I was going to post about Hawaii, but I have a lot to say about it, so I’ll wait until we get our DSL box on Wednesday and I can do it from home. My boss Jodie is pretty lenient (as well as being crazy), but I don’t know how she’d feel about me blogging for four hours straight at work.
Like any creative writing major worth her salt, I have a healthy appreciation for the morbid and macabre. Not without qualification, though. I do take issue with all the gore and death in the news. The Laci Peterson case, for instance. How many pregnant women are murdered by their husbands every year? Most likely, lots. So why all the press coverage? Why do news channels like CNN, NBC and (puke) Fox News devote like half of their air time on Scott Peterson and his equine-faced ex-lover (the other half divided between Kobe Bryant and MJ)? They aren’t celebrities or powerful people, and although they were well-to-do, were by no means among the elite in California. The only explanation I can come up with is that Laci Peterson happened to be beautiful. Had she lived, she should have tried out for toothpaste commercials, her smile was so bright. Thus a public jaded from so much exposure to crime this and killing that is captivated by her particular story. Meanwhile, other women who take unexpected “walks” on the beach go largely ignored by everyone except a handful of people, who suffer their tragedies in private. I understand you can’t cover every murder, but still, why only this one?
Why, indeed, when there are so many crazy things that happen in that big mass of synapses and neurons in people’s heads; accidents that cause them to say to themselves, “I could totally waste that guy” or something even more basic – not words – just an intense feeling of unadulterated hate. When I was holed up in a hotel room in Hawaii, I watched a lot of news (Fox News, because that’s my mom’s favorite news station, le sigh). One news story in particular caught my attention – the murder of six people in Deltona, Florida, by some guys with a baseball bat. Jesus Christ. Apparently one of the victims was housesitting for her grandmother. The ringleader of the killers had been squatting in this house, but was jailed for some reason or other. The girl came back, moved in, and threw out the squatter’s stuff. The squatter was very pissed off, mostly because of the loss of his X-box, and apparently in his mind, this justified beating the shit out of her and her friends. The girl, in particular, was more badly beaten than her friends – they almost couldn’t i.d. her body.
I don’t support the death penalty, because in my good liberal heart, I believe that it’s used more often for evil than for any good – being applied to black people more often than white, for instance – and because I think that mistakes, no matter how careful the legal system is, can and do happen, and happen more often than we think. I can’t support the state-sanctioned execution of someone who is innocent and just happened to have tremendous bad luck. Despite all these arguments, I still have reservations about people like this squatter guy, and the Carr brothers. The Carr brothers committed an even more heinous crime, described here. I can’t really enjoy reading about that case, even on a morbid fascination level, because it makes me feel sick. One woman survived the attack, incredibly – after being beaten and raped, and watching her friends die, she walked a mile, naked, through a snowy field for help – I wonder how she’s dealing with it now. In all likelihood, not well.
Yet, besides the Carr brothers’ case, I can’t help but be sucked into stories like these. One website that I’ve spent hours on before is www.crimelibraries.com. I’m especially intrigued by the bizarre cases, like the cannibals. Am I crazy? Maybe. Is there a lot of writing material out there? Hell yes.
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