A few weeks ago, there was a thing that made me mad. And then tired. And then resigned. Unfortunately, while I was in the mad bit, the man helpfully made an appointment for me to meet with his therapist so that we could talk it out together as responsible adults.*
I decided that I didn't want to go.
He decided that I really should.
I said, fine.
My internal organs said, ABANDON SHIP, and tried to violently claw their way out of my rib cage.
So I spent the evening in the emergency room, instead. The doctors determined that I did, in fact, have organs, but couldn't figure out what they were doing, so they shrugged, filled me up with morphine, gave me a prescription for narcotics, and waved me off into the night without making sure I had a ride home. Why do we have an opioid epidemic? It is a mystery.
I tore up the prescription. Where the IV was, my arm has blossomed into an amazing palette of electric green and deep purple and lurid pink. I feel like someone kicked me down some stairs, but do not appear to be actually dead. So that worked out. And the man gave me a gyro, which pretty much counts as marriage counseling.
*My last meeting with her was not actually so helpful. Or it was, but not in the way it was supposed to be, because I ended up buying plane tickets to Seattle.
Librarian super sleuth knuckle-cracking action
I have a few pet research questions that I work on when things are slow at the reference desk. Among these is,
Who was the serial killer who picked up my mother while she was hitchhiking as a teenager in the 1970s?
The story goes like this: my mother, a teenager, is walking home from school and hitching a ride. A man picks her up in a sedan - he's old, to her, so maybe in his 30s. She tells him where she's going, they chat a bit, and she notices that he's taking the wrong turn, heading out of town. She tells him he's going the wrong way. He doesn't stop. She tells him to let her out. He doesn't stop. She tells him to pull over NOW or she's jumping out of the vehicle. He doesn't stop. She opens the door and starts to jump out. He hits the brakes. She runs out, gets away from him, and walks all the way home. Some time after this, a girl goes missing. A body is found in the wooded area where they had been driving. Then others go missing, but they are never found. She realizes she probably met the killer, and she bets the bodies are still in those woods.
I knew my mother had been a teenager in Bloomington, Indiana, before the family moved to Newfoundland, so I started looking for murders along the main highway in the mid-1970s. I found a lot of serial killers. A LOT. There have been waaaay more serial killers in Indiana than you'd find comfortable, which is probably attributable to
corn madness (says me, arbitrarily, after reading one article about cannibal hamsters). I never figured out exactly which one it was. And that is because it wasn't any of them. This weekend, my mother casually mentioned that she met the man again, years later, while walking home from the Memorial University. In
Newfoundland.
All this time, the thing I had
not known was that while my grandfather had been working on his PhD in Indiana, he had been working part of the year in Newfoundland, doing a professorship at the Memorial University. During those months, my mother went to a jr. high school near the university, and it was while she was walking home through St. John's that she was picked up by this man.
Years later, in about 1985, she was walking home from the university with her dog when she passed him on the sidewalk. He remembered her name, and called to her. She stopped, recognizing him. He had a cane. "Does your dog bite?" he asked. "Yes, but only if I
tell her to," she said. He tried to be conversational, and explained that things weren't so great for him; he'd been in a diving accident. He'd been swimming pretty deep, thought he saw a shark, and panicked. Whether he had the bends or an injury, it wasn't clear, but she sized him up and decided that he probably wouldn't be murdering anyone else in that condition. She felt uneasy about meeting him so close to her home.
This is the timeline I've put together:
1972 or 1973 - my mother is picked up while walking home from jr. high school, and escapes after threatening to jump from the car.
1978 -
Sharon Drover, 17, disappears while hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is never found.
1981 -
Dana Bradley, 14, disappears while hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is found in the wooded area South of St. John's.
1982 -
Henrietta Millek, 25, disappears at night. She is a student at Memorial University. A friend says she got into a car with someone in St. John's. Her body is never found.
1984 -
Pamela Asprey, 20, disappears while walking home or hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is never found.
1985 - my mother meets the man again, and he is walking with a cane.
No further disappearances.
The fact that he remembered her name, and that she got away, leads me to suspect that she was one of his first attempts. She encountered him twice in roughly the same area of the city, so he probably lived somewhere around the university. If he's still alive, he may be in his 70s now. And he was injured while diving (or so he said), so OFF TO THE NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES I go. Maybe there is some mention of an accident in a small local article.
I'm coming to get you, old man. Very slowly. If you die before I figure it out, please mention the diving injury in your obituary so I can solve the mystery in a tidy manner.
