Once in a while something will happen in life that after it has
occurred things will never be the same again, if a person is really lucky that
something will be a good thing and the things that happen subsequently are
amazingly good, but the other possibility is that something incredibly evil
will occur and that something terrible is the result. The following is a story
about one of the latter types of occurrences. The things that couldn’t ever be
undone and the chain of events that unfolded took a lifetime for the truth of
them to be discovered.
Two little girls are
huddled up by the fire in a small cabin on a beach by the ocean. They have a
pile of magazines on the floor in front of them and they have one spread out on
the floor in that are both intensely concentrating on.
“Look, here it
mentions that this murder happened in Oregon!”
“Let me see. Where?”
“Right here.”
“Neat.”
“In a small town in
southern Oregon a 16 year old girl was walking home from school one day but she
never made it home.”
The girls were 6th
graders and they were at the coast for their spring break along with their
mothers and sisters. It had been raining the whole time from the minute they
got there and so they had been forced to find inside entertainment. They were
delighted to discover a wonderfully horrible treasure trove of the potboiler style publication of “True
Detective.” Their mothers would never
have allowed the girls to read the magazines if they had realized what they
contained in the pages, stories of rape and murder in language that was not appropriate for young teenaged girls, but they hadn’t noticed these magazines
that had been in with the assorted comic books and other reading materials that
the coffee table rack was stocked with.
Headlines like
“Stabbing Death of the Blonde Babysitter” and “Case of the Traveling Killer”
were eye candy to the curious little minds that wanted to be scared to death!
This classic potboiler magazine was
complete with grisly crimes and gruesome descriptions of them and the two girls
managed to scare themselves silly, delight in reading the lurid details of the
terrible real life crimes.
They were delighted to discover a story in
there set in their own state and eagerly read the story. The story they were
reading was of 16 year old boy who had murdered a 16 year old retarded girl and
the crime took place in town that the girls had actually been to.
“This says the boy who killed the girl’s
name was Elmer. My dad has a brother named Elmer and he used to be in jail, but
I don’t know why. I just met him and he was really nice so it couldn’t be him.”
“Look Mary Lou, this says Elmer Bradley.
That’s his name.”
That was too exciting to not follow up on.
“Mom, what did Elmer got jail for?”
“Why?”
“We were reading a magazine and it had a
story that had a man with his name in it that went to jail. He also lived in
Oregon.”
“Let me see it?”
They were forced to show the stash of
magazines in order to get an answer.
“Where did you get these from?”
“They were here under the coffee table.”
Shelly’s mother read part of the story and
looked at the girl’s. “Yes that is Dave’s brother but this is an exaggerated
version of what happened. I don’t think you should be reading these magazines,
find something else to do.”
The young man walked down the path that had
formed along next to the river and as he walked along he kicked the little
rocks that had rolled onto the trail back towards the steep rock wall that
lined the other side opposite from the river.
All of a sudden he stopped and looked
around, he heard sounds coming from farther on up the trail, it was the sound
of someone walking on it and he quietly slipped behind a tree growing on the
bank of the river and he waited to see who was approaching.
The sounds of
someone’s feet walking on the dirt trail were very faint. As he peered through
the brush from where he was standing the young girl he had been waiting for
appeared on the trail beyond a bend in it. He quietly stayed hidden behind the
tree and waited for her to walk by. It was a fairly large tree with a cluster
of bushes growing at the base of it so that he was completely hidden as the
approached.
After she walked by where the young man
was hiding he picked up a large rock from by the river and slipped up behind
her. She immediately fell face forward on the trail and he immediately took off
running frantically away. He crossed the shallow river up ahead and one of his
shoes got caught in between some rocks in the river and when his foot slipped
out of the shoe he just kept on running as fast as he could.
Unbeknownst to the young man there was
someone else observing what had occurred from another hiding place behind
another tree. This fact would not be known to anyone for many years, no one
knew there had been an eye witness to this.
The young man ran home as fast as he
could and never stopped to look back. When he got home he realized he had lost
one of his shoes so he took the other one off and took it out to the trash pile
outside the old house that he lived in with his mother, father and four of his
five brothers and buried it under the trash that was waiting there to be
burned.
The news spread through the tiny little school as soon as
everyone arrived.
“Did you hear about
Betsy?”
“Hear what?
“They found her on
the trail by the river, and she was dead. Somebody killed her!”
“I bet Elmer did it.
Yesterday I hear Tom teasing him about getting her pregnant. Elmer started
crying. He is a retard just like she was. I am going to go tell the teacher.
The boy hadn’t gone to school the next because
he was scared. When the police came to the house they had the shoe that they
had found in the river by the girl’s body. When they found that it was the same
size as the boy wore they searched the property and found the shoe he had
hidden outside. The police figured that when he had been teased about her he
got scared and solved the problem the only way he knew how to, with a rock.
The trial was held in
the nearest large town and didn’t last very long as the 16 year old mentally
challenged plea bargained to a 10 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter
`Jail hadn’t been easy for the
boy and when he was released he was taken in by the church in the small town he
grew up in and worked for them until his mother got old and needed his help
around the house. He moved in with her along with a woman who he had met at the
church and he married her and had two children with her.
Lillian had divorced
Elmer’s father after he went to jail and started doing household chores for
other people, eventually she ended up being a caretaker for a fairly well to do
man. She and her sons had very little contact with the ornery drunk that she
had left. When she died she left everything she had to Elmer and that was
alright with the other brothers because they had all made a success of their
lives.
On his deathbed
Harlan confessed to a priest that he had been hiding behind a tree when his son
hit the girl over the head. He also confessed that she hadn’t died from that,
she died because he killed her because it was his baby she had been carrying.
He needed to get rid of the terrible secret he had been hiding for over thirty
years before he died he said.
There was
nothing Elmer could do to get back the ten years he spent in prison but at
least his name was cleared and his children had the peace of mind knowing their
father was not a murderer.
The little girls that
read about this story in the magazine were very pleased to find out that the 16
year old boy in the story they read had been innocent even if it took a very
long time to come out.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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