would consider a just and well-deserved execution? Or will he be forced to stand down as the law does its duty, whether it's fair to any given individual or not? Does this condemned serial killer even deserve his support?12

Heavily inspired by, but not 100% based upon, the true life and times of serial killer Carl Panzram.