Deaths in the family

Dec. 13, 2007

Dear Leslie,

Growing up in Cape Girardeau in the 1950s and 1960s, fear was not personal. In the spring we watched the darkening skies for whirling dervishes and embraced the generalized fear that the presumably monstrous Soviets would rain ICBMs on our heads if we weren't vigilant. At the movies we laughed and screamed at Dracula and Rodan.

On summer evenings in my neighborhood the children still roamed the streets carefree as the sun faded. We rode bikes off homemade ramps and jumped off hillsides we thought of as cliffs. Nobody was scared of mosquito bites.

OK, a neighborhood child who had the talent to become a real baseball pitcher was afraid of tossing a Whiffleball for fear of throwing out his arm, and we looked out for grownups when one of us jumped the fence to grab grapes or plums from the house with the orchard. But the idea that someone might mean us harm never occurred to us.

In the early 1960s some fellows with robbery on their minds came through town and killed two police officers who tried to stop them. The townspeople were very upset. Newspaper headlines were outraged. That didn't happen in Cape Girardeau. Those who could celebrated the sesquicentennial by growing beards. We entertained ourselves with baseball games and stock car races at Arena Park and the annual Mickey Rooneyesque show called the Jaycee Follies.

My family moved out of that neighborhood as I began high school. The new neighborhood was just as benign as the last.

The old neighborhood took on a different cast in 1977 when Brenda Parsh and her mother Mary were murdered in their home. The house was only three blocks from the house I grew up in. Brenda was in my high school class, a beautiful and smart girl who had a special way about her and was kind to nerds.

By our 27th year, other high school classmates had died before her in car wrecks and the Vietnam War. But her death was the first time the shadow of evil became personal.

We can't imagine how personal it was to Brenda's and Mary's family and to the families of the three other Cape Girardeau women mysteriously murdered in Cape Girardeau within the next five years.

One victim was the mother of yet another classmate, Gary Call. Margie Call lived alone in a house just two blocks or so from my family's house in the old neighborhood.

Some began to worry that the neighborhood itself was the nexus of evil.

Gary died last year without getting to hear this week's news, that a heinously disturbed man who did not live in the neighborhood or even in Cape Girardeau had confessed to the murders.

I do not believe in monsters, but Dracula and Rodan do represent very real fears of our spirits being drained by outside agencies and of being responsible for our own destruction.

Evil is not a force but rather a vacuum, the absence of love. That absence exists not in God but in the rest of us unperfected human beings to some degree. The murderer is as loved by God as you or I but tragically far, far from believing so.

Three decades after their deaths the five victims are being mourned again. Brenda's classmates are checking to make sure other classmates know the riddle of her death has been solved. Some people in town might even have known all five women. These were all deaths in the family.

All holy books contain consolation comparable to this in the Bhagavad Gita: "Even as a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on others that are new, so the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new. Weapons cut It not; fire burns It not; water wets It not; the wind does not wither It. This Self cannot be cut nor burnt nor wetted nor withered. Eternal, all-pervading, unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same for ever."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.