8:29 p.m. - 12 August 2002
Safety
(I posted another entry from last week, too. Go hit What happened before and play ketchup).
I’m tired of talking about my job. I’m tired of thinking about my job, which has resulted in me dreaming about scheduling appointments and answering the phone (no, I’m not kidding. I woke up several times Friday night after dreaming about Outlook and appointments). I’m very tired of my job, which is a large part of the problem.
As I suspected before I ever came down here, I don’t have much to do. I need to come up with some creative ways of goofing off without looking like I’m goofing off. Ordinarily I’d read some fan fiction (X-Files and Harry Potter are my fandoms of choice), but I haven’t gotten around to saving any on disk at home to be brought in to work since all activity on the internet is now logged and I don’t think they’d appreciate me seeing schnoogle.com in my history logs.
And while technically I support everyone, really, I’m a secretary to a secretary. And yes, it’s just as odd as it sounds. Mostly I get the scut jobs that she doesn’t want to do, like scheduling meetings for half a dozen people. And calling the people that she doesn’t want to talk to. And other stuff that would take her as long to do as to tell me to do them.
On an unrelated note, I got to see my aunt and her family last week, which was really nice. Her husband’s family had all gone in together to rent a house on the Outer Banks, so I went out to see them and go have dinner. I didn’t realize it was going to take me quite as long as it did to get out there, so I ended up not getting home until a little bit after midnight. But the visit itself was worth it. I was able to hand deliver the sampler that I did for my grandparents’ anniversary last year, and if they react the way everyone else did, it will be worth it.
Lee and I went up to Virginia on Saturday, partly because we couldn’t think of anything else to do. So we had lunch at our favorite Indian restaurant, bought books, and went grocery shopping. Not a bad way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon, but not exactly a healthy one on our wallet. I picked up a copy of John Douglas’s Mind Hunter, and I’m not sure it was a good idea. I mean, I enjoyed it, but I spent some time Saturday night wide awake unable to sleep thinking that someone was going to break in at any moment. I was not helped by the fact that Lee will be out of town for part of this week.
Actually, there was one chapter in Mind Hunter that I read very closely, but I had no idea that this particular case was in the book when I bought it: the chapter about Shari Faye Smith.
Shari Smith was a high school student who stopped at the end of her driveway to pick up the mail and disappeared. Her car was found running with her purse on the front seat. Her family started getting calls from the man who had abducted her, saying that he would return Shari to them, but also taunting them and trying to get under the skin of Dawn, Shari’s sister. A few days after she disappeared, her “last will and testament” was received in the mail. A day or so after that, her family got a call that gave them directions to her body. She had been killed the day she was taken.
Two weeks later, Debra May Helmick, who was nine, was abducted from her front yard. Shari’s killer continued to call her family and let them know that he was the one who had taken the girl. He gave them directions to Debra’s body as well. The sheriff and the FBI worked together to try to trap the killer, using Dawn as bait, but were unsuccessful. Tracing the phone calls led the police to public phones that had been abandoned before anyone could get there to catch the killer.
Finally, by using technology to lift previous impressions from Shari’s will, the police were able to get a phone number. When they followed that number, they were led directly to the killer, Larry Gene Bell. He was arrested, convicted of both murders, and eventually executed in 1997.
So why did I read that chapter very carefully? Because these events took place in Columbia, SC, in 1985. We were living in Winnsboro at the time, which is a thirty-minute drive north of Columbia. The newspaper was full of stories about the crimes, and I read every bit of information I could. I was not quite nine at the time, and I was convinced that I was next. Even after Bell was caught, it was a long time before I really felt comfortable outside.
Nor was I alone. I remember several reports that said it was a couple of months before things went back to normal in Columbia. It was the first time that a story got me interested in the newspaper, and definitely the first time that a crime like that happened so close to home. I was suddenly aware that bad things happened everywhere, and not just in far away places on the news. I don’t think I’ve ever felt completely safe again.
