The horrific stabbing deaths of the two girls in Illinois by a maniac right out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre reminded me of the good old days when I was 11 or so, a time upon which we look back with a certain fondness with warm, fuzzy memories of a safer, more secure time.
My very being was baseball and not much else mattered. Danny, one of my best friends, and I were locked in a monumental battle for the playground home run crown that summer, just like Mantle and Maris battled a few years before, except I pretended I was the Say Hey Kid, baseball cap on my buzzed head adjusted just how he did it so it would fly off as I charged toward right after a fly ball, making sure to catch it at waist level with the famous basket catch, feet flicking against dandelion stalks that could never be cut by any lawn mower known to man.
Danny's older sister was 17, a grown up. She was hardly ever at my home away from home. But one evening, Danny's mom said that I needed get on home. Police cars jammed the streets to the south and west of their corner house. Danny's tattooed brother was there. The only other time I saw him was when he wanted to teach me to shoot a BB gun. His demonstration shot ricocheted off something and plinked a hubcap that hung on the wall over my shoulder. He now stood on the step at the back door, smoking a cigarette, his tall, lanky frame towering over a silver-haired man in a white short-sleeved shirt, gold badge on his left breast pocket, holding a black-barreled shotgun. Two more policemen stood by one of the police cars angled into the curb, blocking the street.
Danny’s sister stood on the doorstep of her girlfriend’s house, knocking on the door. There could be no answer. Her friend had been brutally murdered in the upstairs bedroom. Years later, an acquaintance, who was an intern at a local newspaper while in college, had been allowed in the house, in the bedroom. She decided that after seeing this horrific example of the brutality of man, blood sprayed over every wall and the ceiling, blood pooled on the bed and the floor with other remains of the 16-year-old, Catholic schoolgirl, she wasn’t interested in this kind of journalism.
Three doors down, another friend, who has remained so to this day, was given the job in his house of making sure all of the doors were locked each day and night.
The killer was never arrested for the murder.
I drop by Always the Abecedarian semi-regularly, and I invite you to do the same. We all lose faith in humanity from time to time. I guess if you don’t think on it too much, they were the "good old days." They were what you imagine them to be.
Posted by Bill at May 17, 2005 09:34 AMI know that if you look up statistics in the UK, there are about the same number of these horrible crimes as there always were. When I was 16 my best friend's sister-in-law came over from the US to visit, she told us stories of all the serial killers around California.
Posted by: Anji at May 17, 2005 11:26 AMGood grief, Bill.
Wanna know something great about this story (even if the adjective is a little out of place)? I can smell fresh cut grass and the mouth-watering scent of fried potatoes with onions from a kitchen window at suppertime; hear the patter of sprinklers hitting the sidewalk and the odor of wet, sun-heated concrete. And, I can see the pulsing red and blue lights of a local yokel's black and white cruiser against the purple-blue of an evening sky at early dusk.
Not meaning to trivialize your story, nor make light of something so horrific, but my bookworm side says this has the potential of a full fledged crime novel - move over King...
Posted by: Cowtown Pattie at May 17, 2005 11:48 AM