Part 11 in multipartite post, The ‘Madwoman’ v. the Madness of the State.
Since Meridian Police Department seemed so disappointed that I had only brought in evidence supporting the current crime of human trafficking, and not handed to them on a paper plate like a wedge of cake they would get to hork down with sporks and a gulp of milk a 17-year-old cold case homicide, and that, by their circular or irrational logic, supports their decision to place me in handcuffs and haul away a crime victim like a criminal rather than perform their taxpayer-funded jobs to set aside their sexism or irrational fear of educated women or their unresolved difficulties in relation to their mothers or irrational fear of poverty and investigate the crimes I reported, and Sarah Sorensen, Volunteer Supervisor, Victim Support Services, Seattle Police Department, only replied to my volunteer application detailing my extensive personal and professional expert qualifications with a poorly written generic bulk bcc rejection email communicating to me only that she, like many of Idaho’s mental health professionals, neither reads nor writes at what I consider to be the college level, how about if I walk the world wide web audience back through the ingredients that went into baking that cake?
My undergraduate professors at the University of Utah and my graduate school faculty who were not themselves too dysfunctional to know how to think critically at the University of Idaho taught me to write not to fill in abbreviated form fields in a database, but as if writing for an audience educated but outside my field. That means you, Professor McConnell, are my audience.
Any other audience capable of reading may follow along.
If my writing feels too rapid to them, they might try reading. Real. Slow. A n d. S i m p l e – l i k e:
Coinciding with the State of Idaho violating my constitutional rights without bothering to investigate facts supporting my witness account, a sidebar on page 2 of the 23 May 2014 print edition of the Idaho Statesman likely also missed the attention of Dr. Sonnenberg. Likely Rick would not have grasped its significance, anyway, as his personal biography differs from my own life experiences. Further, he does not impress me as being an individual capable of empathizing with other human beings, thinking systemically, or outside his personal box of unresolved difficulties in relation to his mother, rage that he enacts on the patients under his control. Particularly if those patients happen to be female.
Is it too late to revise one of the statements I made to the detectives in Meridian?
Ms. Dalrymple’s head may not simply spin around, she may need a strait jacket after she hears this “grandiose delusion.” But perhaps we could get her some life drawing lessons, intensive psychotherapy, and healthy supervisors instead?
The prosecutor responsible for supervising the office that successfully plea bargained a sentence for the perpetrator allegedly solely responsible for the death of my first husband’s third wife may not have been entirely successful for also prosecuting O.J. Simpson, whose case is now on appeal.
Coincidentally.
At some 19,000 words and nearly 4,000 words above the limit permitted by the Nevada Supreme Court for an appellate brief, does that mean his lawyers are manic? Or merely educated and professionally thorough?
Prior to this experience having my constitutional rights revoked by the State of Idaho for attempting to seek freedom from human trafficking, I would have said the criminal justice system has come a long way toward better identifying and prosecuting crimes of child abuse, rape, and homicide just in my lifetime, when it used to be legal for husbands, still enraged by their unresolved boyhood conflicts with their abused and abusive mothers and no role models for masculinity beyond their abusive, alcoholic, and/or absent fathers, to rape their wives, and when my sadistic first husband finished beating his second wife before tying her up and stuffing a gag into her mouth to muffle any of her cries for help that their neighbors might overhear before shoving the unlubricated handle of a bullwhip up her anus for another of his protracted amateur photographer sessions for images for his later personal sexual stimulation as well as for public consumption in those mags that make Playboy and Hustler look like child’s play slithering up from East L.A. or out of Vegas warehouses in a culture where vast fortunes are won and lost multiple times over again night after night after night hedging their bets before the interwebs allowed much speedier and more widespread proliferation of precisely that dichotomy of fear and rage between passive feminine and aggressive masculine, there was not much Metro officers would do beyond giving the criminal’s victim a business card with their number to call when, not if, she again needed medical help as a result of one of their little matrimonial spats.
Another time, further along the spectrum of violence as their abusive relationship matured alongside our systems of legislation and criminal justice, Metro responded to a 911 call she placed shortly before he slammed the base of an old school rotary dial telephone against her face, in the midst of an assault that left enormous bruises all over her body, goose eggs along her cheekbone and skull, and unable to walk without limping when I saw her several days later. Metro was by then required to remove one partner – it did not matter yet which one – from their home overnight for a “cooling off” period. As far as I can remember the story, the criminal was neither arrested nor taken to jail as he would have been had he committed a similar assault against a victim outside their home, rather, her mother arrived to offer him overnight shelter in her home.
Just in case you thought you confused your pronouns in that last sentence, I repeat, her mother arrived to provide sanctuary for her daughter’s attacker.
No surprise to any readers with rudimentary knowledge of human psychology, still further along the spectrum of violence in an abusive relationship lacking role models or resources for resolving conflicts in healthy ways, my first husband’s second wife later attempted suicide to escape his abuses.
His third wife was killed. Maybe raped first. Maybe not.
When the crime of communications is he said/she said, as Umatilla County’s former District Attorney is only too happy to tell his prospective criminal clients, and she’s no longer around to say, whose story becomes history?
What about when it’s he said/he said, and the man serving a 20-year sentence for the murder of another man’s wife has a rap sheet as long as your arm, wanted in at least three other states for sundry other crimes, in some reports claims childhood associations with the FBI, in others the CIA, and his own terrorized wife four months later finally leads authorities to a body in the desert?
Maybe he’s a raving lunatic.
Or maybe authorities simply refused to listen to an adult still traumatized by the adverse family environment in his childhood home, and there are more crimes not yet investigated?
What happens when there’s still an extra body, unaccounted for, unnamed, a victim deprived of her voice, of her life, without speech, unspeakable?
And both husbands share a history of engaging in physically and sexually violent behavior that our Justice Department-funded Duluth model defines as criminal, the underbelly foundation upon which Vegas fortunes are erected, the wink-wink, nudge-nudge of “adult” entertainments, the sly kink, or S/M predilections of chronologically adult men grown from boyhoods traumatized by child abuse or neglect or unlove from parents playing out their own neuroses within the rigid gender roles defined by a dualistic culture that rewards males for their aggression and females for our passivity? Of course, in that underground culture of domestic affairs where the submissive partner does not experience pleasure from pain and the dominant partner cannot seem to experience pleasure without inflicting pain, that’s just S without the M, or sadism.
Like my Cousin Ted.
For younger readers curious to weigh the differences in heft between telecommunications then and the mobile now in your pocket, you may still be able to locate rotary dial landline machines in your neighborhood antiques shop.
Metro is the local nickname for Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, contrary to the LVPD acronym dreamt up by Hollywood television producers and writers.
When I talked to Metro police Detective Jeff Rosgen, he was still with Missing Persons, before his promotion to Homicide. If my online and free knowledge of trauma and recovery were not more deeply informed by my graduate research and studio teaching experiences, I would be surprised when I return today to my journal entries then, where I noted only passing reference to the traumatic events leading to that telephone conversation that seems etched into my brain, what Freud and later Derrida, building on earlier research, describe as the “Mystic Writing Pad” or magic slate of memory, where we repress trauma to survive it, yet the repressed memory returns again and again, the unconscious brain attempting to alert the conscious self to heal itself, or, in the vocabulary of the good doctor from Vienna, we only truly experience traumatic events nachträglich, in memory or hindsight long after the chronological experience.
Some of Rosgen’s questions and responses to my younger, less educated self impress me now as puzzle pieces not quite fitting the solution plea bargained between the Public Defenders’ office and then-Chief Deputy District Attorney Ed Kane, since jumped across the aisle en masse with some of his other colleagues, citing low morale and poor communication under former leadership that required an unreasonable quantity of cases brought to trial annually.
The same District Attorney responsible for successfully prosecuting O.J. Simpson, as I explained to Detectives Miller at Meridian Police Department, prior to their jeering derision of my “delusions” ascertained by Ms. Dalrymple’s obedient repetition of my brother-in-law’s abuse of his patriarchal authority.
“Boy, do I wish I could have talked to you three or four months ago,” was Rosgen’s initial gut response to my call, before asking, in a tone that sounded almost accusatory, or perhaps coming from a man more accustomed to interrogating by coercing or threatening hostile witnesses than gaining from former victims information critical to his investigation. Or even, you might say, the tone of a jealous husband suspicious of his wife’s activities, “Where are you?”
A peculiar question from an ace detective returning my call while I waited patiently without leaving the privacy of the office of the administrative manager of a global medical research funding mechanism that provides tax shelter for the Howard Hughes estate at a campus facility physically located not west but to his immediate northeast, where I was then working two or sometimes three jobs to put myself through college, and later, my second husband through law school. In between calls, Rosgen surely referred to his notes to refresh his memory of the case where one or two missing bodies had been found before reaching for his office phone and punching buttons to area 801.
And try to remember, while mobile phones were by then something less than the heft of small bricks, they were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today.
“I’ve been searching LexisNexis all over the State of California for you,” still in that tone of suspicious hostility, “Mark said you went to California,” without making the connection, quite, that meant that his numero uno suspect at the time that he acquired that information had deliberately lied, obstructing the police investigation.
Maybe because he knew what testimony I could give about his lengthy history of abusing his wives?
My main concern, now that the third wife’s body had been found, was for my safety and the identity of the second body or the safety of the second wife, who had become my friend after she had come across my writing describing the kind of man I wanted, giving her the courage to leave their abusive relationship.
“That’s funny,” Rosgen said, “She asked the same thing about you.”
Funny as in ha-ha, slapstick? Or funny as in strange, maybe your investigation is not quite ready to be tied up in a bright red bow before giving the case to the district attorney?
Still, you have to admire Rosgen’s stick-to-itiveness or willingness to reopen 20-year-old investigations, his spunk, you might say, in bluffing his way through questioning that prompted the double suicide of parents in an unrelated case. Or you might say something of a hothead, depending on your perspective. Saved the state the expense of prosecuting likely child abusers, but did his youthful interrogation tactics actually solve that missing persons case?
Maybe he was in the midst of his own messy divorce at the time of our conversation, and could better identify with the narrative told by a husband with a lengthy history of violent behavior toward his wives? Maybe, like me, he lacks role models for healthy communication between women and men, but has since matured? Prior to his departmental shift from Missing Persons to Homicide, perhaps he had not previously encountered personalities like my Cousin Ted, who also assisted authorities investigating his own crimes.
Award-winning journalism published in January 2000 in Las Vegas Life magazine amplifies a biased and poorly researched martyr narrative that describes the husband of the murder victim, still struggling in relation to his self-described “protective” (read: clingy, manipulative, controlling) mother, herself the victim of an abusive marital relationship that produced three children, and who, like my Cousin Ted, converted to Mormonism for a time, with her youngest son portrayed as both the victim of the police investigation, failing a lie detector test, but later he “developed a rapport” with Detective Rosgen, where the two shared hours of conversation, and assisted in his investigation.
Looks like that award-winning journalism might have been as effective as the award-winning “graphic design” spiraling out of Duluth, with that magazine in 2014 promising to return in 2011. That’s why, during my years of surviving while looking over my shoulder for criminal violence that escaped the attention of law and order, I printed a hard copy of the article before the publisher removed his archives:
“We had access to the husband of the victim,” the reporter crows victoriously while collecting his journalism award, “By getting his story, we had a story nobody else could touch.”
Oh, really?
Wanna shake hands?
Compare notes?
And the reporter neglects to report the publisher’s conflict of interest as (former? future? current?) employer of the husband of the victim? Doesn’t that break some sort of Hippocratic oath of journalism? Yet faithfully retells the narrative of a husband who describes his third wife as his “soul mate” and self-pitifully muses the loss of his object, “I mean, I’m supposed to start over and find someone as good as her?” The same wife whose evidence he destroyed body he ordered cremated against her parents’ wishes, also refusing to file wrongful death suit against the man who allegedly killed her alone, while he sounded more than willing to start all over again with me not three days after her cremated body finally received Catholic services, telling me I was the best thing to ever happen to him, begging to reunite with me, threatening even, replicating the homicidal behavior of the guilty husband, innumerable phone calls and hang ups left on my analogue answering machine, stalking me while I was out of town and finally returning to his eerie version of his sordid adventures many months after I had asked that he never contact me again, “Well, maybe one of these days I will just drive up there and surprise you.”
“There is no connection between the shop owner and Mark,” Rosgen abruptly dismissed my concerns in September 1997 without asking for a statement from me.
No connection? Other than they both admit to being the last two men to see one, if not both, victims still alive? While news reports from a variety of sources are, not surprisingly, sketchy and contradictory at best, it sounds to me like the two husbands were able to get their two stories to agree on at least two points before contacting authorities: missing wife walks into shop and purchases two books, specifically, before she goes missing.
Not a book, not some books, not one or two gadgets, not a book and a gadget, but two books, though the two husbands’ two stories diverge again on the subject of the two books, and not a single reporter queries how a 20-year-old young woman manages to destroy her credit so badly she needs a book on the subject of its repair, or was her bad credit thanks to marriage to her 30-something husband with a history of bad practice taking out small loans to repair his car, and using the cash to purchase new clothes instead, leaving him without transportation to and from work, or purchasing another vehicle he could ill-afford before skipping out on payments his impoverished first ex-wife finally stopped paying, once she realized the bank would make no effort to pursue his debt that the sleazy Vegas divorce lawyer she could not afford had insisted could not be separately assigned?
Did Arizona investigators compare rope burns on the body of the unidentified young woman against the rope Metro reportedly confiscated during their search of the newlyweds’ new house, or did that investigation occur prior to the election of a new sheriff, a decorated police officer and war veteran, committed to cleaning up corruption in his local government whose claims to fame include busting an “identify theft ring run from the County Recorder’s Office and arresting Court personnel for soliciting bribes to fix cases”-?
Would you look at that? Even the Pinal County Sheriff needs my help with his global communications, as the Twitter icon on his contact page does not actually link to his Twitter page, instead merely reloads the contact page, and the Sheriff’s office has yet to cotton to the marvels of email?
During plea bargain, does the Clark County Public Defender ask about DNA evidence to ascertain the strength of the District Attorney’s case for felony murder during sexual assault, or because his client wonders if the deceased might provide DNA of another assailant despite doing his very best using bleach to scrub DNA evidence from the crime scene?
Of course, as you probably know, Professor McConnell, my college alma mater has significantly progressed DNA research and forensic science since the late ‘nineties. A shame Arizona has such difficulty keeping track of its victim-objects, but maybe a persistent investigator could track down the missing body of evidence?
Like Rosgen, I make a timeline when conducting design research for infographics.
Another peculiar coincidence that weekend of long-overdue funeral services in Las Vegas followed by repeated telephone calls from my ex-husband to my answering machine in Salt Lake City was a phone call not routed through the motel’s front desk, according to the clerk, but rang directly to the room that I shared with my then-boyfriend, later husband, now ex-husband, now Justice Department lawyer with ex-FBI parents, the only people as far as we knew at that time who knew our direct room telephone number, during a spontaneous road trip to Denver, a call from a mysterious young woman who refused to identify herself, but whose conversation so terrified my then-boyfriend, a nationally ranked marksman and NRA-certified weapons safety training instructor, that he insisted we hurriedly repack our bags and leave without showering, going so far as to wipe the surfaces of the room clean of our fingerprints, bag up his spent condoms for later disposal, and pay for the room and the remainder of our abbreviated romantic getaway prior to the beginning crush of another semester in cash instead of more easily traceable credit.
Paranoid? Or childhood experiences different from my own?
Daniel may not remember that weekend the same way I do, but does that mean I am delusional? Or that our perspectives are merely different? He told me more than a few times that he felt like he was not fully alive, that he only existed in my journals, so emotionally removed from his own life was he. Isn’t that sad? Fathers who role model, and parents who so shame their sons of their emotional selves that in later life they scarcely permit themselves to feel.
At the time, he attributed the call to a manipulative former girlfriend of his own, though unresolved during the long, unhappy drive back to Salt Lake City from Denver was the puzzle of how she obtained the direct number to our room. Today I wonder though: two lovers coincidentally stalked by their exes in the same weekend-?
Like something out of a really bad Hollywood movie.
While the screen writers’ guild is on strike.
Or a very tightly written script, superbly directed, shot from many different perspectives, but missing the professional actors. And a tad too much violence for my personal taste. I wish this was pulp fiction. Or delusion. Unfortunately, this is my life.
Was the unidentified body also missing genital piercings? Did she also have a tattoo?
Was her hair also long and dark, like wife number three, number two, and like mine used to be?
By any chance, was her name Maria?
Do not ask me how I know what I know. Most of my readers will not be ready to hear it yet. Call it a hunch. Or logical deduction.
If science already knew everything there was to know, would we still fund scientific research?
Remember that my logic has been complimented by a biochemist one generation removed from the Nobel prize – and she may well win it yet – for my ability to think “like a scientist” one evening when she treated the entire laboratory to cocktails in celebration of Secretary’s Administrator’s Day. Surrounded in abashed acolytes none of whom were prepared to ask critical questions about some results newly published in an esteemed, peer-reviewed scientific journal, and I can still remember my questions, coincidentally not unrelated to the crimes I have survived.
The surprise visit didn’t come along until later that semester, if my memory serves where my journals again fail, the hatchback window of my bitchin’ Camaro smashed to smithereens while it was parked off the street not steps from my apartment door, an act of vandalism discovered by one of my neighbors one Friday near twilight. Perhaps related. Perhaps not.
Another puzzle piece not quite fitting in my mature retrospect was why ex-FBI parents with a known history of engaging in their ongoing professional access to law enforcement databases for personal use would not encourage their son’s then-girlfriend to witness her expert knowledge to federal authorities if Metro wasn’t interested in further investigating the second homicide, especially after she appeared to be a possible victim of interstate criminal activity? Maybe because their religious preferences encourage the disrespect of women? Or silence motivated by an abusive mother’s unhealthy attachment to her son? What I remember is spending a miserably surreal evening, afraid to be alone, while my then-boyfriend dumped me off at his parents’ house where we watched a long-winded documentary on Mother Teresa and he left to play auto mechanic with a high school friend until one or two in the morning and finally even his father was so embarrassed by his son’s unchivalrous behavior that he drove me to the friend’s house where I was lucky enough to sit on the concrete floor of an oily garage thinking I was so so so tired that maybe being a third homicide victim might be preferable?
Perhaps just one in a rash of crimes in that neighborhood between the Mormon temple and Salt Lake City’s bucolic hillside campus that semester, but consistent with my first husband’s modus operandi, where in Vegas once he tracked me down long after we separated, after marriage to his second wife, after I had moved to a new side of town, new apartment, new roommates, new-to-me car, leaving his smutty amateur photography on the front seat for me to find on my way to work one morning. In the era when Photoshop was still a novel tool for the porn industry, both before and after prints, obliterating psoriatic outbreaks on my skin, as a small boy still seeking approval from his mother-substitute-object-of-fear-and-fantasy, “Look, Mommy. Look what I can do. Aren’t I clever? I can make your body do whatever I want. Reward me for pissing on the fire hydrant in your neighborhood, Mommy.”
Sort of the digital version of Cousin Ted dressing his kidnap, rape, and homicide victims in his chosen costumes, applying makeup to their dead faces, oh so tenderly brushing their hair, a necrophiliac returning again and again and again to his crime scenes.
And contacted me still again while I was in grad school in Moscow, the traumatized, narcissistic subject self still not hearing that no means no, or an abuser fantasizing that he is forever one with his earlier victims.
And maybe still more recently, after I moved to Seattle, in this era of Googleopolis when it is much easier for stalkers to track their victims, and received a rash of calls from the 702 from a number that I did not recognize as belonging to anyone in my family.
Why was a beautiful, supermodel-thin, clearly vivacious young woman taking an obesity drug like Fen-Phen, removed from the market by the FDA the same year that she was murdered? Perhaps because her husband treated her as if she would be replaced with an ever younger model if her body did not meet his fantasy standards generated by an industry that capitalizes on that unhealthy dichotomy of fear and rage between passive feminine and aggressive masculine? Perhaps because our pharmaceutical industry also capitalizes on that same socialized, biologically unsound fear, desperate young women today risking a drug that causes cancer in rats, rather than recognizing obesity for what it is, the physical evidence of our lack of nurturing, the soul ever hungry for love received in inadequate doses in childhood, or abuse defined as love, perhaps nowhere more poignantly illustrated than the worst child abuse case known in the history of the State of Texas, the unspeakable horror endured by this brave survivor described by social workers and psychologists as not worse than the experience of a child unloved by her mother?
Maybe the two homicides were accidental. My metaphoric money’s on group sex S/M. Both women died. Maybe that event scared him into changing his behavior. Or maybe he got away with murder when only one of the men went to prison? Maybe there are other bodies, other unsolved homicides? Are there any other missing persons or unsolved deaths in the area with victims with long, dark hair? Tattoos? Bodies bound and gagged so they cannot speak, speechless, while they endure the unspeakable?
After 17 years, he must be about ready to explode with the urge to tell.
Detectives will gather better intelligence if they send in a middle-aged woman capable of empathetic listening rather than brutish white males whose interrogation tactics are limited to threats and intimidation or young white females too traumatized by their own experiences to listen to the perspective of others. Everybody on the planet longs to tell his or her trauma narrative to an empathetic listening mother-substitute-object. That is primal human desire. Hence the success of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging platforms. In real life, it is rarely the Mata Hari who acquires useful intelligence. That is mostly the pubescent male fantasy of Hollywood writers with very little, if any, education in the field of human psychology.
“Gravely disabled”-?
Or it looks to me like I may have provided personal witness information leading to a homicide unsolved for 17 years due to passive aggressive communications between and among law and order in at least five states and at least one if not two or three federal law enforcement agencies.
Professor McConnell, in your expert legal opinion, to which investigating body should I witness this testimony?
If they denied the murder of my first husband’s third wife or our relation to the Bundy Ranch or my second husband’s relation to Patty Hearst when speaking with law enforcement or mental health professionals, maybe the question to ask is not why am I on food stamps, but why would my Mormon family further obstruct a homicide investigation by lying about facts from my biography and our common genealogy? Though I have some hypotheses I could make based on my educated knowledge of human psychology, I am not quite ready to ask that question in open court. Readers might better understand if they remember that I descend from a family where my sisters think it “romantic” to reunite with a psychopath, and to whom Mormon data collection is more important than respecting the wishes of their own sibling, a family that shames their gay son for his statutory rape by a well-respected member of their small, rural, predominately Mormon community, rather than report that crime to the authorities, a family that describes its adopted black children as “savages” and its daughters as “whores,” a family with a long history of blaming the victims of domestic violence for the criminal behavior of the perpetrators.
“Mentally ill”-?
If that were true, then when the “Glen and Ken Show” arrived at Intermountain Hospital before dawn to again shackle me and haul me across the fat southern portion of Idaho, and, in response to my humble gratitude for the opportunity to inhale a few precious minutes of fresh air while watching the sun rise above the eastern horizon, a parole officer from Meridian Police Department cracked what he thought was a witticism about handcuffing and chaining all of his dates, that should have triggered me into hysterical rampage, maybe even frothing at the mouth or attempting to injure my captors. Instead, I inhaled, thought about three years of marital rape in handcuffs and chains by my first husband, thought about my sacrifices to my career to put my second husband through law school and support his transition to professional life, thought about the University of Idaho failing to uphold Title IX leaving me without a safe place to work and study for three years on their campus and with apparently permanent respiratory damage, thought about the State of Idaho violating my civil liberties as my reward for surpassing by at least fourfold the minimum expectations set by the College of Graduate Studies of its flagship institution, exhaled, and replied quietly, what I hoped would be to my captors in front barely audible from the backseat of a cramped Chevy Impala crackling staticky classic rock from its dashboard radio and that had logged over 189,000 miles before I was forced to share it with a chain-smoking trauma victim stamped with the state mental health label schizophrenic:
“That doesn’t seem very funny to me right now, but maybe it will later.”
“Delusional”-?
In science, creative thinking is essential to deriving answers not previously considered. That is why STEMs Need Blooms. Not to make it pretty, but to bring a fresh perspective to challenge group thinking or mob rule. At least in my classrooms, what we teach in the visual fields are the multiple possibilities of “right” answers, a range of “wrong” answers, and because we teach through a process of critique, visual students learn to listen to an array of nuance across various perspectives, or critical thinking, without feeling threatened when other egos disagree with their own previously held opinions, before providing visually literate solutions to communication problems.
United States of America, where’s my job professional salaried meaningful work? Yes, my critical thinking, design research, and visual communications skills apply to any field. Alternatively, I feel happy to review offers from firms or organizations located within the boundaries of any other country not openly or discretely slaughtering or imprisoning without cause, competent counsel, or fair trial its own or a neighboring nation’s citizens. Yes, I realize this severely limits my job-seeking efforts through our post-Great Recession era of waning capitalism.
journal6other 
add marginalia