I’ve Been Thinking About Murder Lately
From time to time I consider how one would commit a perfect
murder. But lately it has occurred to me that it probably happens all the time.
I have at least one example in my own life…third hand, twice
removed, around the corner of memory. It’s one of those reports from a cousin
who was friends with some other remote relatives who knew about it.
There was no resolution to this probable crime. No one
really knows what happened. Certainly no one was ever charged with anything.
The clues were scarce and as flimsy as cheap toilet paper. And now the crime is
so far back that it has long since faded from everyone’s memory. Almost. But it
sticks to me like that cheap toilet paper, stuck to the bottom of my shoe.
At least one of the reasons this likely murder has faded is
because the woman who died was so colorless…so stunningly unimportant. A few
family members were distressed for a while, but now very few even remember her.
Even when the crime was fresh, it was pretty easy to stop looking for the culprit…at
least once the looking got hard.
For the purposes of this
story, I am going to wildly change the settings and the relationships and the
locations. The nut of the story is as close as I ever heard it, but I will do
my best to make it impossible to trace. Anything you read here that you think
you could use to trace the story is a lie.
There once was a young-ish woman I’ll call Dottie. She
didn’t make much of an impression on anyone. She was married but had no
children. She lived on a small farm in the back of beyond somewhere in that
vastness of prairie that is western Kansas or Oklahoma or Nebraska. There were
two or three small towns within about a half hour drive…a mid-size city was
about an hour and a half away, so there was something like civilization on the
horizon – somewhere.
Her husband, who I will call Roger, was a likeable-enough
fellow of no particular impact who sold insurance to farmers over a wide area.
He drove to his appointments, alone for hours in his car. He was unreachable
most of the time, checking in with his regional office for messages several
times a day.
It is important to note that this goes back to the 1970s,
long before cell phones. His job was pretty simple – drive from farm to farm to
talk insurance, then return the calls of anyone who needed to talk to him.
Dottie was resolutely ordinary. Her life was centered on the
farm and she didn’t go out much. The few times I saw her at big extended
friends and family picnics, she wore jeans and plaid shirts. She was pleasant
enough, but she never had anything memorable to say.
Just like her life, Dottie was plain – not pretty, not ugly
– just somewhere in the middle. Thinking back on it, you would have been hard
pressed to describe her – average height, weight. You wouldn’t have remembered
what color eyes she had.
But, there was one sort of remarkable thing about her – her hair.
She always had a “do”, based on tightly curled hair, teased
and sprayed in the style of the period. We mutually resented our straight hair
and joked about it. My response was to let it grow and wear it straight and
long. She kept hers short, tight, and unnaturally curly. I called it her “hair
hat” which she pretended to find funny. I doubt she was amused but then who
would know.
That’s about all I remember about her. I saw pictures of her
house. It was her “project” with Roger. I thought it was an albatross – an ugly
one at that – that took the place of any other interests. It was an old, white
farmhouse surrounded by tumbledown outbuildings and a sagging barn. It had been
abandoned for years on property owned by some relative, and the place was sold
to them for back taxes.
This was their “back to the land” move and capitalist
venture all in one. They thought they’d make a bundle when they got the house
done and sold the place. In the meantime, they could farm the land to support
themselves. I doubt the plan was working.
They were remodeling the house room by room so nothing was
ever quite completed. It looked like a jumbled mess to me. They rented out some
of the land and farmed some themselves. Given enough time and good weather they
might have made it pay but, then again, maybe not.
In the pictures I saw, the house looked like something in a
Hitchcock movie. The setting was stark and vaguely disturbing if you are
bothered by emptiness. There was nothing between the house and the horizon
except rows and rows of cultivated dirt.
To get there, you took the interstate out to a blacktop farm
road, then you would turn twice more…each road getting more narrow and worn. A
few miles on, you turned down a gravel road, tight for passing cars, impossible
for farm machinery.
Further on down a ways, you turned at their mailbox, crooked
in the hole, which was far enough away from the house that you’d probably get
the mail when you came home at night.
So far as anyone knew, Dottie and Roger just went from day
to day, season to season, doing one ordinary thing after another. But one day,
we got word that Dottie had disappeared. She was gone. Just like that.
There was nothing remarkable even in her disappearance,
except the disappearance itself. Her purse was still in the house. So were her
car keys, and the car was parked out front by the faded red shed where it
always was. Nothing seemed disturbed inside the house. As it was described to
me, that’s what gave a couple of the officers the creeps. There just didn’t
seem to be anything wrong, except that Dottie was missing.
Almost all of her personal things were still there. The only
thing missing, in fact the only thing missing in the whole house, was the
collection of pink foam rollers she used every night to curl her hair. No doubt
you remember those curlers - bright pink foam around a pink plastic stem that snapped
into place. Oh, they’d curl your hair all right, and they didn’t dig into your
scalp like brush rollers. However, they were (and are) unattractive and
probably the best form of birth control this side of saltpeter. (If that ever
worked to tamp down erections, which I always doubted.)
And so Dottie and her hair rollers were missing.
Roger was out on the road that day, making his usual calls. It
took him awhile to get home, but when he did the state troopers and the sheriff
were there.
From what I was told about the situation, they asked all the
usual questions. Did she have any enemies? Was anyone threatening her…or him?
Had he seen anyone hanging around the place? Did she seem upset or worried
about anything?
They looked around and agreed that while it wasn’t all that
tidy, it wasn’t all that messy, either. There were dishes were in the sink but
then Roger was out of town so maybe Dottie hadn’t bothered with them.
They checked phone records, they talked to anyone they could
think of who might know something. No one did.
They looked at Roger’s sales calls. Nothing raised any
questions.
They checked the finances. They owed some money, but
everybody did. There was nothing unusual in that, there was nothing unusual at
all.
It was established that the couple was friendly enough. They
had some acquaintances in the area but they didn’t mix much with the locals.
Dottie’s sisters in the city were the only ones who pushed
the investigation, at least in the early days. According to their cousins who
were friends of mine through my own cousins, they thought Roger probably did
it.
They didn’t have any reason to think so, really. But
somebody had probably done something to Dottie. Probably that something was
awful. Roger seemed as likely a suspect as anybody.
After all, there were limited possibilities. Dottie could
have walked off, but that just didn’t seem like anything she would do.
The next possibility is that a stranger did it. Certainly
there was plenty of opportunity for a stranger to come up to the house and snatch
her. But why take her? Why go there? Why drive all that way down all those
roads and lanes? Just for Dottie?
And so that leaves Roger.
There was one school of thought that maybe Roger came home
and surprised Dottie with a lover and killed her. Possible…but then you have
those missing hair rollers. Would she have met a lover in her rollers? Doubtful.
Also doubtful was that Dottie had a lover. Who would want to
bird dog someone so utterly colorless as Dottie? This was no siren. Her scent,
if she had one, would probably not arouse mad passion. I doubt whether even
Roger felt a thrill of excitement when he turned at the mailbox.
Eventually, any leads had petered out, as they will do. Finally
there just wasn’t anyone left to talk to. Dottie’s family was upset, I suppose,
but then she’d been away for a long time and no one really missed her all that
much.
It was pretty easy to get on with things. There was no real
property, except for the farm. Nobody wanted it enough to fight over and,
besides, it was Roger’s.
The last I heard, Roger stayed on at the farm, still selling
insurance and working the land in one way or another.
And that’s about it, but murder stories always need to come
to some conclusion. Here is mine.
I think Roger did it. I don’t think there was a lover
involved. I think her constant embrace of the ordinary finally got on his
nerves…her with her nothing to say ways and her tight little curls and the
constant hair rollers. I think he finally had enough with the unfinished house
and the dishes in the sink and the vision of the future rolling out day after
day of more of the same.
I think it all got to be too much. And so…just once in his unremarkable
life he rose to red-hot, killing passion. I think he wanted her dead, very
dead. I think he killed her with a kind of joy, with a soaring feeling,
strangling her…watching…looking into her nondescript eyes and seeing what
little light was there finally go out.
I think he loaded up her body and drove to one of the brushy
gullies that are out there. He had miles and miles and miles to choose from…and
he knew all of the back roads to take. He would have dumped her clothes
somewhere, or burned them. The animals would do the rest of the work for him.
After he was finished, I think he was drained of the only passion
he had ever felt. In his case, it was murderous. I think the every day routine
felt welcome after that one release. I think he was glad he didn’t get caught.
I suppose the moral of this little story is to make sure you
kill someone nobody cares all that much about, and who won’t be missed all that
much when they are gone. And make sure that no one can really imagine doing
such a thing.
It’s such an ordinary little crime sometimes, murder.
