“… whose severed body was found Sunday on both sides of train tracks…” –Lawrence Budd, staff writer for the Dayton Daily News.
The above quote is something far more gruesome than anything I could ever write. No matter how graphic the detail or frightening the crime. I could never even come close to the horror of the line.
It’s true that I have written plenty of stomach churning sections in my numerous stories, but the fact of the matter is that I write fiction. And unfortunately the quote above was not a work of fiction, but a simple statement of facts. Facts from a case that made my own stomach do flips when I first heard about it. I wished that it was just another story made up by someone else. That it wasn’t true.
She was stabbed in the neck. Beaten in the head, postmortem no less, with a rock. Then they dragged her body two miles and left it own a rail road track.
There he lifeless body was ran over be not one but two trains until someone called in sighting the remains around the tracks.
A girl once so sweet, so shy, so beautiful was now nothing more than chunks of flesh lying on the cold ground around the steel tracks. Her life cut short in a truly brutal way.
And they planned it. For about two years they planned it. The two of them planned it. And not once did either one of them ever stop to think that what they were planning was crazy. Was terrible. Was evil.
So now her body, though collected from around the rails, is still in severed pieces. And to this day I know plenty of people who can’t not think about her whenever they hear a train.