Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Staring Down One's Demons






I've been obsessed with morbid crimes, particularly involving children or women as victims, since as long as I can remember. My mom agrees that I've always carried an unnatural preoccupation with true crime in general, and in particular with those crimes in which I could in any way relate to the victim.

I was barely two when Jonbenet Ramsey was found strangled and with her head severely damaged in the basement of her family's home. Shortly after the story broke, our immediate family was vacationing with my dad's side of the family at an over-sized cabin somewhere in the mountains of Utah. The cabin would have needed to be very large to accommodate my grandparents, their offspring and the spouses of those who were married, and the children of those who had already started families. The family is much larger now, but even then, there were probably at least thirty people in that cabin.

The cabin had some sort of dish network TV access. The men and several women were watching BYU's football team in a bowl game. (I looked it up: it was the Cotton Bowl, which would have made the date January 1, 1997.) During a commercial, Uncle Mahonri clicked the remote control to a news channel that was covering the Jonbenet Ramsey murder case. I toddled closer to the TV to watch and listen. From the kitchen portion of a huge kitchen that connected with an even larger family room, my  mother, who was spreading ricotta cheese across a layer of lasagna, hollered out loudly, "Change the channel now!" 

Mahonri  answered, "I'm interested in this!" and otherwise ignored my mom. My mother dropped the rubber spatula she had been using  into the container of ricotta cheese and quickly made her way across a family room floor strewn with toys and children. She picked me up, then reached down and turned the TV off  by pressing the "power" button on the TV. It's now a well-kept secret, but TVs can be turned off and channels can be changed not just with the access of a remote control device, but also by pressing buttons directly on a television set or on a cable or network box.

Mahonri, who held the remote device,  blurted out, "What in the Sam Hill did you have to go and do that for?  I was interested in that!"  Another uncle quietly made a joke about Mahonri being concerned about whether or not the feds were onto him yet, after which all the men but Mahonri laughed. Mahonri glared at the others, then started to turn the TV back on with the remote control.  My mother grabbed the remote device from his hand before he could turn the TV on again. "Hey! Who died and made you the TV monitor?" he yelled at my mom.

By this time, my grandmother had left the kitchen to mediate the dispute. My mom handed the remote control to my grandmother. "Mahonri clicked onto  coverage of that little girl in Colorado who was found dead, " my mom whispered to my grandma, but not quietly enough that I couldn't pick up on the gist of what she was saying. "Alexis was watching, and I didn't want her to see it. I don't think it's good for any of these children to see it." 

"We were watching the football game," my Uncle Steve explained to his mother,   "and he [nodding in the direction of Mahonri; he couldn't point because he had nachos  in one hand and an Orange Crush bottle in the other] clicked it off the game. No one else wants to watch that either, Mom." My grandma handed the remote device to my Uncle Steve, who had by then downed the nachos remaining in his hand. Steve turned the TV back on and quickly changed the channel back  to the one carrying the Cotton Bowl.

My mother carried me into the kitchen, telling me that I could help her cook. "What happened to that girl?" I remember asking my mom. "Nothing," she lied to me. "They were just showing a picture of her because she's so pretty." It was probably right after the media had made the connection between Jonbenet and the baby beauty pageant circuit, as I recall the TV screen having been filled with the image of a beautiful blond child in formal attire with a tiara atop her head. 

"Are you going to put blinders and ear plugs on her until she turns 18, Erin?" Mahonri hollered out to my mom. "This is the real world she lives in. You can't shield her from everything."

"She doesn't have to know about everything ugly in the world when she's two," my Aunt Cristelle muttered to my Uncle Mahonri."

"Shut up, Cristelle!" Mahonri muttered back. "You're every bit as stupid as Erin is." For the record, my dad was outside gathering firewood to bring inside. Mahonri would not have spoken of my mother in such a manner had my dad been in the room.

"Mahonri," my grandmother admonished, 'We do not speak that way at family gatherings. Go outside if you cannot control your mouth better than that." 

Mahonri sulked through the remainder of the Cotton Bowl, in which, due to the magic of the Internet, I can tell you BYU went on to defeat Kansas State  19-15, leaving most of those with any interest whatsoever in a good mood. 

That's my earliest memory (and some of the details are sketchy to me; my mom filled in what I couldn't remember) of an encounter with true crime.

The kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart struck me hard. One set of cousins  had grandparents on the other side of their family who lived just around the corner from Elizabeth's grandparents in Salt Lake City. Elizabeth was considerably older than I but, I had played with her younger sister on more than one occasion.

The disappearance of Laci Peterson bothered me deeply though she was much older than I, in particular because it happened not terribly far from where we lived. The killings of Carole Carrington Sund, her daughter Juli, and their foreign exchange student Silvina Pelosso were a source of great anxiety to me because my family had stayed at the hotel where Silvina and Carole were killed and from which Juli was taken. I've since then refused to vacation anywhere near the vicinity. 

Polly Klaas was kidnapped and killed before I was born, but some misguided teen-aged relative babysitter watched a made-for-TV movie on the topic with Matthew and me in the room when we were not quite four years old. We both had nightmares  -- Matthew for weeks and I had them for months, and probably still have an occasional nightmare based on something I saw in the movie.

I didn't have a direct connection to the Martin and Michele MacNeill case, but during summers that I spent with Uncle Scott and Aunt Jillian, the case against Martin MacNeill was being made. One of Scott's brothers lived very near the home where it happened, and his parents were not terribly far from the location, either. The other children were told to mention nothing about the situation to me, but I eventually picked up a newspaper and discovered that I was spending some of my nights within a literal stone's throw from a heinous crime scene.  Having  seen in person a man who drugged then drowned his wife in a bathtub has interrupted my sleep too many times.

In the aftermath of my own personal near-miss in the form of an attack that injured me but in which an all-out rape or sodomy was kept from happening, I received treatment not just for the physical injuries but for psychological ones. One of my counselors suggested that at some point when I have time (and when that might possibly be in the next few years is difficult to pinpoint) I might choose to focus upon perhaps just one of the true crimes from which I was impacted by the fallout to research and write about in depth. 

While it would seem in some ways to be counterproductive to what I would be trying to accomplish, I can also see the logic in it.  I suppose it's a way of facing down one's demons once and for all. I do not yet know which crie upon which I wuld choose to condense my efforts, or even if I might choose to write in great detail about my own experience. the disadvantage to using my own experience is that it is so very close to home that reliving it might be all the more painful. An advantage to using my own story as opposed to someone else's is that I've already been exposed to all the details. There won't be any new details to haunt me.

The particular counselor suggested that on nights when I've been awakened by an especially bothersme nightmares, I should assess my circumstances. if possible, my first course of action should always to be to go ack to sleep, with the assistance of others around me or even with pharaceutical assistance if it's not too soon before I must be awake.

If going back to sleep is not a possibility, I should assess my circumstances. If i'm feeling unsafe, i should do what i need to do to feel safe, whether than means calling someone  to come spend the rest of the night at my house, sleeping in a blanket on my brother's bedroom floor, moving to my parenrs' room, for the remainder of the night if they happen to be around, or something similar.

If I've assessed my sitaion and feelperfectly safe yet cannot sleep, and if I'm unable to concentrate on any other reading or studying project, that is the time at which I should work on the true crime story on which I've chosen to focus. I would be doing that right now except that i've decided it wuld be best for me to choose a subject for my focus in the light of day when I'm a little less spooked by the nightmare that just woke me. 

Tomorrow when Baby Andrew is sleeping, I will make a decision as to which true crime shall receive the benefit of my focus. 

P.S. Tomorrow may be the final semi-quiet day around the home where I'm working for awhile. Baby Camille Catherine, who weighed in at 4 lbs, 7 oz, on Monday morning, is slated to make her very first trip home tomorrow (Wednesday). I'll be up at the crack of dawn helping neighbors and relatives to decorate the house with welcoming signs, ribbons, and balloons,  for the entire family. (Even though he's too young at almost nine months to really know what's happening, we do not want little Andrew to feel slighted in the least.)



11 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. I guess that you were around 6 years old when 9/11 happened on 9/11/2001. Were you allowed to watch that news when almost 3,000 people died? Of course it is a very different thing than the things that you mentioned above.

    Note that on 9/11, 2 planes hit 2 towers and 3 towers fell. Some experts say the towers should not have fallen from airplane crashes. Before the 3rd tower fell (it was not hit by a plane) someone announced it was going to fall before it did.

    Life appears as a strange thing since the main goal of people is to be happy yet fear of anything can destroy happiness. Fear and happiness cannot co-exist! Then you couple that with the only thing that one can be absolutely sure of, as far as the future, is that someday they will die.

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    1. Chuck, I'll find a link to a blog I wrote about my day on 9-1-1. I was in catholic school that year. I thought it was very poorly handled at school though not intentionally so. They simply hadn't pre-planned how to handle a disaster of that magnitude; then when it happened, they didn't think it through very well. My take is that they should have either treated the day as normally as possible, or made a more concerted effort to contact ALL parents to send us all home, or simply spent most of the day in the church praying. Any of that would have been better than what they did. Still, their mishandling it was an ignorant mistake, not a malicious one. You'll understand where i'm coming from when you read my blog.

      As far as my parents handling of it, I though they dealt with it as well as anyone could. They recorded it and we watched it together one single time, with them explaining with each image what happened. After that, they tried as much as possible to keep us away from live television for a few days, and even months later, changed the channel if it appeared footage would be shown again. They didn't want us to got the idea that the same thing was happening over and over again. They also explained what steps had been put in place to make it more difficult for that exact thing to happen again, but said that of course there were no guarantees that no bad things would ever happen again.

      LINK
      http://alexisar.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-personal-memories.html

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    2. Chuck, I'm unfamiliar with what you refer to as the third tower that fell. The twin twoers fell, of course, afterbeing hit. The World Trade Cneter contained other buildings (a total of 7, I think) . did one of the seven also fall? I don't think the other buildings were commonly referred to as towers, per se, though I don't really know. It;s not beyond credulity that either the spreading of fire or the intense heat generated by the fire in the twin towers might cause another building nearby also to collapse. I don't see the level of conspiracy in the entire incident that some people see beyond the A; quaeda aspect of the conspiracy, but that's just my opinion. Others are entitiled to their opinions. For example , one poece of "evidence' cited that the U.S. government was involved was Presidemnt g.w. Bush's minimal reaction when told, indicating in the minds of the conspiracy theorists that he knew beforehand. I didn't take his reaction to indicate such at all. He needed a moment to process what had happened, so he continued to read for a page or so. If the whole thing had been pre-planned, I suspect he at least would have planned in advance to whom he would hand over the book so that someone else could keep reading instead of abruptly stopping. i'm not criticizing him in the least for his reaction. I'm citing it as firther evidence that it wasn't a conspiracy of which he was a part.

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    3. Chuck, I'm unfamiliar with what you refer to as the third tower that fell. The twin twoers fell, of course, afterbeing hit. The World Trade Cneter contained other buildings (a total of 7, I think) . did one of the seven also fall? I don't think the other buildings were commonly referred to as towers, per se, though I don't really know. It;s not beyond credulity that either the spreading of fire or the intense heat generated by the fire in the twin towers might cause another building nearby also to collapse. I don't see the level of conspiracy in the entire incident that some people see beyond the A; quaeda aspect of the conspiracy, but that's just my opinion. Others are entitiled to their opinions. For example , one poece of "evidence' cited that the U.S. government was involved was Presidemnt g.w. Bush's minimal reaction when told, indicating in the minds of the conspiracy theorists that he knew beforehand. I didn't take his reaction to indicate such at all. He needed a moment to process what had happened, so he continued to read for a page or so. If the whole thing had been pre-planned, I suspect he at least would have planned in advance to whom he would hand over the book so that someone else could keep reading instead of abruptly stopping. i'm not criticizing him in the least for his reaction. I'm citing it as firther evidence that it wasn't a conspiracy of which he was a part.

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    4. Wikipedia says "Within two hours, both 110-story towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the World Trade Center complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures."

      I wanted to learn more about the above and found that there were sources that did not have an agenda like a conspiracy theory but just presented a lot of conflicting facts.

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    5. I watched the TV news and never heard of tower 7 falling. 43% of Americans have not heard about tower 7. This is funny. Wikipedia says that the main guy still living responsible for 9-11 was interrogated using waterboarding.

      It then said that he confessed to being responsible for 9-11 and also said that his confession was not given due to any duress!

      Interrogation! Wikipedia says "Waterboarding is a form of water torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning."

      So isn't torture duress? Duress-- "threats, violence, constraints, or other action brought to bear on someone to do something against their will or better judgment."

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  3. Here is what Eckhart Tolle says about the above:
    Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible. And yet this is the liberated state to which all spiritual teachings point. It is the promise of salvation, not in an illusory future but right here and now. You may find it hard to recognize that time [perception] is the cause of your suffering or your problems.... Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.

    Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry-- all forms of fear-- are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

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  4. Some people disagree when I talk about happiness being the main goal of life so here are some quotes. "The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.... We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so."
    Sigmund Freud (founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology).

    "All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."
    Blaise Pascal (He was a brilliant French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher.)

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  5. Amazing that you can remember any of the Jon Benet coverage if you were only 2. It must have struck a chord.

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    1. Some of what I remember was told to me and came out in therapy, like the earliest stuff that was covered shortly after if happened. I can't really remember not knowing about it, though. several yearsago when I was still quite young the original DA held a press conference announcing a decision not to press forward with charges against the Ramsays. It ends up that his announcement directly followed a decision by the grand jury to indict the parents on unspecified charges. The whole thing was bingled from the beginning.

      Those people are all lawsuit-happy, so ome must be careful what one writes even in a blog or a subsequent comment, but I was always impressed that the linguist from [I think] Vassar who correctly identified which journalist wrote the campaign noverl "Primary colors" insisted that Patsy Ramsay wrote the ransom note.

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