TW: Rape, death
I watch a lot of murder dramas. Hannibal primarily. Criminal
Minds. Bones. The Vanishing Women on ID (although that's a documentary, technically). The ID Channel is a treasure trove
of shows that make it hard for me to sleep at night, with its spectacularly
terrible I Am Homicide with the
medium-like tagline of “I speak for the dead.”
Who does speak for the dead? Because here in the
middle of nowhere, it sure isn’t homicide. We don’t even have a homicide
department. When people die in strange circumstances, we’ve got to send the
body to Wayne County.
This blog post doesn’t try to speak for the dead. It
tries to speak for the living.
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Like everybody else in Monroe County, my mom and I
watched Danny Clay be arraigned. He refused bail, apologized to the news
cameras, and asserted that the death of Chelsea Bruck was accidental and caused
by—ahem—some 50 Shades of Gray stuff. Please remember, readers, that Bruck’s
clothes were found in a cement shack and that her body was moved from that
shack and dumped into a ditch. She had decomposed to the point that, according
to the papers, we’re not sure what killed her—asphyxiation, blunt force trauma
to the head, aliens.
“He looks so nice,”
mom marveled as we observed his profile.
“He’s balding,” I pointed out, because he was
balding in a most unattractive way. He was also sweating.
My mom tsked
at me, because that wasn’t what she meant and she had expected me to know it,
but I am cold-hearted and did not think he looked like a nice polite young man.
I thought he looked like Paris Hilton when she got out of jail. “I mean,” she
clarified, “he doesn’t look like a monster.”
 | |
| Just keep your head down, it'll all be over soon. |
I didn’t answer, but I was thinking of a quote I had
seen on tumblr: Monsters are real, and
they look like people.
It surprised my mother that a murderer looked like a
person. It surprised me that catching Danny Clay didn’t bring Chelsea Bruck
back to life.
In movies and television shows there is always a
sense of justice and peace when the police catch the bad guy. In Criminal Minds especially so
often the FBI shows up just in the nick of time to save the life of one of the
(usually female) characters about to be murdered by one of the (usually male)
killers. The world is safe again! Peace reigns on earth.
In real life, nobody rescued Sierah Joughin—a twenty
year old who was murdered this past week—at the last minute.
In real life, it took two years to find a man living ten minutes from where he
stashed Chelsea Bruck’s body. In real life, there is no closure, just the
nitty-gritty details of Dale Malone posing for a selfie with Bruck’s family,
the blue and gold posters that read RE-ELECT MALONE SHERIFF on every street
corner, bumbling reporters, and the familiar scenes of the Monroe courthouse.
I’m probably supposed to feel safe now. Danny Clay no
longer lives five minutes from my house.
Bruck’s body is no longer lying a hot second from where my grandmother
used to live. Sierah’s killer was caught days after her murder. The bad guys
are put away, right?
Except it isn’t over. I saw on Good Morning America
another murderer claiming that his victim died accidentally after rough sex,
claiming like Clay that she wanted it; it just got out of hand. Oops, sorry.
And this afternoon, on the front page of the Monroe Evening News, comes the
story that Judge Jack Vitale is allowing Danny Clay to undergo psychiatric testing and see if the 27-year-old is fit to stand trial.
This is their story, and they’re sticking to it. I was just giving her what she wanted. Aren’t
girls into Fifty Shades of Grey stuff
nowadays? It’s not my fault. I’m on medication.
We have created a system that allows perpetrators to
live free for years and, when caught, to escape punishment for their crimes. This
is rape culture. Men—white men—are never held punishable for their crimes, be it
the murder of a black boy, a white girl, whatever color or gender or creed—white
men are protected by the law.
I freely admit that I do not have all of the
evidence or any background to this case other than what I see on television and
what is printed in the papers. But I understand that Clay has confessed—sort of—and
that when the news asked Clay if he wanted to say anything he replied, “I’m
sorry” as he was led away to a second trial, this one for not paying child
support.
It’s the same story, over and over again. She wanted
it. It was an accident. I’m mentally ill. I’m sorry.
Accidents happen, my mother told me when I was
little and broke a plate, but killing a twenty-two year old girl in a cement
shack and then carting her body away does not seem like an accident to me.
The blame always seems to rest on the victims, and
that is the definition of rape culture.
Danny Clay is behind bars. But in the shadows
there’s someone else, more monsters who look like people, people who will claim
when they are caught that it was an accident—implying that the dead girl asked
for it, that if they were in their right mind it never would have happened.
The oldest rule in the book is Thou shalt not kill. Unfortunately it is a new law that states, Thou shalt not rape. This commandment
certainly isn’t in the Old Testament. It’s barely on our law books.
The patriarchy is alive and well in Monroe County.
And until we do something about it, our girls will continue to disappear, their
naked bodies lying in shallow ditches. And I can’t bear to hang any more yellow
or purple ribbons on telephone poles.
I never asked for this.
You can exhibit this as evidence if the time ever
comes when I’m not here to defend myself:
I never asked to die
and neither did Chelsea Bruck.
I'm calling fire.
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