Don't Open The Shed

Someone's been charged with murder in two cold cases here. In the first case, they just assumed the murder took place, in the absence of a body. I don't know: it's hard enough to keep track of all the people we have and if someone lies low for for a while it seems rude to just conclude, ipso fucto, he's been murdered. I suppose there are clues. I, for instance, can hole up inside the house for a long time--I've got toys--but if a few weeks go by and nobody sees any beer bottles in my recycling there might be cause to worry.

Anyway, the cases appear to have been broken due to forensic genealogy. That's the relatively new practice of sleuthery using data that were volunteered to an outfit like Ancestry or 23andMe. Our murderer might have had cause to wonder just how much Neanderthal he had in him and didn't stop to think that dribbling drool into a tube might have consequences for him down the line. (I'm guessing there was a lot of Neanderthal.) Or maybe he just wanted to reassure himself he was super white.

He was connected to the first murder due to the discovery of Probable Murderer DNA in the victim's house. He was connected to the second murder due to the discovery of the victim's dismembered remains in his shed. In criminal investigation circles, that's considered a red flag. I'm guessing he lives in the boonies, and didn't need his mower for a while.

He's also being investigated for a number of other unsolved murders. They'd have him in the slammer already, if any of the detectives searching his house had gotten a craving for fish sticks.

It makes me think of when the Bob Crane murder case was reopened after the discovery of "previously overlooked" brain tissue in the suspect's car. It wasn't enough to convict, but again, highly suspicious, there being vanishingly few innocent ways to get brain tissue in your car, even with the worsening pothole situation.

The other thing it makes me think of is I don't really know what-all is in our shed, and maybe I should find out.

Dave built the shed a long time ago and it has two doors that swing open wide. One of them opens easily by turning a bent nail and the other one is latched shut by two eye-bolts that slot into a cavity, and you have to pull them out from the inside. For thirty years now I've bothered to open that door only a couple times. If I want anything on the right side, I hold onto the middle post and swing my body around like a pole dancer. There's too much stuff on the floor to actually step all the way inside. I am not tidy.

I do have four big containers of water in there somewhere for The Earthquake, and I should replenish them one of these days, but it's a bother, and I figure even real old water would be fine in an emergency. Anyway I can't rule out a body part or two. It's not a big shed, but not everybody is all that big, and things happen. I know we have a saw.

We did find a whole cat tail in there once. Just the tail. Seemed like there had to be a story connected, and I was content to just wonder about it, because I don't reserve my sentiment for outdoor kitties. Cats are wonderful creatures but once they step outside they're coyote chow as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, months later, we did see a tailless cat skulking around the yard. I'd like to say we had ways of making him talk, but we didn't.

The Good Book

I took a little stroll through the Bible the other day. I was familiar with it as a child but you never know if your literary tastes hold up into adulthood. I thought I'd just flip through but instead I got completely caught up in the first book. Talk about your pacing!

Right off the bat, humans started screwing up, starting with disobeying an admittedly arbitrary rule and then plunging right into murder. Some of the action is off-screen: for instance, you've got your two humans who are supposed to get the population ball rolling, which means their kids are going to have to get fruitful either with each other or their mom, but we soon learn this kind of thing is totally normal in Genesis. Anyway God looked at the whole mess and called for a do-over, with good reason, and sent down ark instructions and invented the rainbow. (Noah, the one God had taken a liking to, had three sons and a vineyard, and one day he got drunk and blacked out in his tent naked, and his sons carefully covered him up without peeking at him, and for some reason this really ticked him off. Whatever.) The three sons ended up populating the whole world.

Which brings us eventually to Abraham. He and the Lord conversed, leaving Abraham in fine shape. He traveled to Egypt with his wife Sarah but worried that the Egyptians were going to want to have their way with her because she was so beautiful, even though she was at least 65 at that point--people didn't let themselves go so much back then--and he told her to tell everyone she was his sister, so they wouldn't kill him. (It's bad to steal another man's wife, but murdering him is okay.) And sure enough he palms her off on the Pharaoh, but it falls apart eventually when the Lord sent plagues to punish the Egyptians for all this; but Abraham is in no trouble at all with the Lord, and they leave and get rich again. They pull the exact same sister gambit later on with the king of Gerar. And not only that, but when Sarah, who really was his half-sister but who's counting, fails to have children, she suggests he help himself to her pretty Egyptian maid, and soon enough Abraham is a first-time dad at 86.

God was cool with all this and looked favorably upon Abraham and told him he was going to be the father of kings and nations, and all he had to do was snip off a bit of skin around his then-99-year-old penis and do the same to his son and his slaves and any other males in the vicinity. That had to have gone over well. And not only that, but it was going to be Sarah having the anchor baby for the nation-building. Sarah overheard this and chuckled at the Lord, which you should not do. "Is any thing too hard for the Lord?" the Lord demanded, rhetorically, and maybe no thing is, but he made Sarah bear a child at age ninety, and that can't have been easy.

Meanwhile, their nephew Lot had decided to move to the greater Sodom area, which was a bad move. Abraham found out Sodom was doomed and asked God if he'd really smite Sodom if there were fifty good men there, and God said he wouldn't, and then Abraham, who thought he had a good rapport, bargained him down to ten good men, and probably thought he'd done well, but God didn't look too hard and stuck with his plan to take Sodom out with fire and brimstone anyway.

Salt.

God decided Lot was okay and encouraged him to leave Sodom but he didn't, so he sent some angels that looked like men after him to close the deal. The wicked men of the city wanted to meet the new "men" but Lot, being a good guy, refused to make the introduction, instead generously offering to send out his two virgin daughters for them to do with as they wished.

Then the angels dragged him and his wife and daughters out and told them not to look back while God smote the city, but Lot's wife did, probably because her other kids were still back there, for Pete's sake, and she was promptly mineralized for her maternal instinct. Lot and his daughters scampered off to a cave and his daughters drugged him with wine and got themselves knocked up by him--their own dad--without (wink, wink) even waking him up. All that was fine and dandy.

Then, the Lord popped back to Abraham and suggested he murder his own son Isaac to prove his devotion, and poor Abe got all the way to the point he had his kid trussed up and on kindling and a knife at his throat before the Lord went all, ha ha, just kidding, take this here sheep instead. Isaac in turn grew up and went to a new town, where he started telling people his beautiful wife Rebekah was his sister, just in case the men in town would be inclined to kill him in order to ravish his wife. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. But the jig was up when he was caught sporting with her, and the town king said she must be his wife, because no one would ever sport with his own sister, there's no precedent for that, and the king promised Isaac he'd kill anyone who touched his wife, and everything worked out great because the Lord blessed all this and wanted them to be fruitful.

So Isaac and Rebekah had twin boys and those two went at it with each other before day one. Whoever was first out of the womb got the birthright (cows, goats, honor and glory and such) and apparently they knew this in utero. This was troublesome to Mom who had the audacity to ask the Lord why things had gotten so rough and unruly in there and the Lord explained "Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels."

Women really do not get much of a break in this book.

Esau squeaked out first but fairly promptly sold his birthright to his brother for a bowl of lentil soup. Basically, Jacob wasn't that nice and Esau wasn't that bright. Also, they kept trying to kill each other. Eventually, Esau married two women from out of town, but nobody including God liked foreigners, so any thought of getting that birthright back was out of the question, because it was important to keep those lines of descent pure, if incestuous and homicidal.

We are not thirty pages into this tome. Already I have the vapors. I swan.

The Wind In Their Sails

I'm not afraid to say I'm a coward. That's the only thing I'm not afraid of. Everything else is on the table. The fastest I've ever moved was the time I launched myself down two flights of stairs (I admit the gravity assist) to get away from a man who was beginning to have a grand mal seizure. I didn't realize that was what was happening to him, and my instincts drove me down at something approaching 120 mph, taking wind resistance into account, and ultimately behind a locked door and a refrigerator.

I'm not afraid of death, in principle; probably less afraid of it than many people I know who have a punched ticket to an afterlife. Nevertheless, my body and brain invariably catapult me away from danger faster than I can assess it. I even distance myself from a loud argument, like it's a snarl in tiger territory.

I don't take light rail often. The MAX train I'm most likely to be on would drop me off at the 42nd Street Station, which is where a fresh Nazi with a large knife just murdered two men and butchered a third. Had I been on that train at the time, I would have demonstrated my strength and courage by pushing out a window of the car and blasting across the tracks until my empty lungs left me gaping in the gravel.

The Nazi in question is in custody and has a lengthy history of vitriol and violence. Recently, at a rally, he dressed himself in a flag and tights like Superman. Like some kid wearing his skivvy-shorts over his pajamas, draped in a terry-cloth cape. His emotional range did not rise over the first-grade level either. This guy is incoherently pissed off. Life stranded him, somehow, left him lying on a beach with a dangerous sense of powerlessness. Seems as if there are more and more like him all the time. And all of them are starting to feel some wind in their sails.

He had gotten on the train intent on terrifying a couple of teenage girls, one black and the other wearing a hijab. This is what makes him feel alive. The man had slipped his hinges many stops ago and had more hatred than he could hold in.

And then three men intervened. One was a poet; one was a recent college grad; one was an Army veteran. Three men stood up and put themselves between an enraged, self-righteous wretch and his innocent targets. Two of these men lost their lives and the third is just hanging on.

Their mothers, right now, are wishing more than anything that they had raised more cowardly men.

We are urged to send them our thoughts and prayers.

I don't pray. It would feel like talking into a toy telephone. But I do have thoughts, and more.

Today, my thoughts are with the families of these three brave men, with my gratitude to their mothers that they did not raise cowards. Because of their sacrifice, the Portland community and the community of humankind can hold onto hope. Because of them, we can pull ourselves out of despair and complacency. I have thoughts, and I have a vote.

And my vote will never go to anyone who schemes to shred the fabric of our tribe into rags, who plays us against each other for profit. My vote will never benefit one bent toward war or its relative, greed. I would love to say that my vote might go to a Republican, and maybe some day that will happen, but today is not that day.

A Murder Mystery

Dave and I hadn't been on our hike five minutes before we came upon a murder scene. We're figuring the victim was a raven. We've got lots of ravens on this mountain and not a lot else, especially a lot else with real long black tail feathers. The carnage was spread over a good twenty feet. Basically all the soft outer portions of the raven were strewn from hell to breakfast, and nothing else was left. A lot of the smaller feathers were white, but that doesn't rule out a raven, I think. Just because a dude is done up splendid in a shiny black suit doesn't mean we know the color of his underwear.

We didn't know what would take down a raven. Ravens are formidable. If we ever let our cat Tater out and she met a raven, that raven would relieve her of both her curiosity and her eyesight in two pokes. Ravens are handsome and large, with massive beaks I would describe as both aristocratic and indigestible. But the beak was nowhere to be found.

When one watches enough TV, one assumes these puzzles are solvable. But we're more fans than students of nature. I do know a whole lot of individuals who could bring a vast store of knowledge and lore to the problem. Which, I figure, is just about as good as having the knowledge and lore myself. But Dave and I on our own aren't that good at sleuthing.

For instance, it was Dave's contention that nothing would take down a raven, because of its aforementioned formidability and all, and so what must have happened was the raven got hit by a semi on the nearby highway and kept flying through the woods before it noticed it was damaged, and then, like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff and pedaling across the air and finally making the mistake of looking down, it dropped dead onto our trail. Whereupon some opportunistic varmint hoovered it up.

Of course, I find that ridiculous. Clearly this was a terrorist raven who suffered a premature detonation. All the signs indicated it.

We could ask our friend Ranger Dan, the tracking expert. Ranger Dan is able to infer a shrew's toenail from a single displaced grain of sand. Ranger Dan would have this all figured out, not only the perpetrator and the murder weapon but the motive, the previous three meals of the victim, and his foregone plans for the evening.

I have Facebook friends who could give us input. Real nature nerds. When I reported finding a headless starling on the sidewalk the other day, I got a whole thread of educated guesses as to how a starling would come to be missing his head. And I learned (and subsequently forgot) that one sort of bird predator pulls out the quills and another sort bites them off. I think owls eat the whole thing and urp up whatever they regret later. I believe we ended up with the most plausible scenario being a window-struck starling who later lost her entire head to a crow. Don't mess with the corvids.

Which brings us back to our raven. Someone sure got it. Someone bit the feathers off first. Someone even ate the head, or took it home and stuck it on a pike as a warning to the other ravens. All that was left was the feathers, and the Nevermore.

Love Me Tender

A California chef has been tried for murder after accidentally killing and boiling his wife. The case had been simmering for a while. Jurors were not persuaded on numerous fronts. It was difficult to make the case that the man had accidentally boiled his wife, inasmuch as he confessed to sticking her in a fifty-five gallon drum head first, keeping her submerged with weights, and slow-cooking her for four days. This, the jury felt strongly, had intention written all over it, even though--as the defense pointed out--the accused was a professional chef and yet failed to add the celery and carrots at any point. By chance or no, once he discovered he had boiled his wife in a vat, he disposed of most of the remains, by now quite flavorful, in the grease pit at his restaurant. Only the skull was left, and that, he says, he stored in the attic at his mother's house. This had the ring of truth, because the attic is where you store everything you don't really want anymore but can't bring yourself to throw away. Police dispatched to the location were unable to find the skull, but no one ever finds anything they're actually looking for in an attic. If they had gone up there to look for the Christmas ornaments, they might easily have stumbled across the skull. However, to date, no portions of the body are in evidence or, to put it another way, there are no leftovers.

Boiling a corpse is not unprecedented. In 1796, fierce General "Mad Anthony" Wayne sat down and died in a chair of gout. (The local museum still has the Chair Of Gout.) He was buried under the blockhouse and remained there for 13 years before his son arrived to unearth his remains and take them to the family plot in Pennsylvania.  To everyone's surprise, most of him was still in nearly mint condition, preserved by the cold, when he was dug up. The son, who had been counting on a clean set of bones, had him stripped, dismembered, and boiled, and the meat was discarded. Nobody trusts gouty meat.

It is only natural for someone aiming to dispose of incriminating remains to fall back on the knowledge of his own experience--in the case of the California chef, cooking. Rare is the mailman, for instance, who has not given at least some thought to how to hide a body. Practices change over time. In my early days as a letter carrier, we would probably have gone with the old standby, misdelivering the corpse to a vacant house. Everybody does something like that sooner or later. Or, bodies can simply be stacked in the mailman's own garage with the rest of the mail. Modern carriers need only slap a garbled barcode on the remains and slip them in the mail stream, where they will loop endlessly around the country being stamped "undeliverable" until they fall apart.

The jury also had trouble believing that the murder itself was not deliberate, although here the defense was stronger. The accused admitted he had duct-taped his wife and then fallen asleep, and to his dismay she was dead by the time he woke up. Tellingly, he gave several different versions of why he duct-taped his wife, including to keep her from getting into her car while she was drunk and high on cocaine--a public service, if you will--and to get her to quit talking so he could get some sleep. The latter version is the more plausible. Anyone who drops dead when prevented from speaking is probably a pretty noisy individual.

He got away with his crime for two years, but panicked when it appeared that the police were closing in on him. He threw himself off an 80-foot cliff but succeeded only in tenderizing himself. But he was wise to try to avoid apprehension.

They were going to grill him.