THE UNSEEN DARKNESS
I have written, perhaps too many times, about the un-hinged who live among us. We all see it in the increasing amount of violence in our culture, the random nature of it, and, moreover, the increasingly bizarre nature of these crimes. As is unavoidable to some degree, we become numb to it, We come to expect it and it is evident in the ambivalence we show in our collective reaction, or non-reaction, to it. Even here in New Hampshire almost daily there are accounts of increasingly vicious crimes. How about crimes against children? We barely bat an eye anymore at those stories, they come and go with the regularity of junk mail and receive similar attention.
So maybe it is with some subconscious intention that I make myself stop once in a while and shake my head. Like rubbing your eyes in disbelief at a sight you can't believe, in the slim hope that you may be able to rub the image away. A story out of Alton, Illinois struck me this way, left me rubbing my eyes and shaking my head, wondering what has happened that we can harbor, sometimes unwittingly, such monsters among us. That behind closed doors, across America, every now and then, there is a scene inside that defies all imagination. And yet the perpetrators mingle among the rest of us when beyond those closed doors. They go to work, they shop for food with us, they travel next to us on roads, yet they dwell in an unseen darkness, cold beyond reason, completely incapable of feeling anything for anyone but themselves.
Dorothy Dixon was 29 years old and pregnant. She was also developmentally-disabled, child-like in her thinking and capabilities. She had been befriended by Michelle Riley and Judy Woods, 35 and 43 years old respectively, also Riley's 15 year-old daughter. They moved in with her and assumed control of her social security/disability payments. They also moved her to the basement of her home with just a thin rug and mattress for furniture. She ate only what she could forage from the refrigerator, given that her trips upstairs would be met with BB-gun fire. They used her for target practice, burned her with a glue gun and "doused her with scalding hot liquid that peeled away layers of her skin". They burned what few clothes she had and she walked around naked. They often pummeled her with an aluminum bat or metal handles. Last week, Dorothy, along with her child-in-womb, died from the abuse. Police have charged two adults, three teenagers and a 12 year-old boy with murder.
I always wonder, and always will, where are the neighbors, the social-service employees, the friends or family...where is..anyone? Dorothy Dixon was somebody's daughter, once held as a baby with all the hope for a bright future and happy life that is bestowed, hopefully, upon any child. She may have been a sister, she was about to be a mother, for better or worse. And what have we done as a society that we are able to breed such callous monsters? In this case, a rag-tag half-family that found mutual pleasure in physically and emotionally torturing a disabled woman. Recall the Michael Vick story, the dog-fighting that got the attention of the entire nation and spurred outrage and indignation, yet this story was found on page 3 of my newspaper and won't get any national attention. We are busy wondering about Barack Obama's Pastor and agencies snooping through our Passport history. This story was as cold as the dirt on Dorothy Dixon's grave before it even got to press, and tomorrow, there'll be another one.
Always a bummer to have to think about this stuff, and I suppose we can just continue pretending that it's all from another planet, it's not going to happen to us. Well, I can't really think that, because just miles away in Epping, New Hampshire, Sheila LaBarre, a clearly criminally insane and truly frightening woman, has admitted to befriending and murdering two mentally-disabled young men who she brought to her sprawling farm and dismembered, then burned them in her front yard. Nearly every room of her farmhouse was spattered with blood, a scene that makes most horror movies look benign, if for no other reason than the fact that this is reality.
I can barely imagine the heartbreak of losing a child under any circumstances. I can't begin to imagine the heartbreak of having endured raising a disabled child and the deluge of sadness that must accompany that, and then losing that child to someone that used their superior intellect, their unseen darkness, to lure that child away and into a villainous Hell. As I have written here before, we must all be vigilant to the growing army of dangerous sociopaths among us. I am sure the only thing worse than the unseen darkness, is being sucked into it.
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