Posted on 10/18/2002 9:05:52 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
One of the many threadbare jokes I used to hear, going back to my earliest days of running around with cops, was that a shooting victim "died of lead poisoning." I used to roll my eyes at the stupid joke. But I'm not now. For the first time in my life, I realize it is possible for a people to be poisoned by a single round. One shot, two shots, eleven shots fired by someone with an AK-47 or some other high-powered rifle with a scope rips the life from another of our neighbors and sends the rest of us indoors.
We don't want to buy gas. We don't want our children going to school. We don't want to shop. We don't want to drive to work. We may deliberate for hours whether we go to the grocery store or pharmacy. These days, we cringe beneath the shadow and roar of every low-flying passenger plane. We worry about opening our mail. At the office, we demand X-ray scanners and other high-tech devices that might detect explosives or anthrax. We decide not to buy that new house or car. Really, we rationalize, we don't need anything right now. New clothes can wait. A dinner out at our favorite restaurant isn't a necessity. In fact, let's not go anywhere. Forget vacation plans or conventions. Forget any activity that might involve travel or expense.
Terrorism. Lead poisoning. We watch the stock market implode. Fear creates fear, and the more we fear, the more we create fear until the day will come — and it most certainly will — when we won't need anyone to ruin our lives. We will become perfectly capable of ruining them ourselves.
I just returned from Baton Rouge, La., where there is a serial killer on the loose, a murderer more cunning and brazen than most. Although he uses his hands and a blade while the sniper's weapon is a rifle from afar, the two killers share several traits.
Both target people who are going about their daily routines and are in no way making themselves vulnerable. Both killers manage to blend with their surroundings well enough to move about undetected, perhaps without arousing even the slightest glint of suspicion as they, too, go about their normal activities. These killers probably have neighbors, jobs, hobbies, habits, relatives — perhaps even spouses and children.
These murderers probably look perfectly normal. They may be attractive and above average in intelligence. Someone reading this article could very well have met one of these killers and found him polite, helpful, charming or, if nothing else, forgettable. Someone reading this article may know one of the killers and refuse to make the connection for the simple reason that we believe only in monsters.
We call the sniper a coldblooded monster. We call the Baton Rouge serial killer a monster. We fear monsters, not ordinary people. We read about monsters in novels and watch them in movies. We are confident that we will be able to peer out the window and recognize a monster immediately.
As a perennial student of crime, I am here to tell you that there is no such thing as a monster. Neither the sniper nor the Baton Rouge serial killer is coldblooded. These killers are human beings, as warmblooded as the rest of us. It is unlikely they bear any resemblance to Frankenstein's creation.
Walter Sickert, better known as Jack the Ripper, was strikingly handsome and charming. Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were good looking and gifted at manipulating others, including the police. Intelligent people got crushes on them. Equally nonthreatening was David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer. He looked like a nobody — the guy you might stand next to on the subway, the one working around the corner in the deli or sitting on a bench eating a sandwich.
Yet these men had invisible and aberrant thoughts and fantasies, and were constantly processing their weird symbols and hatred in ways normal people will never fully comprehend.
Our reaction to the Washington-area sniper is normal and understandable, and I have yielded to it myself from time to time. (Yes, I have changed or canceled travel plans. Yes, I have thought twice about going out.) But I have come to a conclusion about our fear and what we must do about it, and in part, this revelation entered my life just the other day.
The revelation's name is Lynne Marino. She lives in Baton Rouge and is the mother of Pam Kinamore, a beautiful, kind-hearted and talented 44-year-old woman who was abducted from her bedroom on July 12 after she had gotten out of the bathtub in her upscale suburban home. As was true of at least two of the Baton Rouge serial killer's earlier victims, Pam had been stalked. She had worked late in her antique store, and was probably followed as she drove home around 10 p.m., stopping on the way to buy a Diet Coke at a Jack in the Box drive-through.
Her killer must have known that Pam's 12-year-old son and her husband weren't home. Lights in different rooms blinked on as Pam headed back to the master bedroom, then her killer walked through an unlocked door and accosted her. Her decomposed body was found weeks later, some 30 miles away under what is called the Whisky Bay Bridge, a remote area where one might suppose that the killer assumed her body would never be found, at least not in time to glean any meaningful evidence from it.
I sat with Lynne Marino on a bright fall day in the neighborhood where her daughter had been snatched and driven off to have her throat slashed out in the middle of a Louisiana nowhere. I asked her what she could tell the rest of us. We live in a world of terrorist cells, or serial killers, of spree snipers, and as hard as we try, we can't seem to catch them. What can we do?
"Get involved," she answered. "People should notice a strange car or truck or person in their neighborhood. People need to be neighbors again and care for each other. You can't hole up in a house and not get dressed and not go out."
And if she lived in the Washington area right now? "The way my adrenaline's pumping, I'd go out in my car looking for him," she replied.
Amen to that.
We don't want to buy gas. We don't want our children going to school. We don't want to shop. We don't want to drive to work. We may deliberate for hours whether we go to the grocery store or pharmacy. These days, we cringe beneath the shadow and roar of every low-flying passenger plane. We worry about opening our mail. At the office, we demand X-ray scanners and other high-tech devices that might detect explosives or anthrax. We decide not to buy that new house or car.
She needs a therapist and maybe some prozac.
Actually, she probably already has both.
I'd add to the above with the suggestion to get armed and learn how to use your firearm of choice.
Semper Fi
WFTR
Bill
But I would be very surprised if the probability of being shot by a sniper was even half of the probability of being killed in a car accident.
These people are dangerously stupid.
Clearly this is proof that she is "not" a Freeper :o)
Stay Safe !
Gee, maybe at least one person wll begin to give up their self-centered, materialistic way of life, and realize there is a lot more to life than things.
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