Fiksi Berdasarkan Fakta Misteri Pembunuhan:
Ada pembunuhan yang sebenarnya tidak saya ikuti di sekitar Gahanna, Ohio pada tahun 1970 kiu online24jam -an. Saya hanya mengatakan kepada ayah saya untuk meminta “pria di tempat kerja” untuk menjemput saya, menyiratkan sesuatu. Saya pikir pria itu, yang sudah mati sekarang, membunuh istrinya dan menguburnya di suatu tempat. Sampai hari ini, saya tidak yakin apakah saya yang menyebabkan pembunuhan itu, atau hanya korban yang tidak bersalah dari mereka. Apakah penting bagi saya untuk mengajukan pertanyaan terbuka kepada ayah saya, pertanyaan yang mungkin berarti saya menyerah pada hidup dan kehidupan, untuk menjadi korban pembunuhan?
Saya berlari di sepanjang jalan dengan anggota tim lari saya, dua gadis, di depan saya, berlari sekitar seperempat mil di depan. Saya tidak berpikir mereka bisa mendengar saya jika saya berteriak. Kami berada jauh di ladang dan tanah pertanian Ohio, dan kami adalah tim lari jarak jauh dari Gahanna Lincoln High School. Saya telah mengharapkan pria itu muncul, pria dari pekerjaan Ayah. Saya pernah melihatnya di sebuah foto, dan dia tampak seperti sedang dijebak oleh pria yang berdiri di belakangnya di foto, mungkin setiap hari. Pekerjaan ayah terkadang aneh.
Dia adalah seorang veteran Perang Dunia II cacat mental dari Angkatan Laut AS, pensiunan, bekerja di North American Rockwell di Ohio. Dia mudah marah dan suka menggoda saya hingga menangis. Dia kemudian menjadi sangat marah, menabrak saya dan berteriak seperti banshee laki-laki di wajah kuning saya yang mengalir. Kupikir dia akan membunuhku, beberapa kali, tapi Ibu selalu mencegahnya agar tidak terjatuh. Dia sehat secara psikis, memiliki kesabaran dan perilaku seperti orang suci, dan menyatukan kami semua seperti lem. Aku merindukan mereka berdua secara meriah. Saya adalah putri bungsu mereka, sang putri, alasan kami tinggal di Ohio.
Aku harus memilih berhenti atau tidak, membiarkan pria itu keluar dari mobil sedan putihnya, dan mungkin saat itu aku bisa melawannya, tapi aku belum cukup tahu bagaimana cara bertarung dengan seseorang. Itu membutuhkan karate, judo, kung fu, pelatihan seni bela diri. Saya tidak akan mencapai semua itu sampai bertahun-tahun kemudian, ketika saya kuliah. Saya hanya samar-samar tahu bagaimana menyingkir dari menonton David Carradine di “Kung Fu”, acara televisi di tahun 1970-an. Saya sedang berlari dengan tim atletik putri selama awal musim panas 1977, ketika peristiwa mengerikan ini terjadi. Saya kemudian akan memenangkan surat sekolah menengah saya, tetapi untuk saat ini pria itu datang kepada saya, dan berbelok di depan saya, terus-menerus memotong saya.
Jadi saya tidak akan berhenti berlari, meskipun saya merasa seperti Jerry Lewis perempuan, dan saya terus berlari, lebih dari yang pernah dia lakukan sepanjang kehidupan selebritasnya yang letih. Aku berlari dan berlari dan berlari, dengan sangat perlahan, saat pria dari tempat kerja Ayah terus-menerus memotong di sampingku, dengan sudut 45 derajat yang sempurna sekitar dua kaki di depanku setiap kali. Saya harus memacu diri agar tidak terlindas oleh hidung mobilnya. Itu putih dan tidak dikenal, seperti Lincoln yang digunakan oleh James Earl Ray ketika dia menembak Dr. King pada tahun 1968.
Bagaimanapun, pengemudi terus memotong sudut yang sempurna di depan saya; Saya terus berpikir itu adalah tanda kematian tertentu, kesempurnaan bagaimana dia mengarahkan mobil setiap saat. Itu pasti berarti dia sudah menyiapkan senjata, dipersenjatai dengan peredam yang mahal.
Apakah itu memberi tahu saya sesuatu tentang pengemudi yang terlalu tidak berbahaya untuk benar-benar tidak bersalah di Ohio yang penuh sesak? Ada banyak ruang terbuka lebar dan ladang yang didedikasikan untuk penyebaran, lahan pertanian komersial utama, dengan pertanian yang lebih kecil dijual kepada pemerintah secara teratur saat itu, jadi itu penuh sesak secara maksimal di kota-kota besar Ohio. Orang-orang mengendarai sepeda di trotoar, dan arteri utama tersumbat oleh mobil dan kendaraan lain. Koran-koran mengklaim statistik menunjukkan kelebihan populasi yang menjulang, dan Ayah saya percaya Ohio semakin ramai dengan orang-orang, datang seperti yang kami lakukan dari tempat lain, ke keindahan Negara Bagian Pantai Timur yang dipenuhi terutama dengan lahan pertanian. Baru-baru ini saya membaca di Internet bahwa Ohio sekarang lebih padat dari sebelumnya, tetapi saya tidak tahu siapa yang menyimpan statistik seperti itu, atau untuk apa mereka digunakan,
I read in Mad Magazine in the 1970s that people across the entire planet “have nowhere else to go.” I learned at school from one of my male teachers that we had reached the ends of the Earth in the early Twentieth Century, and that is why the Holocaust, the Purges and the Gulag etc. happened, as historically the right wing elements of male history have decided the planet was overpopulated. This also led to mass homicides through knifings in Mexico several centuries ago, due to a crying need for more protein – albeit human food – and the huge, million member genocide by gore-covered machetes of Rwanda, Africa in 1994. So this came to me right there in Ohio – I would become a murder victim to stop from ever getting pregnant, along with other girls, and would not add to the problem. Murder was surely better in some way than concentration death camps. It meant dying on your feet and not living on your knees, hopefully!
Anyway, the guy in the white car looked like someone hideous mentioned by Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl in his Holocaust book, cutting perfect, deathly still and grave-like marker corners right in front of me, to let me know I was a lifelong faggot going straight to Hell – simply because I’d joined the girl’s track team, a recent event under Title 9 for women’s sports back in the 1970s; or because I had accidentally arranged the murder of his daughter. The truth is that I walked up to my father while he was reading the papers, after having gotten sick and tired of waiting around for something like that guy from Dad’s work to show up in my life… his daughter was blond and blue eyed, gorgeous but a little odd looking… tall, not doing her homework. Unless the girl I thought was his daughter was the class valedictorian, and was never killed by anyone.
Something like God was screaming at me that the girl I saw in the cafeteria, not doing her homework, was the one, though. But I was lonely, tired of waiting for a nonexistent Prince Charming. She looked like she had one of those prearranged, down a road of Soccer Motherhood and bliss. Yet, she also looked like something was phony, off and all-pervading… slutty evil. She was ghostly, outlined in white as if she was barely in human existence yet. It may have been my autism, where I sometimes saw people appear unusually outlined in black or white, as if they were ethereal or otherwise not particularly there.
Perhaps her Dad worried her into place. Was that blonde girl his daughter? I practically zoomed sideways, falling into the seat in front of her. I tried complimenting her, telling her that if she wore two different earrings, they might offset her beauty and make her look much more appealing. I didn’t like judging her, so I tried to talk, make her smile, something. I was afraid to tell her stuff, for fear of being labeled a lesbian. I didn’t want to care about anyone, considering the overall situation – especially some all-white girl much taller than me. She could be a model, someone who didn’t need to put forth any relative effort in order to attain an almost perfect life, sitting in the cafeteria and smiling completely without any fear for her personal safety. She didn’t have to worry about being bullied by the other girls and the miserable, misbegotten boys, like I did. It was an everyday event with me. She didn’t run track way out in the countryside, alone, without the other runners keeping alongside her, like I did.
The two girls far ahead of me on my team, a straight quarter mile away and shimmering off in the distance like twin fairies, couldn’t possibly hear me. I waited while the guy in the white car kept cutting me off, at least half a dozen or more times, maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen. It was a long moment of forcing me to realize that he had a lovely “naked gun” as well as his gun in the car; maybe he also had a nice, sharp Jack the Ripper knife. Maybe the perfect death reference was subterfuge, hiding what he was really planning to do to me. Take half an hour, two hours or more to rape, cut up and kill me, inserting the knife into my vagina slowly, or whatever.
It was a long time of worshipful respect for the Ripper, and the lessons that had taught me. According to the Victorian Era book I had read, girls like me think it means sex. Hope lasts until the very end, does it not? Screaming with my mouth taped over, nobody to hear until it was too late. My body dumped along the road, in a secluded woody area, similar to the Green River in Washington State. Excruciatingly alive, waiting for the ants and other bugs to slowly finish me off, my mind gone coldly to die of eventual thirst. It takes a week to leave from no water, they taught me at school. Since I was athletic, maybe two weeks, biting my lips to produce blood to suck on.
And yet angrily, fearfully, I longed solely to oppose that guy, if he ever stopped the car and pulled over to uh, greet me. Or grab me and stuff me in. I waited for centuries, millennia of sloppy, Jerry Lewis style running around the place, stumbling over myself, arms and legs crossing and crisscrossing and flailing around in a spastic, terrorized manner, as if I was signaling for help from a nonexistent male, jealous God hating girls like me and who wanted to teach me a horrible lesson. Something like my Dad, who hated me more, who had arranged for this while laying the blame at my own doorstep?
It must be a huge fat man. I was right; I saw his form as I glanced through the window, so terrified I was barely able to turn my head to the left. I picked him out years later in the two photos Dad had of his work. I guess my father did, maybe innocently, mention me to the guy at his work, pent up and frustrated after years of not getting promoted, being picked “up” in a funny way by another guy at work, a dark man obviously making fun of him. The dude at work was innocent in a hideous way; but how innocent is a man who’s willing to kill someone because they think they are the “wrong” sexual preference, just because they are newly in a women’s sport? Or are too willing to give up trying?
He must have killed his wife, he surely killed his daughter. What he did, I don’t know. Daddy, he dropped bombs on the Japanese during WWII, so he didn’t particularly care because he was trained to kill during boot camp in WWII. Totally necessary for the country. He was a decorated WWII veteran, and to him his daughter seemed to be a latter day hippie, gay, odd somehow. To him and my Mom. I wasn’t really one, I just liked to dress up differently for various reasons. And maybe the whole thing was sexism, where those two men had no real respect for women at all.
Anyway, I didn’t ask Daddy to kill me. I just gave up and stated, “Dad, have the guy from work pick me up.” Not a question – a command. Did he mistake it for an order from his Navy days? Mom told him to do a lot of things, such as stop drinking beer; did Dad listen to me on this, when I asked him to let me give up trying? Inescapable fate, like Mad Magazine said. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Nothing. Where was I going to go in life? I did my homework faithfully, and I was getting ready to go to college. But my low thyroid made me tired all the time, shoving me to push myself to the outer limits. Work for Dad and that guy must’ve been simple, easy and incredibly difficult all at the same time. However, my Dad had a Trick Knee and that made work, much, much more difficult for him. So he went to work and three days later, the guy from work showed up to become Jack the Ripper at me.
You know, serial murder and cannibalism in crowded apartment buildings. The gifts that keep on giving, that people just know all about, and can tag everyone in some simian way about. Repeating ourselves over and over, without ever doing anything real about the problem. Such labor has to be through the authorities, paid work. And 99% of the time, it involves coming in after the crime has been committed, after the deed is done, after the bodies are found. The murderer may finally be stopped, but only after he’s ruined dozens to hundreds of lives in an overcrowded, fitful world.
The guy from Dad’s work, after he tried to get me into the car, failing miserably to do so because he wouldn’t stop the car and I wouldn’t stop running… well, after I shouted the single word “HELP!” at the tops of my lungs, with it coming out like a “peep” – I thought for sure no way could it be heard by anyone – my two fellow female track runners, Nancy and Jeanie, turned around and raced back toward the car. As dark-outlined, screaming, claw-extending shadowy little Valkyries. My autism made them both look unreal, like shadows without any form or substance. They dove in the car’s direction, and you should have seen that white man jerk the car into a perfect U-turn, right around, heading back the way he’d come with screeching tires. I saw through the window that he was now far more terrified, horrified and scared than I was, having witnessed the Valkyries. He zoomed away like a vanilla bat out of interminable Hell, beaten and found guilty out of his mind – ecstatic, I jumped into the air, laughing!
The car was gone; I didn’t have paper or pen in my pocket to write down that horrible man’s license plate. Maybe I should have memorized the number, but we were way out in the country and I would’ve needed to chant it silently for the next half hour. I was far too tired and too happy to do so. It was only two seconds before the man in the white car took off. I wonder what happened to his wife and daughter. Did he bury his wife out in the backyard, with no one caring about it or maybe he did it at night; my Dad told me the girl’s body was found two blocks away from our house. He said she was drenched in semen, her arms and legs were broken, she was cut everywhere and that her eyes were gouged out of her unsmiling face, with blood caked all over her body.
“Do you want to go see?” Daddy gloated. I was in the bathroom, waiting too long in my shocked response. “No,” I sighed. “That’s okay.” Daddy smiled, the worst smirk I’d seen in my life. “By now, the ambulance has picked her up. Too bad; they don’t know if she is dead or alive.” I didn’t need to find out more. I didn’t like the way Daddy was looking at me, either. I wondered if he was proud of me for having escaped, fighting a battle of wits where someone other than me, normally luckier in our privileged society, had lost. Should I have tried harder to rescue her? She was all-white and tall, I was off-white and short, and maybe she usually did her homework at home and not at school; but if that had indeed been her Dad, apparently she had nowhere else to go.
Actually, I think that “dead or alive” comment indicated there was no dead body. Dad had sent the guy from work to “teach me a lesson,” and was worried about my tendencies to range around the Ohio countryside, running and on my bicycle. It was merely a stern warning that the sort of thing he was describing could happen – he gave a damn about me. I loved my Dad; he provided extremely well for us, moving us to Ohio so I could grow up in an innocent, untrammeled place, one without too many people. We were disappointed soon after we moved there, what with the freeway coming right into our neighborhood. “They opened up the gates,” Dad sighed once while driving, indicating lines and lines of stacked up cars going by while we were trying to pull out into traffic.
Dad is dead now, and so is my Mom. I can say this now, and get it off my chest. I don’t really know if walking up to Dad and giving up my life and everything counts. Was my plan based on the Holocaust; was I an idiotic mini Hitler? Planning was vaguely involved; I thought I might be the first in a string of serial murders, and I also thought I might welch out and not be the first victim after all. I thought if I weaseled out, there might be several other such female victims, as I had gotten the guy at work started on murdering girls and maybe women. I was willing to take a chance, but had a feeling I might get away, and then have to realize what I had done. However, what I really believe to this day is that the guy from Dad’s work had already murdered somebody, probably his wife… and that somehow I came along, with my usual luck, and seemed to be someone he could blame his actions on.
After all, wouldn’t they have had to make one more child, eventually? Maybe he had slowed it down to one kid, through intemperate habits like overeating, smoking, drinking, seeing hookers, etc. That would be sad, if they only had that one girl and no others, and he still felt like Ohio was overcrowded enough or he needed vengeance enough to murder people. On the day after the car had cut me off, I decided that when I grew up, I would only have one baby, and no more after that. I would battle overpopulation that way, even if it never did anyone any good – I was sick of murder and its aftermath.
Recently, I looked up the local papers in both Gahanna and Columbus, finding no evidence of any such murders or bodies left two blocks down from where we lived. Maybe my Dad and the guy from work had pulled a joke on me. Surely the murder would have been reported. One week after the incident, I read in the Columbus Dispatch that a man had gone around in a white car, shooting 100 men, women and children before he turned himself in as the 101rst victim. He explained that his crime was due to overpopulation in Ohio. I don’t know if he was the same guy or not, and what I meant by I am not exactly white is that I’m “racially impure” or otherwise have more than just freckles under very pale skin. 101 in number is a reference to a children’s movie by Walt Disney, “A 101 Dalmatians.” Those are the dogs that are… covered in spots. Black spots, making them look like me. I was the only kid in my whole high school with freckles, so far as I knew, and it was like that nearly everywhere I went in life.
But the other white, etc. people in an overcrowded Ohio? The type that don’t talk, don’t dance, don’t do anything but smoke and drink? The type that believes in Jesus above all else? In an afterlife, or something to do with the theory of relativity or something, all orchestrated by men somehow? By white and other types of people, making up religion, making an overpopulated world happen without any mercy or memories?
What happened to the three of us, my Dad, me and the guy from work? I left for college and didn’t find out, except Dad died a few years back. I tried to turn in the murderer after my father told me it had actually happened. All I could tell the cops was that it was a fat man in a white sedan car; the cop I called over to our house was disgusted with me, because I couldn’t give him any further details. For my Mom’s sake, and because my Dad was psychologically “off,” I didn’t mention the guy from Dad’s work, but there was no report in the papers either. Maybe none of it ever really happened.
Orang dari pekerjaan Ayah mungkin sudah mati sekarang, karena dia benar-benar gemuk dan perokok berat. Aku berani bertaruh dia juga minum tiga bir sehari. Kami semua adalah orang Amerika-Jerman, sungguh, dan rentan terhadap kebiasaan yang paling berbahaya. Kuharap dia tidak membaca ini. Aku bahkan tidak ingat namanya. Apakah dia punya anak perempuan, apakah dia terbunuh, apakah semua ini pernah terjadi pada kita?