The friendly ghosts

There’s a house in our neighborhood that has a few stand-up Halloween decorations in its front yard. Among them a smiling ghost; a cute orange-faced witch: horror icons purposefully denatured so as not to scare little children.

Which seems to defeat the purpose of Halloween. Don’t you want those little buggers properly traumatized? Seems like when I was a kid the grownups took an unwholesome delight in making us pay for our candy with genuine trepidation. There were houses (almost) too scary to approach.

But it’s probably better now. We are more careful with our children, pets and feelings. And we should make the world as safe as possible. I smile at the whimsical ghost; he seems friendly. (But morbid too, for his ghostliness implies his having once been a child whose purgatorial spirit is now unable for some reason to move on from this mortal plane. What happened to the poor kid?)

Maybe enough is scary in the world that we can do with a reassuring holiday. The point of horror movies is we get to experience extreme emotions without incurring real danger. The point of Halloween is to mock the monsters.

What they don’t tell you is that monsters are real.

I have sat with some, sometimes with inchthick glass between us, but more often at conference tables in book-lined rooms. We have smiled at each other, we have collaborated. Another thing they don’t tell you is that there is a transactional component to this business, that no one really talks to you unless they perceive it is to their advantage.

Maybe they think they can convince you of their essential righteousness, because, after all, monsters are able to justify themselves to themselves. Maybe they think that they can manipulate you with flattery and enlist you in their cause. Maybe they are desperate enough to take a flyer. Maybe they believe there is redemption in confession. My point is they want things, just as you and I do.

There once was a firefighter accused of strangling his wife’s sister to death with her bra after sex, allegedly because she declined to lend him more money. Someone put her body in a contractor trash bag and dropped it in a dumpster. I have no doubt he was guilty.

I interviewed him in his lawyer’s office. This was a very unorthodox situation; there are good reasons most lawyers forbid their clients from saying anything to the press. I was suspicious, assuming they intended to use the newspaper to present a picture of the firefighter as a nice guy. Only after being assured that there was nothing off the table did I agree to the interview.

We sat for a couple of hours and he tearfully unpacked his shame of the affair and his impecunity. He admitted everything except the crime itself. He had no idea how his sister-in-law ended up in the dumpster, though he allowed that she ran with a bad crowd.

I was very young then but was not moved. I wrote a long story that included what I could from my detective sources and quotes from people who knew the firefighter. It explained his financial desperation, and offered evidence of how the victim had helped the firefighter and his family out of money problems in the past. She had bought their kids a swingset; she had paid to have his truck fixed. It was not a sympathetic article, except to the extent that it presented an alleged murderer as a weak and troubled man who was having trouble holding everything together.

One thing did worry me about the story. Before we started the interview, a photographer had shot a series of photos of the firefighter. When these were published in the newspaper, I was struck by what a beautiful man he was. He looked like a sensitive movie star.

He was acquitted, simply because the case against him was circumstantial and his attorney was very good at his job. Having admitted an ongoing sexual relationship between the firefighter and the victim, the physical evidence was less convincing. By the rules we have established, it was probably the right call.

Years later I saw the firefighter again, working behind the counter of a gas station convenience store. He looked right through me, no sign of recognition whatsoever. I handed over a $20 bill for my gas and he made change and smiled warmly when he handed it back to me.

Sometimes I think about him out in the world, and wonder what became of him. What I hope is that he’s managed, that he never hurt anyone else.

If that seems mushy, consider that about half the murders in this country go unsolved. (The latest figures have police “clearing” 52 percent of homicides, though in 2020, the rate dropped below 50 percent, a historic low. While I’ll save the details for another column, during the ’60s, when murder rates were higher than they are now, more than 90 percent of murders were cleared. Most industrialized nations solve murders at a 70 percent clip; Germany clears 90 percent of its homicides.) Which means there a lot of murderers walking around out there, some of whom have handled their problem, will never pose another problem for society.

And then there are the serial killers that the FBI estimates are responsible for about 1 percent of all homicides. We don’t hear much about them anymore, maybe because there aren’t as many of them. While it’s not that difficult to get away with a single murder, serial killers get caught because they follow patterns. Each additional crime scene yields more forensic evidence, more data points.

As my criminal law professor Cheney Joseph said, getting away with murder is easy if your intention is to simply get away with murder. Just be random. Pick a victim you don’t know in a place where you don’t live. Don’t ever talk about it.

You can live as a monster. Thousands do. Mostly because they present as harmless, as smiling friendly ghosts. And most of the time, that is exactly what they are.