I wonder if it is possible to embrace the weakest links in the OCCK case—for instance, to love Gregory Greene, to shower compassion upon him as merely another member of the human race maneuvering through the complexities of a world that incubates people like him. Can I accept that these killings may be less the actions of an individual and more the inevitable consequence of a sanctioning society? I do not know the answer to that.
I do know that, regardless of my respect for the human race and sensitivity to societal quirks, if Gregory Greene had been found to have touched one of my children, I’d have put a blade in his neck, and in doing so I would have killed two people at once: the Gregory Greene that had become the monster his adulthood had diagrammed, and the Gregory Greene who had been the small boy lounging in his mother’s lap at some point, not yet knowing the beast he would become, and perhaps not in control of that becoming.
ON IMPERFECTIONS
I would like a readership to find fault in perfection, should I threaten to deliver it, the story winding itself down on the streets of Detroit, my hooded figure bookending the tale, or with my hair in the wind riding a ferry through the frigid chop toward the Foxes; for it is only in the imperfections, the unknown aspects of the OCCK, that we are allowed to see the truth: that no serial murder case in the history of modern criminal justice has had so many leads, and for as long a duration, without a single arrest. That we are not allowed to know why has provided us with a certain kind of understanding.
There remain holes in this story, and yet, as in many mysteries, the answer can be found by simply reaching through those holes, the truth only an arm’s length away after all.
That a privately sponsored investigation into Adam Starchild’s financial statements would detail the listing of a heavily insured, extensive art collection, including works similar to the one missing from the McKinney gallery, is of interest.
That South Fox Island would be found to have served as a port of transfer for the drug trade, an illicit accompaniment to its pornographic brethren on the northern island, with cocaine swinging in from the southern seas via East Coast hubs—New Jersey and New York—and smut traveling from Michigan toward those same hubs, to be swung out across the Atlantic for the titillation of its European clientele, is also of interest.
That planes go down over frigid waters, automobiles explode, suicides abound, blood is sprayed on dashboards in the parking lots of apartment complexes, lives are gassed in the suburban single-car garages of spring, birth certificates are burned and passports faked, and composite after composite matching suspect after suspect and vehicle after vehicle matching imprint after testimony after composite alike can, without resolution, be overwhelming. It can feel as if all we’ve been left with is the mystery, even after everything that’s been learned about these murders. And yet, the loose ends, flapping like strands of silk, remain just on the other side of an ever-closing hole in the tale:
A single arm, like a magician’s disappearing down a hat, can retrieve a bouquet.
SPRING
I noticed flowers growing along the side of my house today. One small blue flower, the shape of a bulbous dime balancing on the thinnest of stems, rising only inches from the dirt, and then several clumps of a larger, .44-caliber-shaped tubular variety of varying colors, everything precariously reaching, not yet fully trusting in the arrival of spring, not yet opening but willing to rise up and peek around in the warmer air.
Today is March 26, 2013, thirty-six years and four days after Timothy King was found shucked from the palm of his neighborhood into a channel along a slender road in the darkest of hours. It will be 57 degrees today, 65 degrees tomorrow.
I do not know the names of the species of wild things, but my father knew them intimately. As a teenager, when I began to see my father once a month or so and witnessed the flowers that had sprung around his home, I could perceive that the Latin and the English held different weights for him. He was aligned with the former: to speak, when naming a species, the words that ended in -ia and -is, the sounds of a language curling upward or stretching out, instead of the harder consonants in his native language.
His own father, practicing medicine, had spoken in the Latin as well, while his mother reportedly spoke only with a venom that contaminated him from early on. While I recognized my grandmother’s knife skills with language, she was warm to the touch, coddling my needs with the smell of her perfume and the largesse of her hair, reddened like evening sunlight across glass.
That my father, feeling the way he did about her, would choose the more marbled aesthetic of formalism represented by my grandfather does not surprise me. My father’s seeming lack of genuine affection for his wife and children was either birthed from the short-circuiting of his maternal relationship or from his own silenced traumas, or from that which we as mortals can know little of: the recognition of the timeless and divine in his father, the idolization of the mechanics of the particular. These were the restraints that kept my father from crossing over, that allowed him to function when so much inside of him was raging. Why my displacement of his hairbrush from one side of the sink to the other caused such hostility in him that it terrified me even at nineteen. How I had been learning that anger and love were of the same bloodline. Why I buried myself in the structuring of sentences to escape the threat of that destiny.
I do not know what I feel when I stand in the mirror and study the body that has been marked by my own hand at times. From the moment the first belt across my back became release, it somehow did so in imitation of the dotted bruises from my brother’s jersey that were pounded into the flesh when he was a boy. That the two could exist in harmony—the preservation of my brother’s pain, which he has not asked of me, and my own exulting—seems a blasphemy upon the gift of life. And yet it was a thing that happened, in a time that requested it, that I must purge by making known.
In the marking is the release, as I have marked my wall with the photo of police officer Reni Lelek, the only clipping from my files that I continue to reflect upon, in order to let her go. Although I have taken no further measures to reach her, I know that in Reni is the image of Ellie, and that in Ellie is the image of my mother in those early years of my clasping to her hand. That I do not come to find Reni Lelek dead or seek her in life is no surprise. She may be, after all, beyond the rendering of her portrait, a mere imagining of that purest of loves, in the moment of its capture, before its striking.
The rendering of my father in these pages may be, unfairly, the mere rendering of my hurt. Although I have told the truth, I have indeed left out those forgotten moments that were perhaps overpowered by my coming of age, the way I must have softly leaned into my father’s lap as a toddler or chased what was thrown by him to be retrieved by me: a ball across the carpeted bedroom floor, a single marble across the tiles where the bathtub met the doorjamb.
In my clearest moments I think fondly of my father revisiting my childhood home as I, too, have done, and imagine his car pulled to the curb, his motor idling, his memories of our time spent inside those walls, in greater richness than I have allowed him here, a thing that fills the silence.
WHEN THE WEATHER first warmed last week, I watched my son through the matchbook-sized monitor of my Flip cam, set on a tripod in the driveway; he was captured in a square of light that saw him doing curb slides on his skateboard, the sunshine warping against his leather jacket. At thirteen now, his body is lengthening, the sound of an electric razor comes from the bathroom some nights before he showers, and the scent of cologne lingers in the living room when I’ve returned from driving him to school.
I know that one day he will be gone from me of his own accord and that within his absence will be my failure to have been perfect for him, in the most difficult times that we faced together, when he needed that perfection from me most. I can hope that within his absence will be his joy as well, and the remnants of his verve, and I can know that he will return.
My daughter’s leaving will preface his
, only a year from now when she fills her car with the many treasures I’ve watched her accumulate over the years—her record collection, the boxes of books that went unpacked after the split, her guitars, her amplifier, the magazine photos from her wall—and hopefully with her she will take the confidence to be a woman in a world that I have not changed at all, except via my unflinching adoration of her.
Time will tell how I will be judged by them both. Whether I said the right thing in moments of stress, whether I gave of myself enough during the years of my hunt, whether I, when time allows again, give everything available—they will be able to tell that story better than I.
Just yesterday I stared at the videos of them taken in a grainy light outside the home we all believed in together: each of them sharing a rope swing at midday, each of them holding a sparkler in the darkest night, each of them running across the sunlit grass as it filled in with summer.
And the sounds they made, the sounds were just incredible.
EPILOGUE
There was water gushing down from the mountaintops by May, a heat fog across the sidewalks by June. With nothing more to hunt, I wandered through coffee shops and sometimes thought I saw my father in the glance back from strangers awaiting their morning double-shot Americanos. Every few days my father’s hands appeared to carry a plate past me in line, a small bagel balancing on it as precariously as my memory of him, or I’d brush across what appeared to be his thinning arm on my way out to the street-side tables where I watched a month go by like streaming traffic. I’d look up from my coffee and see my father’s figure in another bystander out on a corner awaiting the crosswalk light to change, a question mark hooked into his right fist with nothing to strike, nothing to subdue but regret.
My car had died, and I’d borrowed money to buy a truck that cost me as much in gasoline every week as our grocery bill had cost, scraping away at the inner edges of my bank account once our food stamps had run out again. Sometimes I’d sit in that truck outside my old home and remember things, but other times, when my kids would come out to the driveway of our rented bungalow, we’d shut ourselves inside the doors of that truck together and feel like a family again, even if we had to bullshit ourselves into forgetting the missing pieces.
Some things never come back, not the splinters of a whittled relationship, especially. If you are lucky enough to get a second chance, it often appears in the form of a mutated piece of driftwood no bigger than the arms that carry it from shore to bed again, all the extra things it used to be now planed away by its passage home.
Kristine Mihelich’s birth father, I’ll soon learn, will commit suicide, a troubling detail that I receive via text message from Detroit, sent to me across two thousand miles.
Only a few months after Kristine’s father passes, Ray Anger will die, too, having sustained a head injury due to a fall in his home. In the hospital I was born in, just outside of Detroit proper, Ray Anger languished for a month after his fall, I am told, then passed.
The daughter and the nephew of the cop named Flynn will begin a correspondence with me via email shortly after Anger’s death, and we’ll eventually have long phone calls wherein the silences between our conviviality and shared knowledge are not awkward, only ruminative with the distance of decades we can no longer get back but, with grace, can move forward from.
And Vincent Gunnels, I’ll learn soon after, will be back in prison after a drug-related probation violation.
The city of Detroit, however, still crippled by bankruptcy during the periods of my visiting, will turn a corner toward something cleaner and brighter on the horizon. Millions of dollars in investment capital, mostly in the technology sector, will turn many of the once-rotted-out downtown high-rises into hives of millennial-inspired productivity. And from the center of the city outward, moneyed hipsters, street-savvy artists, and blue-collar industrialists will carve out the smaller nooks, renovating cinder-block storage spaces into corner shops and restaurants, things bustling and hot again, Detroiters moving ahead in the ways they’d been taught to by their history, with brick and mortar and fists, and with hustle.
THE LAST WEEKEND in June, I walked into a church downtown and bent my knees, holding on to the wooden shoulder of a pew. I’d expected to cry but couldn’t. There was sunlight coming through the rear windows behind me, and after a while I could feel a heat on the back of my neck. I thought of my father sitting across a table from me in a diner before our food had come, the smell of Old Spice freshly splashed against the carriage of his jaw in reminder that I would always be younger than him, always subservient to what was greater and stronger than what I could control. It is why I haven’t told my father’s story in its entirety within these pages, why I have left out pieces that were not mine to tell, those pieces that remain ellipses when one asks, “Whatever did he do that was just so bad?”
I have been anointed, by the liquor of his memory and the sheer, overwhelming largesse of faith, in spite of my instinct to kill.
By midsummer I was working full-time as a fraud investigator for the medical insurance industry, conducting surveillance on worker’s compensation claimants, diagramming and photographing accident scenes, red-flagging exorbitant injury claims, and recommending cases for prosecution. It was a solid paycheck for the first time in many years, and I became good at it. Sometimes out on surveillance, when there was nothing but myself and the long hours encased in the blackout glass of my vehicle, is when I felt most at home. I was a figurine inside a snow globe of the slightly shaken quiet of whatever years remained for me. It’s how my brother must have felt entombed in a Humvee during his mission sets; how my sister may have uncomfortably felt in the wraparound blur of my uncle’s prurient gaze; how my mother all those years ago must have felt in the vacuum of our home, her eyelids fluttering to a crease against the thickening glass that separated our family from the roving world.
I worry sometimes about the pruning of my children from my father’s grasp. By dragging them to safety, I know that I have cheated them of the bits of joy he may have offered, in time, when patience allowed. I worry equally that, in tearing myself away from his will, I have torn through the fabric of our family’s story too violently and, in the course of our lives, it might be proven, irreparably. Neither the authority of my god, the wielding of morality, or even the heartbeat of a decent instinct guided me with grace; I raged, I raged and lashed against the passing of my nights, and in the faces of strangers I see my father’s impunity overwhelmed by the immeasurable hurt I imagine to have caused him during what are undoubtedly his final years of life. I have always wanted my father’s love, but today, now, I want his forgiveness, too.
TWO WEEKS AGO it snowed for days and by Christmas Eve our small city was perfectly painted for the holiday season: white on the lawns, with glowing twirls of color up the banisters, lining the eaves, and framing the upstairs windows of the tidiest homes.
I drove, my children in the backseat and, beside me and across the armrest, a woman I would come to love so dearly for the many years ahead, her hand reaching for my knee and resting there softly as the snowed-over subdivision streets unfolded in my headlamps. We gazed at the twinkling lights to either side of us, the Christmas trees in the big downstairs windows of the homes hung with candy and tinsel. For the first time in years I didn’t notice the inversion that must have also painted the world in front of me. There must have been a darkness somewhere, but I didn’t feel it. I only saw the lights shining through.
It had taken so long, but the peace my mother had wanted for us all those winters ago—with my stocking-capped forehead pressed to the rear window of her station wagon as we cruised those neighborhoods where happiness seemed to live, my index finger tracing through the fogged-over glass and wondering how many years, how many years it would be—had possibly come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some had faith enough for the both of us, and I thank you for that. To the family members of the victims, your sacrifice should never have been. I am wit
h you in spirit, always. David Klein, your years of encouragement were often all that pulled me from the floor at night. My dear friends, Ori Lev and John McMillian, I thank you as well, for the decades of kinship and phone calls that have been my lifeline. Dani, this could not have been accomplished without your enormous heart and loving years of brilliant company, which I will endlessly want more of. Adilyne Elizabeth and Jackson Sugar, who will forever be my northern stars, I steer toward you always. And to so many others along the way: Victoria, it too often goes without saying but we did a really good thing for a very long time; my incredibly reliable and dedicated first responders, Jon Keller and Tyler McMahon; Ben LeRoy, for saying yes when everything was looking like no; Kate, Chelsea, Molly, and Elisa for making this so much better; the Homeland writers, for their early and wonderful support; my longtime cheerleader, friend, and inspiration, Adam Acey; little Jenny Forgache, my first love, sanctuary, friend, and, in some ways, the center of this tale; Dylan Bruno, for instructing me on the circular nature of existence; Michael Hoffman, force of nature and companion in a time that mattered; Tom, whose rides home in his Cadillac offered much-needed respite; Jill, Michael, and Jodi for the road trips and sanctuary; my mother, unsung hero of the story then and now; David Yasuda, for the lunches and the caring; Sarah Masterson, for always texting at the very right time; Emily Skopov, Sandra Andersen, Al Greenberg, and Janet Holmes; the 208 Kickstarter backers, including Thomas Obrey, Amy Shuler, C.W.W., and Margaret and Bob Church; Shannon from back in the day; Michael, Elissa, and Max; and Barry, Cathy, Chris, Erika, and Tom, for your vulnerability, access, records, and embrace of this project. And for my father, who, regardless of the tale herein, deserves some respect for having been, off and on, present in the ways that he knew how to be. I am especially thankful, as well, to the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts for their financial support along the way. May we, together, rise above these difficult times.
The Kill Jar Page 22