Hildegarde

Okay, before I start this, you have to understand something.  It’s nearly nine o’clock in the morning–in fact, when I look at the computer clock, it’s 8:59–and I just got up.

I never get up this late unless I’ve been out very late the night before.  That’s unusual, but it didn’t happen this time.  I just slept, nonstop, for whatever reason my body felt like doing it this morning. 

And I find this very disorienting.  Never mind the fact that I’m going to start on the caffeine in a couple of minutes, which means that I haven’t had any yet.

At any rate, I was going to start in today on one of those things that just sort of catches my attention–things I write about because I don’t know about them rather than things I write about because I do.

You’re not supposed to do that, but I know from experience that at least under some circumstances it works quite well.   Maybe I should think of it as my own private Socratic method.  Socrates believed that we could “bring out” what we knew but didn’t know–which was pretty much everything–if we only subjected ourselves to the right kind of questioning.

Of course, Socrates also seemed to believe that we are born with all the knowledge in the world and then forget it at birth, so there’s that.  It’s the kind of thing I usually have no patience for.

Anyway, what was on my mind to write about today was people who have either been convicted of famous crimes, or been tried for them and not convicted, who are now living among us like ordinary citizens.

I put that badly. 

I mean that there are people–think, for instance, of Mary Bell, or Carol Ann Fugate–who have, pretty certainly, done the crimes they were charged with, but who for some reason did not spend the rest of their lives in jail.  Some of them were acquitted.  Some of them went to jail for a time and were released.

Eventually, they became free people again, and they lived ordinary lives in ordinary places. 

Except, of course, that there is a sense in which they can never live ordinary lives in ordinary places.  There is always the chance that someone, somewhere, will find out who they are.

Mary Bell was married and the mother of children when the British press discovered where she lived and the assumed name she lived under–and proceeded to camp out on her doorstep for days. 

It must have been–as one of the writers I read on the subject said–an interesting mother-daughter talk that followed that one.

It seems to me, however, that outside of the most obvious and stupid of murders–the guy who gets drunk and bashes in the head of his girlfriend’s baby because it’s crying too much; the idiot who shoots up everybody in the convenience store because he doesn’t want to leave witnesses–there is a lot about any murder that can and will never be known except to the persons who were there.

And that means to the victim (or victims) and the perpetrators.

In some murders, what can be known is only known by the perpetrators, because the victims never see it coming.

I am, I realize, sort of blithering around with this. 

When I was younger, there was a play that was later made into a movie with Hayley Mills called The Chalk Garden.  In it, a mysterious woman is hired to be the governness to an out of control idiot of a girl, and it is later discovered that this governness is a notorious murderess, convicted in her teens of killing (I think) her stepsister, and now, having served her time, out and in the world again.

We don’t get much from the governness’s point of view in this thing, and we get virtually nothing at all about the crime.  The impression is left that there was some doubt, at the time, if the woman was really guilty.  Or at least guilty in a way that would make her criminally liable.

If I had written it, I would, of course, have concentrated much more on that.  But it is one of those things that I’m not sure I could write credibly from the inside of the character’s head. 

I do know what it feels like to be the only person to know the truth about some incident that everybody else in interested in–well, at least a small subset of everything else, like a family.

I am not sure if that experience would be similar to the ones I’m talking about.

What went on in Lizzie Borden’s head, all those years after the trial, when she was acquitted but virtually shunned by the entire population of the town she’d grown up in?

If she could have changed her name and moved away to live in anonymity–what would that have been like?  Would she always have worried about being discovered?  What would it have been like if she had been discovered.

We’ve got lots of reports about Lizzie before and after the murders, and lots of speculation about whether she killed them or not–but nobody knows what went on in that house but Lizzie, and that’s especially the case if she did kill them.

Maybe I’m just being idiotic here, and there is nothing much to know.  Maybe these people are just psychopaths, a group I find singularly boring.

But it does seem to me that it’s an interesting circumstance.  And in some cases, there are enough questions about the crime itself that I wish I could get into people’s heads and have them explain it to me.

But I really am blithering this morning, and maybe I should have waited for the caffeine.

I’m going to go do that, and listen to Bach.

And I’ve got a copy of the Sam Harris book on morality, courtesy of Marguerite, for which I thank her.

Maybe I’ll have something to report in the next day or two.