WHO IS ICHABOD?

In December of 1991 I lived through the absolutely weirdest experience of my life, so far at least, and if I hadn’t actually lived through it I might have trouble believing what occurred. At that time I lived a roommate who had been my boyfriend when I was 17 years old for about two years until I was 19, which was from the summer of 1974 to 1976 and after we quit going out together as boyfriend and girlfriend we continued to be best friends and still are friends to this day. Through the years we have been platonic roommates several times as well as becoming partners in buying each of our first house’s together as in 1992. We were living together as roommates in 1991 when the strangest experience I have ever had occur in my entire life unfolded. I have known Aaron since the year after he graduated from high school when he was working in his first full time job when I met him which was during the summer after my Junior year in High School.  Aaron was living with one of his lifelong good friends, he had known Scotty since he was in grade school and had always lived in the same neighborhood together, in an apartment and so they had a lot of buddies, ones that they had been friends with throughout school, who came by their apartment to visit and party with them.  I met all of these friends of theirs and began some lifelong friendships with many of them as well. There was a group of us that spent the most time together, Aaron, his good friend Scotty (who was the roommate), Robin who had been friends with the two of them since Junior High and had worked with Scott at the local cannery for a couple summers, Steve who had also gone to grade school through high school with Scott and Aaron, Scott F. who had also gone to school with Aaron, Scott W. and Steve who he had lived two houses away from when they were growing up. There were several other friends also, there was Steve’s brother John who was the guy who introduced me to Aaron in the first place (the eventual story about this person has the making of a horror film which I will go into later), there were a couple other buddies of Aaron and Scott’s that they went to school with also and a friend they made working at the local cannery named Derek. They all came over to the apartment that Aaron and Scott lived in, it was composed of a downstairs with a kitchen and living room and a small patio/yard outside of that ground floor and the upstairs was where the bedrooms and the bathroom was. This was the “happening place” for everyone to come to. Most of these guys who had known each since grade school or junior high were still living at home so Aaron and Scott had the “cool place” to party at because they were both working and were renting their own apartment. Most of us became friends for life and did lots of things together through the years no matter who we were dating or living with, we were the “three musketeers” plus a few more. I still have one of them for a best friend, who was my first real boyfriend when I was 16, and I remained in contact with almost all of the rest of these guys. One of these friends was both my friend and my ex-boyfriend who eventually became my roommate for many years, and after he joined the army he would come visit us on leave whenever he had it.  When he finally got out of the army and started to attend college, which was the main reason he joined the army as his family couldn’t afford to send him to it. My ex-boyfriend roommate and I allowed him to be our roommate when he got out of the army and came home. We were renting a three bedroom house so there was an extra bedroom. I knew he came from a very dysfunctional family and through the years he had told me a lot of the bad things that had happened in his family. Things that he needed to talk to someone about and I understood that having come from my own dysfunctional family. He had a really cool jet boat and the three of us roommates and my sister used to go to various lakes nearby in the summer and would barbeque shrimp and other delights on a smoky joe barbeque we would set up on a board on the bough of the boat in the middle of the water. We got a lot of funny looks until people got close enough to see what we were doing and then we got jealous looks. There were several nights through the years Steve told me some strange stories. I really had no reason to doubt that they were true but they also were so bizarre they seemed kind of unbelievable. When he was home on leave one time he told me a story about one time he let his temper get in control of him and it really scared him. He said he was in Oakland, Ca one time and was walking down the street and as he was walking a black guy, maybe it was an Hispanic guy as I really didn’t believe the story at the time I didn’t pay that much attention to the race of the person other than I know it wasn’t a white guy by the way he was talking, was also walking down the same sidewalk from the opposite direction. He said for some reason he decided that the black man should yield the sidewalk to him and when they approached each other the black man didn’t yield so he attacked him and beat him so bad that he wasn’t sure the man lived. He told me he felt bad about the incident and didn’t understand what had caused him to do it really. I kind of took the story with a grain of salt, I mean who would kill someone just because they wouldn’t yield the sidewalk? I figured that the story was somewhat exaggerated and maybe not really true, that he somehow thought he was impressing me with how he had bared his soul to me with this tale of this awful deed he had done. It didn’t seem to me that it could really be true but by the same token I never forgot hearing the story. We had a lot of fun with Steve, me and my Aaron and I really thought he was a good friend. After Steve had been our roommate for a while he eventually moved out and moved in with a friend of ours, a new friend, and they began a very tempestuous roommate relationship. Then on another visit with me one evening when Steve came by and Aaron wasn’t home Steve told me a story about when he was in the army and stationed in Germany. He told me he was waiting at a train station while he was on leave and a man came up while he was playing his guitar waiting for the train and grabbed his guitar away from him and broke one of the strings. He told me he really freaked himself out and just snapped. He said he went crazy and tossed the man onto the tracks just as a train was coming through and though he didn’t stay to find out what happened he thought he had killed the man. He had been drinking beer so I also thought this was a highly fictionalized story meant to impress me with how much he was baring his soul to me. I knew he really liked me but he also knew I had a boyfriend so he wasn’t going to risk getting his feelings hurt by asking me out. Once again I took this story with a grain of salt. During the time Bob and Steve lived together Steve’s younger brother Brad committed suicide. No one knew at the time why it had occurred but given that both of the parents in the house were life-long alcoholics it was a given that all of the kids had suffered because of that. But that wasn’t all of the story. The oldest son in the family, John, had raped and molested his only sister  and the youngest brother, the one who killed himself because of being sodomized by his oldest brother. Steve was apparently the only one in the family that John had not molested. Steve had given Bob a BB gun that had belonged to his younger brother a couple of years before, before they were roommates and before Steve’s brother killed himself.  Steve decided he really wanted the BB gun back after his brother committed suicide and Bob had given it away a long time before as he wasn’t given the impression that Steve ever wanted it. Steve flipped out and threatened Bob and even wrote a letter to Bob’s employer telling him that Bob was unstable and crazy. It ended in Steve being told to stay away from Bob by a court. A couple years after that the friend, Aaron that I was still roommates with and I were working at two different places but they were right across the street from each other. We still occasionally saw Steve as he had moved into his parents’ house after he and Bob had their falling out and that house was pretty close and so to get out of the house he would bring beer and pizza by and visit. He would do that with whoever was home, Aaron or me or Aaron and me. We still occasionally went boating or camping together. One afternoon two guys who looked like insurance agents came by the office I worked at and asked if they could have a word with me. Of course I said yes and they came in my office at the business I worked at and shut the door. One of them handed me a piece of paper and told to read it. As I started to read it I realized the letter was about Aaron and mentioned that he had a wolf dog and a whole bunch of guns that he had said he could take out all the kids in the school yard by his house with. I was flabbergasted, it was total BS, and Aaron had the guns for deer hunting and shooting beer cans and in no way would ever shoot a kid. The men then introduced themselves and told me they were detectives and wanted to know what I thought about the letter. I told them it was a total fabrication and there was no way Aaron was dangerous. They then asked if I had any idea who might have sent it to them, they said it had been signed with a one word name of which they told me was “Ichabod”.  I said I had no idea who would use that nickname of our friends and we had no feuds going on with anyone. They asked me how Aaron would react when they go and show him the letter. I told them he would have the same reaction as I did. They then said they were going to go see Aaron so as soon as they left I called Aaron to tell him what to expect since I figured there was no reason for him to be as blindsided by this like I was. Aaron called me about twenty minutes later and told me they were going to come by our house at lunch, which was in about an hour, so they could look at his guns to verify there was nothing going on. I knew that Aaron always left his pipe out on the table, as we had many fights about his doing so, and kept a small amount of marijuana in his top dresser drawer which we had fights about for the very reason it was now going to be a problem. So I took a chance that the police were not watching us and drove home and hid his pipe and pot so they wouldn’t be an issue when they came to look at his guns. I then went back to work and went home at lunch which I had at pretty much the same time as Aaron did. When I got to the house the detectives and Aaron were already there and looking at the guns Aaron brought out of the room to show them. They had already been happily greeted by our “vicious” wolf jumping all over them so they knew the vicious part was untrue though they did recognize that she was part wolf. While one of the detectives was looking at the guns and writing the serial numbers down the other asked if it would be alright if he looked in the bedrooms, he said he wouldn’t touch anything. Like it was a really a choice, so of course we said yes. That detective found a couple more guns that were under Aaron’s bed that he had been asked to keep by a friend that he had forgotten were there but they didn’t make a big deal about it. While talking to them and their telling us that these kinds of things usually are done by friends with a grudge I remembered that Bob had gone off the deep end recently and was taking Prozac though I did say I really couldn’t believe he would do something like this. They took his name and where he worked and left. I called Steve and told him what had happened and told him that the police might be contacting him to corroborate Bob being unstable. That evening, it was about two weeks before Christmas and my sister and I had planned to go shopping that evening, when I got home from work my sister showed up at the same time and when we walked in the house Aaron was already there and Steve was there also. The air was palpable with tension when we walked into it. Steve was cordial but there was definitely something wrong with the situation. I quickly got ready and Annette I left to go shopping. We did very little shopping and went to the Mexican bar at the shopping center we always went to after we were done shopping and I told her about the day’s events and she and I came to the conclusion based on the way Steve had been acting that he was the guilty one and not Bob. Aaron showed up at the bar not long after we got there, he knew what we did on our shopping trips and that we would end up at the bar. He felt the same way about Steve being the guilty party but we all didn’t have a clue why. The next morning Bob called me up at work and was really freaked out, he said two detectives came in and showed him a letter that at first he thought was another one about him like when Steve wigged out over the BB gun. That was when the detectives asked him if he thought Steve wrote the letter and he said yes. I didn’t tell him that I had at first suspected him I just said I had mentioned the incident between him and Steve. I then got the creepy feeling that Steve was the perpetrator and I called the lead detective. He told me that as far as they were concerned Steve had written the letter for reasons they didn’t care about and the case was closed for them, all they had wanted to know is whether or not Aaron was a real threat to the school kids. They did tell me that they didn’t think it would be wise to retaliate and that we should just cease being friends with Steve. I then called up Steve and told him that the police would not be contacting him. He sounded disappointed, and asked why not. I said “The police seem to think that you are the one who wrote the letter.” Steve then said “What do you think?” I said that as much as I can’t believe you would do this to Aaron and I it is the only explanation that makes sense. He said “You’re right, I did.” I said “Why, we have been your best and frequently your only friends for years?” He said “I didn’t mention your name.” I said “But I live in the same house, how did you think this would not affect me? The police could have broken in shooting if they had believed you.” He said “Aaron burned me with a cigarette when we were in grade school. He isn’t as smart as me so why does he deserve to have a good job?” I just said “You are so screwed up I don’t see that there is any point in saying anything more. I don’t want to ever see you again and I cannot believe you treated the two people who have been your best friends this way. Goodbye forever.” And that is the last time I ever talked to him. Later on I heard that his younger brother who had committed suicide did it because he had been molested by Steve’s older brother. That older brother died shortly after that. So I guess my opinion is that dysfunctional families take a toll on not only their own family but also on the other people who have the misfortune to come in contact with them. So after Steve did the things he did to Aaron and Bob I have to wonder if the stories he told me about the two guys he thought he might have killed were true. What do I do?  This man is now a successful business man, should he get away with the two murders that he told me he did? And how do I know that a man who was willing to commit two murders hasn’t committed any more since then? What are the odds that someone who has committed two murders of this kind would not be willing to commit more? Is seems to me that if a person is willing to murder for the stupid reasons that he did these first two for that it will be way more likely that he will not have a problem committing a murder for a reason more significant in his life than the first two were. If you would murder a person you don’t know for not stepping aside on the sidewalk, or breaking the strings on your guitar, what would you do if they threatened you personally or someone that you love? I have to wonder.

After this incident happened and Steve became persona non gratis in the city of Eugene, Oregon he moved to Corvallis, Oregon for a while and he was tracked down by one of my good friend's he had also threatened during his "wig out" period but they decided to do nothing in revenge as they realized it wasn't worth risking jail time to get even with someone who was so clearly unbalanced. The only thing that still bothers me is did Steve quit his violent behavior? How many unsolved violent crimes are there in the town of Burlington, Illinois that I have tracked him down in? He seems to have created himself a nice little life on the other side of the country, he has a business restoring old cars that he has several for sale at about $16,000 each, as well as a wife and an adopted daughter. I always wonder if he feels any guilt for almost getting two of what used to be his best friends almost killed because of his being a gilt edged nut case, probably not because he has never sent either Aaron or I an apology and we aren't that hard to find.
As the guy says in the TV series, What would you do?