Sarah H. Foxwell, Age 11, Murdered

This was a Christmas headline nobody wanted to read.  The news story unfolded all too predictably, but despite that predictability–maybe because of it–the story caused a strong reaction in anyone who read it.

Except me.  I was characteristically unmoved, able to maintain my objectivity and intellectual distance; that is, until the news story revealed a single salient detail.  The girl’s toothbrush was found in the suspect’s car.

Of course, this fact probably was included as damning circumstantial evidence against the accused, but for me, this mundane detail somehow broke through my customary emotional distance.  It brought me into that house on that night.  It increased the immediacy of the victimization involved in the crime, the level of violence of the young girl’s abduction and murder.

If she had simply been overpowered and dragged from her bedroom, as I initially had believed, it would have been bad enough.  The detail of the toothbrush, however, leads to a different vision of the crime.  Rather than an act of savage, unreasoning violence, the kidnapping obviously unfolded at leisure, with ample forethought and scheming.  As part of this pattern, the perpetrator created the illusion of concern for the girl’s welfare.  He allowed her to retrieve her toothbrush.

This vision of the crime adds immeasurably to its egregiousness.  The perpetrator, known to the girl as her aunt’s former boyfriend, was able to gain her trust and compliance by his manner and whatever story he was able to concoct for the occasion.  Rather than behaving as a violent fugitive, the perpetrator acted with confidence.  He must have been sure of the girl’s cooperation, her willingness to comply with a scenario that would lead to her eventual ruin.

I am thinking of the moment his manner changed, the moment the girl’s apprehensions crystallized, when she began to see where this episode was going.  I am thinking of the derangement of a person who could carry out such an act on innocents, especially having done so in the past.  I am thinking of a legal system that made such efforts to allow the man to heal his damaged soul and overcome whatever compulsion drove him to acts such as these.  I am thinking of the girl’s aunt–her apprehensions, her hopes, her guilt and remorse.

Single, tender details have the power to eat right through people’s emotional, intellectual distance.  One pictures the exchange that must have taken place between the two of them, the exchange that led them to the bathroom, to turn on the light, to retrieve the toothbrush, perhaps even to roll it in a tissue.  The quiet passage of time.  The pantomime of concern and caring.  The shattered trust and overwhelming terror.

Sometimes the devil really is in the details.

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