anti:freeze

Karrie is on a much-needed media vacation. She will return to anti:freeze soon - most likely later this week.

DF touches her palms to my cheeks, standing on tip-toe to inspect my face. "Open your mouth," she says.

I close my eyes and open my jaw wide. I feel something scrape against my back molars - plastic maybe, or a piece of candy.

"I took the teeth from your bag," DF says. "You really shouldn't carry loose bones around."

She means: the wisdom teeth I carry with me, the ones that took hours to extract, with fused roots and thick pulp.

"I tried to bury them once," I say. "But I dug them right back out."

I unload my blueberries, oranges, apples, oatmeal, & cherries and smile at the Whole Foods cashier. My cheeks flush. This is the cashier that used to smile at me in the aisles when she walked past, the one I thought sort of liked me. Until I complimented her haircut, and she recommended a barber shop on Hawthorne, and I repeated the compliment and she looked at me like I had just asked for a free pound of bananas. Now I catch her staring at me sometimes, and we both look away. I avoid her line whenever possible. Today, only one lane was open, so I had no choice.

I ask, How are you? She says, fine. And then I feel stupid for even asking. I mean, she answers that same question how many times a day?

My jaw clenches tight for a moment and relaxes. I wonder if she saw me in here yesterday. I had to stop in for soy milk and omega-3 eggs. The day before that it was dandelion root, green onions, and grapefruit.

She snatches up the blueberries, types their SKU into the register, and winds a rubber band around the containers to hold them shut. I notice a small bruise at the base of her thumb.

I take out the cotton sack I brought with me and lay it down while I type my PIN into the debit card terminal.

A bagger has walked up to my lane in the meantime, and he leans on the counter as he says something I can't make out. Since I lost hearing in my right ear, I have a hard time hearing words, especially when the words come from my right. I assume his words are meant for the cashier, some private joke or grocery store emergency. Then I realize he is staring at me, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised.

Were you talking to me? I say.

Do you want me to bag these or not? He asks.

I choke up. What is the right answer? If I say yes, I am the jerk who expects him to bag my groceries. If I say no, I will stand at the counter and take far too long, and other people will scowl and roll their eyes. And anyway, isn't this his job? Does he ask everyone this question, or does he only ask when he doesn't want to do it?

By the time I decide to do it myself, he already has his hands all over the apples.

My sister asked why I write about missing people so often. Why I obsess over cold cases. Why I love forensic art. Why so many of my essays and stories center on violence, surveillance, and murders.

I had no answer.

But here is the first image that flashed in my mind: carpet.

Everywhere I lived for years and years, the hardwood floors were covered in soft carpet. I left footprints in my own home, and I hated it. It made me uncomfortable, standing there looking at my own footprints. I wondered if other people stopped to read them, to trace back my path, notice my pacing. As a kid, I thought about my dead grandfather, how he could see everything I did. I wondered if he kept track of the footprints, watched to see if they matched up with the stories I told, the excuses I made. Could I ever tell a lie, with footprints to rat me out?

So I vacuumed all the time. I scrubbed with sponges. I kept the carpet smooth.

Several years ago, I wrote a short story in which a character did the same, and my teacher wrote in the margin: Obsessed with her own subjectivity.

Years later, I read Being and Nothingness, and I finally understood.

I thought back to how I purposefully kept my photograph out of my highschool yearbook. Why I wanted to skip out on graduations.

Why I hate being remembered in stores. Why I feel flushes of shame when I pass strangers on the sidewalk. Why I pause by the door sometimes, fighting the urge to stay home, struggling with the very idea of being seen.

My erased footprints. Smooth carpet. Why I think all the time about RFID. Forensics. Evidence.

Somehow, I have to follow the tracks I erased. Where will they lead?

You can read more new posts over at evidentiary:alchemy. Just wanted to let you know.

During the Scott Peterson trial, his attorney (or was it a pundit?) discussed the level of surveillance Scott had been under prior to his arrest - how police had intercepted his cell phone calls and followed him as he drove out to the bay. The attorney (pundit?) said everyone becomes suspect when captured on tape or watched every minute of the day. Everyone looks guilty of something, he warned.

I remembered my studies of geographic profiling, and I wondered what crimes - and criminals - intersected with my life, how guilty I would look under scrutiny (even though I lead a crime-free life.)

And what crimes would never intersect without all the data collected every day: tapes, card swipes, surveillance videos, and in the future, RFID databases. I remembered an article I read about fingerprint databases, and how the bigger they get, the more fallible they become.

Which led me to interrogations and false confessions. One of my worst fears.

More on this soon.

Performance artist Kerry Skarbakka staged 9/11 falls yesterday from a museum roof in Chicago.

It reminds me of the Tumbling Woman statue created by Eric Fischl, depicting a woman as she fell - or more horrifically, jumped - from the World Trade Center towers. Victims' families hated the sculpture. Of all the images and moments from that day, this one felt the most sacred, the most personal and tragic, to them.

In 2002, I wrote Form Zero: Art after 9-11 for my critical paper in the MFA program at Antioch University. I looked at art, poetry, and performances created before and after the attacks. Some art that was created prior to 9-11 emerged transformed, with new meanings, such as the photographs of Nancy Davenport - many depicting faked, photoshopped terrorist attacks on NYC. One depicted a plane flying low, with a man on a balcony pointing a gun in its direction (a reenactment of a performance by Chris Burden years earlier, at LAX.) Another showed an explosion in the city. She had created the work with the intention of examining "truth" in our media - how images become true. The photos looked remarkably real, like photojournalism. After 9-11, they took on a whole new meaning: as premonition, as attack on America, as terrorist, as offensive, as art imitating life.

As I looked at the art that came after the attacks - art created specifically to respond to the horror - I realized that the most effective art refused to aestheticize the event in a direct way. Instead, it lived and breathed on the periphery, tracing minute details, picking through bits of strange evidence, expressing the profound through the smallest of details. The best 9-11 art was open-ended, asking questions and seeking no direct answers. It disturbed, but it did not offend.

In other words, the best art was a process, not merely a product. It invited transaction. Works like the black cover created by Art Spiegelman for the New Yorker. (Later, Spiegelman also created the cover for a collection of 9-11 essays, and in this cover, he showed a Christo-like cloth hovering over the missing towers. I took this image as a direct challenge to begin thinking about the aesthetics of the attacks - of the losses. After that, he published his amazing book, In the Shadow of the Towers. We could watch his aesthetic develop over time, with incredible sensitivity and thought. Just as this was a process, so were each of his works.)

Works like a comic book drawing of a young boy as he watches a plane fly overhead.

Poems like The Enemy by Raphael Campo.

These were incredible 9-11 art, and have stood the test of time so far.

The worst art failed in two ways: it attempted to interpret and describe, instead of question, and/or it attempted to aestheticize the loss in some direct way - by sculpting a falling person, say, or painting a heroic portrait.

So when I heard about the performance artist in Chicago, I was curious to hear more about his intentions:

"I was so distraught, I needed some way to find an artistic response," he told the Chicago Sun-Times. Now, he says he sees falling as a metaphor for life.

"Mentally, physically and emotionally, from day to day, we fall. Even walking is falling: You take a step, fall and catch yourself," he said. (quoted here)

He sounds sincere enough. But I read that he collaborates with photographers, who snap images of him as he falls toward the ground. Though Skarbakka falls safely, with wires and pulleys, the photos are carefully retouched so these never appear in the images.

Which means he creates the illusion of falling in order to examine falling as metaphor.

I am not sure how I feel about this idea yet. I will post more soon.

When I first took this photo last year, I didn't like it. The colors seemed too pastel, too soft, especially in light of my dread and terror at crossing the bridge.

But last night I took a second look. Suddenly, I saw how the tree and Hawthorne play off one another - similar forms, both evoking delicacy and impermanence. I realized: the photo had come out true after all.

The Hawthorne always seems so delicate to me, like the loose, thready canopy and drooping branches of the tree. Maybe because of the steel grids - how you can see the water beneath as you cross, listen to the whistle of tires (almost like wind through a cracked window in the middle of the night, or a mysterious bird, or a ghost.) Maybe because I know how old the structure really is - that it cannot possibly hold.

The photo captures my terror after all.

So it is possible to catch a moment of pure dread at peace? For if this shows my dread, it sure feels peaceful all the same.

Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller not only molested childen, but he apparently kept notes on every victim. Police in San Jose found a list of more than 36,000 names in his home, complete with headings and codes for the types of boys he molested, as well as the particular violations to each one.

Some of the headings:

Blond Boys
Cute Boys
Boys who say no

(as reported by CourtTV, original spellings & punctuation preserved)

Boys who say no. That gives me chills.

Prior to his latest jail sentence, Schwartzmiller lived just 10 minutes from two elementary schools. He even roomed with another convicted sex offender (neither were registered in offender databases.) He has been arrested for molestation in several states, but like many sex offenders, he walked free to commit his crimes again. Police believe he molested 36,000 children, both within the US and abroad, and they want victims and parents to step forward - so they can lock Schartzmiller up for good.

I keep returning to the notebooks: handwriting so neat, so meticulous - as exact as an accountant's ledger. A television report showed some of the pages, and their mathematical precision - their calculated strategy - twisted my stomach. If you didn't know what the notebooks were, you might think Schwartzmiller collected coins or logged invoices. How could such horrible, twisted madness be contained on those neat lines? It defies logic and makes perfect sense at the same time.

36,000 names. How many children is that per day? How can that even be possible?

Like I said, the calculation twists my stomach.

I thought more about Kerry Skarbakka, the performance artist from my post earlier today.

I decided, despite the artist's sincerity, that his performance ultimately fails. For one, the men and women who leapt from the World Trade Center did not simply fall. They jumped. This act of will - this choice between searing flames and a hard crash on the concrete below - is essential to the horror of their deaths.

Secondly, Mr. Skarbakka uses wires and pulleys. The victims of 9-11 had no such luxury. The fact that Skarbakka edits out the wires for his documentary photographs feels dishonest somehow - an erasure of history, of passion and feeling and humanity. The exact opposite of his stated intentions.

The photos would work better with the wires left in. With the wires and pulleys visible, viewers can ponder their presence and absence. And then the metaphor comes alive.

To me, his falls - and doctored photos - can never be metaphor. Simile perhaps. But not metaphor.

These are old notes from a messy, chaotic pocket Moleskine. Last winter, I wrote a piece weaving together several missing person cases and questions, forensic photo analysis, Lucretius' theories of light (and other ancient theories of how we see), and questions about what I would do, given certain circumstances. Now that I have been writing a meditation on why I write about missing people, some of these rough notes (raw, messy, unordered, unstructured) have taken on new meanings. The notes are more polished in the actual essay, of course.

But I thought, why not post some of them?

Thus for the idealist as for the realist, one conclusion is imposed: Due to the fact that the other is revealed to us in a spatial world, we are separated from the other by a real or ideal space. - Sartre

Ideal meaning: constituting or existing only in the form of an idea or mental image or conception. (Though I cannot help but also think of perfection.)

Does missing mean that you can no longer plot my point on a map? Or is that you have the wrong map - that I have wandered past the boundaries of our charted territories, into places you cannot find?

Or does it mean that the ideal space we always felt - always suspected would force us apart - has simply transformed into something real?

(lots of messy cursive I cannot read - this continues for several paragraphs)

I cannot stop thinking of Tara Calico, who went missing in 1988 while riding her bicycle in New Mexico. Detectives found the cracked window of her Sony Walkman near a campground several miles away, and her mother immediately knew: Tara had left breadcrumbs for police to follow.

Detectives never found Tara's pink Huffy, but they did discover tire tracks along NM 47.

But the tracks led nowhere, and the trail went cold.

Six months later, a Polaroid turned up outside a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida. In the picture: a young woman, bound and gagged; a paperback copy of My Sweet Audrina beside her hip; a boy to her left, his mouth taped, his head resting on a blue-and-white striped pillow.

Tara loved VC Andrews. Was My Sweet Audrina a sign? Some kind of code? And what about the little boy? He resembled a missing child from the same state as Tara - New Mexico. It seemed this could not possibly be coincidence, two people in the same bizarre shot, both resembling missing persons from the same state.

Tara's parents hired an expert in ear identification, and he positively identified the woman as Tara.

Police disagreed.

_____

Lucretius.

Imagine: if light could adhere, if two bodies could touch - leave traces - across a distance, just by being seen. (And what if they were not seen? Would those atoms still travel? Would they still touch?) Imagine a camera: the shutter opens, and your face touches the lens, touches the photo paper, so that it leaves actual bits of the skin, not just the image. Not just an image, but something you might extract, like DNA. Proof. (Note to readers: This fragment appeared in two different forms in my original notebook. I originally posted one form, but then decided to use the other, which is the paragraph you just read.)

And you would never have to compare ears, never have to cut an image to pieces.

Lucretius:

Now will I undertake an argument- One for these matters of supreme concern- That there exist those somewhats which we call The images of things: these, like to films Scaled off the utmost outside of the things, Flit hither and thither through the atmosphere, And the same terrify our intellects, Coming upon us waking or in sleep, When oft we peer at wonderful strange shapes And images of people lorn of light, Which oft have horribly roused us when we lay In slumber- that haply nevermore may we Suppose that souls get loose from Acheron, Or shades go floating in among the living, Or aught of us is left behind at death, When body and mind, destroyed together, each Back to its own primordials goes away.

_____

Over the next couple of years, more photos appeared - each one more puzzling, each one trumping the others, like an ace. The strangest one shows a woman - Tara? - bound in gauze while seated on an Amtrak train. The man sitting next to her grabs her neck and pulls back her head. Every detail seems theatrical: the woman's oversized glasses; the man's gaping mouth; the setting. How could that possibly be real? On a public train?

If the Polaroids were real, Tara was on the move - nowhere in particular, no place you could plot on the map. She was always in a truck or a train, always leaving or arriving, living in the space between spaces.

The empty spaces on maps, with no dots.

_____

You can walk to the end of the earth and never once touch the vanishing point. It wraps around the horizon and comes back to kiss your heels, like a latitude line. The vanishing point, it turns out, is you.

I realized yesterday: I have come full circle with my questions about missing people. I followed clues to the end of the earth and walked straight into myself. And the questions begin anew, with different stakes. And new questions are born.

Several years ago, I kept thinking about redshift and blueshift, convinced they held the key.

This past winter, I was thinking again about optics and light. The material became part of another essay about the missing.

Now, I find myself wondering again about distance and movement and light, returning to some ancient ideas and wishing they were true. Or sometimes true.

The cycle holds true for other questions. I no longer believe any one line of inquiry holds the key, but all lead to interesting places.

I posted a writing exercise on evidentiary. I'll come back to antifreeze later today with more notes and a short piece about a scary moment at the cafe yesterday. Right now, I have to run out and do some more research & writing.

Oh, and you must read Michael Totten's defense of coffeeshops. I would never drink lattes (too sweet, too expensive), but I do slap down $1.00-$1.50 most days for a hot cup of coffee or tea, plus one refill. Ever since I was thirteen and started hanging out at the local Happy Chef in Cedar Rapids (there were no coffeeshops in my hometown back then - only chain restaurants with coffee counters), I have lugged my notebooks, books, and napkin notes out to public spaces to write. (I always wrote, even as a kid. But at Happy Chef, I discovered I really loved writing in cafes.) I can write at home, but the flow is never quite the same. And all that alone time can be isolating. At least out in public, I can people-watch, stare out the window at passing pedestrians and cars, and listen in on conversations. Only out in public do I really enter into the process. So yeah, what he said.

A note to the woman in the photograph (fragment from my essay, Shutter Release, which is on its way through the postal system as I type, except of course I end up revising a bit here - cannot resist):

I want light like Lucretius imagined it. Sight like Leucippus. I want the surfaces of things - and of people - to flit off into the atmosphere and float: to the eye, to the camera lens, to photo paper. To adhere.

If light were a faint film of you - peeled away like a sticker or fruit skin - it would adhere to the photo paper, haunting the Polaroid, a two dimensional ghost. I could dig into the photo and scrape a sample from your miniature cheek, yank out a tiny hair, extract your DNA.

I could pull you right out of the image of you.

I could pick the dirt and skin and food from under your nails and see what and who you last touched. I could pry out a paper tooth and see if it matched the radiographs on file under your name.

(And in this reality, last seen is synonymous with last touched.)

But that would mean: cutting you into pieces. Like the forensic artist disarticulating a skull to make a sculpture, I would have to do real damage, all for the chance to know your name.

And like the archaeologist, I would have to destroy the site, rendering it useless to future digs.

Portland had storms earlier this week. Quiet storms: all lightning and no thunder; cool breeze but no rain. The rain must have fallen far off on the horizon.

I was standing near the window, lost in thought, when I realized the sky had turned a yellow-pink, that everywhere, everything was too bright.

And then I saw the rainbow.

This was the best picture I could get, since my lomo ran out of film and all I had was a lame digital camera. The sky seems dark in this shot, but the streets and buildings literally glowed. I took this when night was already falling.

But let me explain what I mean when I say lie (here, some fragments from an old essay):

The DHS investigator thanks my mother for coffee the way one thanks a waitress, smiling (secretly, an almost undetectable smile) at the fake plastic bricks glued to our wall, the plastic Garfield clock, the burnt and peeling surfaces of our counters.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” She asks, nodding toward me.

I hate her for questioning me in front of my father: How can I possibly tell the truth with Dad right beside me?

“This is bullshit,” my father says. He clenches his fists, grinds his teeth. (Does DHS record this on the legal pad? For all I know she plays tic-tac-toe, makes note of the stained carpet and vinyl tablecloth, or rates the wait service and coffee: 1 star for the coffee; 3 stars for the service.)

The investigator nods. I want to snatch her legal pad and write it all down in my own words.

___

“Maybe it was an accident,” I say, looking the investigator in the eye. “Maybe he was swinging his arm and I just walked into it.”

List of books I am reading:

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (reviewing for Invisible Insurrection - look for it soon here.)

Lost on Purpose: Women in the City, edited by Amy Prior (reviewing for Invisible Insurrection)

Re-reading some chapters in Disorder Versus Order in Brain Function, edited by Peter Arhem, Clas Blomberg, and Hans Liljenstrom.

True Story by Michael Finkel (I followed the Christian Longo case closely, so I knew Longo had impersonated Michael Finkel while fleeing from justice. What I did not know is that - at precisely the same time - Finkel had fallen from grace at the New York Times, for lies in his reporting. Vanity Fair recently published an excerpt.)

I might re-read The Missing by Andrew O'Hagan as well. One of my Antioch mentors assigned this book to me, after he saw that I was writing about missing people. O'Hagan shares my empathy, mourning, and obsession with the missing, but his approach is very different.

Oh - and then there is the list of six forensic textbooks I desperately want to study. Right now, I have books on forensic taphonomy, forensic art, decomposition, forensic anthropology, and pathology. Oh, there are so many more ...

Last year, a television emitted an international distress signal, and police showed up at a house, only to discover the television was crying for help. The owner switched off the set and has not used it since.

I have been thinking about this alot lately - about the concept of inanimate signals. I wrote the story of the television distress signal into an essay a while back (Shutter Release), but as time moves forward, I find myself rethinking the whole concept.

I keep thinking: What if it wasn't inanimate at all? What if the signals came from somewhere else? What if the television was tuned to a channel nobody has ever seen? A missing channel?

I will post some notes on this later.

Here are some pages from a notebook I have been keeping on amplitude modulation (inspired by readings in Aristotelian vs. Platonic ideas of perception and disorder vs. order in brain function). I cut the tiny pictures from my contact sheets (all lomo, of course):

More on my notebooks in these posts:

notebooks as evidence (posted January 22, 2004)

from the notebook stacks (posted August 28, 2003)

A fragment from one of the intermediary chapters in my final manuscript for graduate school, a book/collection of essays entitled Last Seen:

When Alaska Airlines Flight 261 went down in the Pacific, just off the coast from Los Angeles, it spun and spun as if the whole plane were a propeller. Captain Ted Thompson told the passengers there was a flight control problem, nothing big, that the plane would land in LA in twenty minutes, and that everything would be smooth from then on. One minute and seventeen seconds later, everyone on board was dead.

“Ah, here we go,” Thompson said, as if the problem were only a loose screw that he could tighten back into place, as if he didn't feel the thrust downward. Ah, here we go. The last words on the cockpit voice recorder before Flight 261 disappeared from radar.

Sometimes I wonder if he knew has dying, that he was already half-dead just for knowing it. Here we go. Not to a place, but to a new state of matter. As he sped toward the water, Captain Ted Thompson transformed into light and sound, his voice the only trace left of his life.

I first read the cockpit transcript while sitting in LAX, just minutes before a flight home, and my first thought: Let me leave my luggage behind for the forensics team and swim from the wreckage to an empty stretch of beach no one knows. Let me move like a radio signal through the world, passing through buildings and bodies undetected, unseen, unfelt. Let me transit my signal so weakly, so far below radar that no one ever finds me. I tore that last line from the transcript, tucked it under my arm, and boarded an Alaska Airlines MD-80 jet, the same model that crashed just one year before.

Ah, here we go. Every day is like getting on that plane.

___

This fragment holds another clue to my current investigation: Why do I always write about missing people? Even when my essays explore other subjects or themes, missing people begin to populate the pages - literally haunting my work.

So back I go to Flight 261. I have all the transcripts, and I will study them intensely. Process, process, process.

You can find another fragment from the final manuscript Last Seen, in this old post at evidentiary:alchemy.

more questions to ask myself, while writing: Why is it that I love to watch and analyze criminal trials, but I do not much care for any courtroom fiction? Same with criminal stories and forensics. I rarely like any fictional representations, but I could get lost in true stories - news reports, trial transcripts, evidence, trials, transcripts of interrogations, even some of the more well-written true crime - for hours and hours? (Although, I confess, I am working on a science fiction story that weaves a murder in with questions about various forms of surveillance and what it means to be missing/found/killed in such a watched, documented, surveilled world.)

I mean, for someone who does not much care for genre boundaries, this preference (bias?) seems strange. I will have to think more about this.

I do read a lot of true crime, but not usually the icky and sometimes exploitive tabloid-esque books (though some of those are better than their appearance suggests.) The cases in my forensics textbooks grip me, too, and I will track down more information, getting to know all the characters, wondering about them, sometimes mourning for them. I have spent whole afternoons crying over someone in a case I read in a textbook. But why?

I have a secret website, and I finally feel ready to share. I first got it back in Spring 2004, but I waited to dig in while I sat with my intentions. I finally completed a design in February 2005, as I thought about the upcoming anniversaries and birthdays of people I have lost. Then I spilled my secret to a close friend, during a conversation about our writing, why we explore certain subjects and themes, etc. As soon as I revealed the site, I felt a release. I moved some long-hidden posts from draft mode to publish mode, and it felt right. So now I am revealing it here as well. The site is called Missing Person, and you can find it here.

Missing person cases/missing & located people have haunted my evidentiary:alchemy blog for some time, of course, but usually within the context of writing metaphors, forensics, criminal trials, or objective correlative. The Missing Person site is different - more personal.

Thanks to the friend to whom I spilled my secret. (She knows who she is!) If I did not love and trust her so much, I may have kept this one buried. (A behavior this same friend would diagnose as a symptom of my Scorpio rising, which seems like a lovely-dark image to me.)

I remember the days, as a latch-key kid growing up in the Midwest, when I checked the phone wires immediately upon entering the house. If the wires were snipped, I knew to get out as fast as I could.

It was because of the BTK serial killer. Although he killed his victims in Kansas, even Iowans felt terror. We all knew he cut phone wires so victims could not call for help.

So I was astonished and relieved to see that he plead guilty to ten counts of murder today. He described the grisly slaying of the Otero family in detail:

``I made a decision to go ahead and put them down, I guess, or strangle them,'' he told Sedgwick County District Judge Gregory Waller. The hearing was broadcast on live television.

Rader testified that he had entered the Otero home by the back door, cut the phone line and, at gunpoint, tied the family up and killed them. Joseph Otero had back problems from a car accident, so Rader said he offered him a pillow and a coat to make him more comfortable while he was tied up. (quoted here)

He said he decided to kill the whole family when he realized he was not wearing a mask. Which I think says it all.

Notice his language: put them down.

He described how he did not know how to strangle at first:

"I had never strangled anyone before, so I really didn't know how much pressure you had to put on a person or how long it would take," he told District Judge Gregory Waller in describing those killings.

"The whole family just panicked on me. I worked pretty quick," Rader said. "I strangled Mrs. Otero. She passed out. I thought she was dead. I strangled Josephine. She passed out. I thought she was dead. Then, I went over and put a bag on Junior's head."

He then said he returned to the woman: "I went back and strangled her again." (quoted in the LA Times)

He called the killing "projects," as if they were some kind of experiment or art. They served as a sick sexual release - a lustmord fantasy.

I cannot imagine losing a loved one to something like this. On an interview with Court TV, prosecutors said many of the victims' families heard the details for the first time in court today. Can you imagine? I wish them healing.

I got some new forensics books this week, so do not be surprised if you see even more forensics on antifreeze, evidentiary, & Missing | Person.

In the meantime, you can visit the forensics category page (my very first post on this blog was about forensic taphonomy) or read about forensics & objective correlative on evidentiary. More soon.

I am laid up with broken bones in my foot, restless & longing for a hike in the hills. If you know me well, you know I hate sitting still. I will return tomorrow with more posts. In the meantime, check out some posts over at one of my other sites, Missing | Person.