How Violence Close to Home Changes the Way We See Patterns of Crime |
I was 7 years old when Richard Speck made me aware the world could turn intimate spaces--rooms, beds, the ordinary geometry of safety--into killing floors. I was 7 when Charles Whitman showed me that a killer could touch you from a place you couldn't see or reach.
I saw the newspapers. Speck, a human stain with a Dickensian name. Whitman, the blond crew-cut Boy Scout. I had uncles who looked like Richard. I was surrounded by men who looked like Charles.
You couldn't tell by looking. Whatever was wrong with them was on the inside.
When I was 9 and Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, we were afraid of riots--there were riots in those days--but they never came close to our street. Two months later I woke before anyone else in the house and, for reasons I have never understood, turned on the big color television in the living room we hardly ever used. Robert F. Kennedy had been shot. I remembered his brother. I wondered if there was something inevitable about it.
I was 10 when Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, about 60 miles from where we lived in Rialto.
"They could get here in an hour," one of my basketball teammates said.
I was 11 when they arrested and charged Charles Manson and members of his "family" with the Tate-LaBianca murders. My father recognized some of the girls; he used to see them hitchhiking when he drove into the city to visit Litton Industries.
My father was in the Air Force. He worked on missile guidance systems. He visited Litton Industries for reasons that were obscure to me. He was given one of the first microwave ovens. It........