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So, if the real Bill Compton encountered someone who looked very much like him while he was fighting in the Civil War and told this doppelganger about his life back home, who is the man who assumed his identity and was on his way to claim Compton’s wife and plantation when he encountered Lorena and was made vampire?

I think the obvious answer is that he was a serial killer, probably trying to lose himself in the confusion of war to escape from those who were searching for him. If the man we know as Bill Compton is a serial killer, could he be Johann Schmidt , the Stockyard Bluebeard who immigrated to Chicago from the Mainz-Bingen district in Germany, had a wife named Caroline, and assumed the identities of those he killed?* The similarities between his MO and Bill and Lorena’s actions with the Chicago couple are striking if you assume that they impersonated the dead couple and stole their money.

After Bill left Lorena could he have turned up in history as the Axeman of New Orleans who had a particular fondness for jazz music and claimed to be a supernatural demon from hell?

Alan Ball, like Amy and all good writers, likes symmetry.* An impostor Bill Compton who is involved himself in the Civil War and deliberately chose to join the ‘wrong’ side for his own personal reasons smacks of Eric impersonating an SS officer in his quest for vengeance.

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