life (and death) in a small town

Two weeks ago a woman was brutally murdered in my hometown. She was beaten about the face, then slit across the throat and wrists before being left to bleed to death in her apartment.

Details of the murder, as well as the name of the suspect were rapidly made public by that indispensable tool of communication, the small town gossip mill. It must have been churning madly that day, as I heard about the deed before even getting out of bed. The murder was discovered just before sunrise.

The victim, who incidentally graduated with my father, was killed in her apartment building that was once my mother’s elementary school—a drive of less than two minutes from my parents’ front door. Her alleged murderer, her son, was in my sister’s high school class. He was later apprehended in a housing complex to which my other sister delivers the daily newspaper.

I later heard a rumor that the account had made the national news. It may have featured in the thin marquee running beneath a commentator’s head during campaign analysis on CNN. But Anderson Cooper could not have run the stories that were circulating for the next several days. Townsfolk mused over the dead woman’s failed marriage, relationships, and son who “wasn’t quite right.” My parents and siblings recalled the killer’s childhood involvement in my father’s t-ball team and my sister’s wrestling team. Everybody remembered his stint in the juvenile detention center. Even the handling of the report and ensuing investigation were under town discussion. Nobody could get enough of the accounts of the authorities asking the victim’s mother after her whereabouts before actually investigating the scene, where her dead body was reported to have been left. Nor could they be sated with one telling of the tale of the suspect’s girlfriend, throwing his bloodstained clothing in her complex’s dumpster just after the murder and then telling folk at the corner convenience store the next day how the victim deserved her fate. An interesting note: she has still not been tied to the event by the police.

I couldn’t escape, no matter where I went that day. Upon walking into a shop for a haircut, I was greeted not with a wide smile and hearty, “how are you?” but with more speculation. The grocery store aisles were lined with murmurs that evening and the phone line was buzzing with more details when I arrived at home.

Two weeks, and the upheaval has settled. Mostly. The townsfolk have moved on to other topics of conversation, but the family of the victim and her killer may never heal.