That first night opened the door … to what, exactly, she wasn’t quite sure. But that was the night it all began—the rappings on the walls, the floorboards that creaked under invisible feet.
Blood saturated every surface: splattered across the walls, soaking through the bedsheets. Arterial spray darkening from ruby to rust, placing the precise time of the murder-suicide some twelve hours prior. The nude forms of a young man and woman faced one another on the bed, their expressions serene despite the gaping mess of their flayed throats. Hers had been cut just above the clavicle, his severed at the Adam’s apple. A bone-handled razor lay at his side, slick with clotted crimson.
And there she was.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours after nine-year-old Esther Lee Lewis went missing on her walk to the school bus the morning of Tuesday, March 11, 1947, there she was. They found her beneath a weeping willow in a dry creek bed near the Kings River, blanketed in blackberry vines—dress torn, skull crushed.
It always begins with a girl—usually nameless, always dead.
How she died doesn’t matter so much as the fact that she met a violent fate because she made a perceived mistake of some kind: her clothes were too tight, she went out alone at night, or caught a ride with the wrong stranger.
In 1973, a Florida jury convicted Gerard John Schaefer of two counts of murder in the first degree. He insisted on his innocence, yet he named missing person cases and unsolved murders that should have been added to the list of twenty-eight deaths where he was suspected. On top of that, Schaefer was a law enforcement officer.
Forty-two years ago, a gardener working in a Bakersfield back yard spotted blood creeping under his client’s door. Police discovered the beaten and stabbed body of Tommy Tarver, owner of an exclusive beauty salon.
Murder.
It’s not a pretty thing, yet we have a fascination with it. Thousands of mystery novels, movies, and television shows reveal whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit. Reality shows analyze the deaths, the investigations, the captures, and the trials. Usually, it’s men who kill, but there are times when a woman takes a life.
Fresno true crime writer James A. Ardaiz joins us here at KRL this week for an interview, along with a review of his book, a chance to win a copy of the book (details at the end of this post) & information on his upcoming book talk at the San Joaquin Valley Chapter of Sisters In Crime on February 2, 2013.
