Evil Revealed

I wrote a few months ago about one of my earliest memories being the assassination of JFK. At the time I was too young to grasp the magnitude of the event or understand that it was a national tragedy. I didn't understand why my teacher cried when the President's assassination was announced over the public address system at Raemelton school.

I was just short of my seventh birthday.

Three years later I heard on the news about eight student nurses being murdered in one night by a guy named Richard Speck; he'd held them hostage in a dorm room after breaking in and then, one at a time, taken them into a hallway and stabbed them to death. Speck unknowingly left a witness, though; Filipino exchange student Corazon Amurao had hidden under a bed while another of the student nurses was being led out of the room. Amurao stayed there for seven hours and eventually testified during Speck's trial. He died in 1991 in prison, his death sentence having been commuted to 1200 years behind bars.

Even though I was only ten years old, that saga began my introduction to just how evil the world is.

Throughout my years until today, as I type this entry, evil has seized headlines at an ever-increasing frequency. Can't watch a newscast or pick up a newspaper without being assailed by man's brutality to man. Charles Manson's 'family' was responsible for the Tate/LaBianca murders in southern California. John Wayne Gacy raped, tortured and murdered thirty-three boys. Ted Bundy, whose actual name was Ted Cowell, confessed to raping and killing 30 women. Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer raped, murdered, dismembered and ate sixteen young men and boys.

And then Islamic fundamentalists started flying commercial airliners into buildings.

Evil, though, doesn't really resonate until it touches you in some way, close to home, or until you see it for yourself. As a law enforcement officer you'll see it all too often.

A woman stabbed 31 times by her boyfriend early on Thanksgiving morning. Another shot in the back of the head as she exited her home by a jilted boyfriend. The brother of an acquaintance of mine shot and killed as he walked along West Fourth Street. A man found beaten to death with a bumper jack, in a field across from a bar where he'd been drinking the night before. A father shot and killed by his son as he sat in his living room over the killing of the son's dog. A son stabbing his mother repeatedly because he didn't like the man she was dating.

That's a small sampling of the evil I've witnessed. Even my wife's cousin, a local business owner, was found beaten to death several decades ago; a guy I grew up with went to prison for killing a man during a drug deal.

Evil has been around since Cain killed his brother Abel in the book of Genesis...and it has gotten worse through the ages.

All I can say is, God help us.

Seriously.