The clown story

Kenneth Chase was born in 1932 by a difficult labour, which his mother wouldn't survive. This event drove a rift between him and his father that never closed. As the boy grew, so did his father's resentment, and his drinking habit. By the time Kenneth was at school, they lived mostly separate lives.
Academically, he was unremarkable, coasting by on his significant athletic prowess. He grew tall and strong, excelling at track events, but shunned any attempts to coax him into team sports.
On his walk home from school, he would often find feathers on the ground and he soon began a collection, keeping them in a cigar box under his bed. With his father either at work or in an alcohol-induced stupor, Kenneth had hours to spend alone, transfixed by the regularity of the feathers' barbs and the feeling of softness as he ran them over his lips. Watching the birds that came to the feeder in his garden, he imagined how soft they must be and resolved to catch one. He ingratiated himself with the local dentist, soon procuring some anaesthetic. Using this, he rigged up a trap on the feeder, that he hoped would knock out a bird long enough that he could touch it.
After a few failed attempts, he managed to trap a robin. As it lay in his hand, he felt a sudden rush, of a life at his mercy. He had planned to release it once it recovered from the anaesthetic. Instead, as its eyes flickered back into consciousness and it began to struggle, his grip remained firm. His fingers slowly tightened around its throat, squeezing until its chest feathers were finally still. He disposed of the body, keeping just a feather, with which he started a new collection, discarding the others as "fake".
By the late 1940s, Kenneth had left school and started working as a busboy at a local diner. He had also escalated to larger prey, like squirrels, raccoons and dogs, becoming skilled at customising the anaesthetic dosage for each.
In early 1954, a young man went missing and the town was turned upside down in the search. A few months later, Kenneth's father, while doing some work in the crawlspace under the house, found a cigar box. He broke it open and saw, to his horror, that it contained feathers, animal paws, and a man's finger.
Returning from work, Kenneth saw his father leaving the crawlspace with a cigar box in his hands. He turned on his heel and never went home again.
After a few weeks of living rough, he encountered a travelling circus and, with his prodigious strength, was hired to work the ropes. He assumed a new name: Jeffrey Hawk.