Anyone who has ever served the public behind a badge can
tell you about their ‘firsts’… first homicide scene, first bar fight, first
fatal accident… and remember it with clarity. One of my ‘firsts’ is The Hanging
Man.
It was turning into a beautiful spring Sunday morning in
1982; I’d worked the overnight shift at OPD and the eastern sky was turning
that deep purplish-blue that precedes the rising of the sun. It was always
about that time of the morning when I’d take my meal break at Denny’s, because
they were the only all-night joint open in the village back then.
I’d been inside for a bit, long enough to have my
scrambled-eggs-and-hashed-brown-potatoes set in front of me by the waitress
when I got the call.
“112, we have a suspicious circumstances complaint…” and the
dispatcher went on to give me the location. Then, at the end, she added
“…possible suicide.”
Possible suicide.
I threw a couple of bucks on the table, having had one bite
of my meal before jumping up and heading out the door. As I recall, the other
guy I was working with on that night had arrested a driver for DWI earlier in
the shift and was at the station working on his report. We’d usually wait till
the latter part of our shift to start working on paperwork, as the hours
between 0500 and the end of the shift at 0800 were the slowest.
The place I was sent to was in a semi-rural area; it was a
farm with acreage, but the area had been somewhat built up around it. Access to
the farm was back a long, dusty lane which ran between a construction company
and radio station.
I approached the house, which sat to the left of the drive
with a barn further down on the right, and pulled into the gravel drive leading
to the home’s garage. The overhead door was up and I was met by a woman who was
probably 70 years old or better, wearing a house coat over her night clothes.
The look on her face was one of concern…and pain.
After getting pertinent information from her, she explained
that her husband had gotten up sometime around 0430 that morning and had gone
to the barn to feed their livestock, which was his usual routine. Then he would
come back to the house, where she would have his breakfast waiting for him.
On this morning, however, he hadn’t come back. The woman
feared something had happened to him but she was too afraid to go look. “He’s
always back around five-thirty to eat his breakfast”, she’d said, “and I’m
afraid he’s done something terrible.”
It seemed the woman’s husband, who’d always been a fit and
healthy man, had recently developed some problems; problems deep enough that
he’d made an appointment to see a doctor which, she’d said, he would never have
done unless it was something serious. He was due to see his physician the next
day.
Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “He’s afraid he has
cancer.”
The woman pointed out the barn, which sat probably
seventy-five yards from the house, indicating that was where he’d gone. I
backed my cruiser into the gravel lane, traveled the short distance and then
parked in the grass in front of the two-story red barn, entering through the
open man-door on the lower level. I called out a few times, not wanting to
startle the man, and was met with only the sounds of chickens and cattle.
I made my way to the back of the barn where two large doors
stood open, facing the east…and the rising of the sun, which was just peeking
over the horizon.
I found the man in that place. He had hung himself, his
lifeless form hanging by a rope from a cross-beam, facing that rising, burning
orb, a step-ladder laying on its side beneath him.
It is one of the indelibly-etched scenes in my mind, one
which would be joined by countless others in the coming decades.
This man, who had worked hard all his life to provide for
his family, had chosen to end his life because he thought he had cancer.
