A very frustrating week; and by golly it had all the signs of being a fun one.
It started out with detective Schuk getting some info on an old missing persons case. The info was that some nut strangled the missing woman (a prostitute and meth user), then buried her in his back yard. The guy happened to be in the city jail on unrelated traffic charges, so he was convenient to interview. He would not admit to killing the hooker, but he did tell us that he sometimes did “Bad things.”
The reason he does bad things sometimes is because he has 4 women’s voices in his head telling him what to do. The voices are Alice, Carol, Gwen and the real troublemaker, Sally. Sally once told him to break out a window and crawl into it, it happened to be the front window of a local jailer’s home. I asked him if Sally ever regrets doing bad things, he said, “Sally didn’t get her face beat in by breaking into the house, I did.”
He told me the reason he has this entire mental problem is because back in 1976 he smoked some marijuana. I guess the U.S. Government was right when it produced the film “Refer Madness.” I think he was good for the hooker’s death.
A look at his yard showed a “mound and depression” consistent with a human burial. While Detective Schuk got the warrant to dig up the guy’s yard, I got another call of a “bad smell” and some clothing items found near one of the city’s greenway paths.
I went to check that out and found the area where the clothing items were found. There was no mass of blow flys, and no huge population of magpies around, but there was a bad smell. I followed the bad smell to where it seemed to be coming from, a pile of wood behind some thick cottonwood trees. I could see there was some more clothing under and in-between some of the log piles, so I reached down to grab the clothing. Now I had not brought any latex gloves with me; but I thought, if it was a dead body, I’ll just have the crime scene response people bring some. So I grabbed the shirt with my bare hands… big mistake. There was no dead body. There was just some assorted clothing that bums were receiving from a local rescue mission nearby to use as toilet paper. The log pile made a convenient commode. The smell was not that of a dead body but rather… well… poop.
I was not very upbeat as I returned to the station. We got the warrant and several of us set off for the possible grave. We dug for 5 hours and came up with nothing except some exceptionally large earthworms. Detective Schuk did get attacked by a momma cat while we searched the house; everyone in the entire department heard the story of the ferocious animal that left two puncture marks on his left hand, I think he’s bucking for some medical leave time.
Me, I just can’t seem to find any bodies.
