All right, so I used to work at a prison for incarcerated women and basically one of them had…
It was in Alaska, so it was way up north.
One of them had a friend that I guess she didn’t like very much.
So she got out an ax and apparently he had come over to her house and I don’t know if they’d gotten into an argument and then she somehow hit him and knocked him out and she basically chopped him up into pieces and hid him in the backyard under a tarp and they found him in the spring.
It was pretty intense.
I was tutoring women for their GED.
Teaching them how to balance their checkbooks.
I never asked them what they had done, I would just let them talk.
There’s some -
You’re talking to someone who looks basically normal and they’re telling you something that’s pretty mind blowing.
It wasn’t my grandfather but my grandfather’s grandfather was a farmer in Ireland, and they didn’t own any of their land, right, like a potato farmer, and he I guess they, he and some of the other workers, wanted to have kind of an uprising, and they agreed to shoot the owner. And they plotted this big event, to take him out, because every Sunday the owner and his wife went to church, or something. But it just so happened that that Sunday the farmer’s sister in-law was in town and so, instead of him sitting on the left, his wife was sitting on the left. And they shot through the carriage from behind and shot the wife by mistake. I don’t think that my grandfather’s grandfather pulled the trigger but nobody knows and then they had to leave the country, these five guys who plotted to shoot the boss but ended up shooting the bosses wife.
They ended up in America.
It’s been told to me many times, usually around the campfire with a glass of whiskey. Like coffee cups full of whiskey.
I was probably ten when I first heard the story, I’m strangely proud of it, except my Mom. She’s not from that family it’s my father’s family. I don’t think she likes the story so much.
It’s a family member, he was in his early thirties and I wouldn’t say notorious, but a drug dealer, and he got arrested by the FBI. And sent to prison, and part of the deal, they let him out, part of the deal was that he was going to turn states evidence, on his cohorts, or when he got out he said, he basically didn’t give up the information that he was supposed to, so the FBI got pissed off, and so they were going to set him up. To do so, they went to a guy that was kind of a snitch type character and they were going to have that guy set my cousin up. To do so that guy was going to have to have information.
So the FBI went to the court and tried to get the judge to let confidential information get released. The Judge said no, and the FBI said, we’ll do it anyway. So they gave the snitch the information that only the FBI would know. So the snitch went to my cousin and said, I’ll make all your problems go away and get the FBI off your back, if you give me 350,000 dollars. So my cousin goes, how do you know if this is true? And he says well, I can tell this and this about you, and tells him information that only the FBI would know. So he goes, well you do work for the FBI. But it was based on information that was never supposed to be released.
So my cousin ended up going to the rendezvous, the meeting, with the money, the snitch was there, but the guys that were the drug lords, if you will, the overseers of the whole thing, were also there. And what the FBI told the snitch to the drug lords was that he never lost the drug package as part of a bust that he actually just sold it and took the money for himself, and that’d be the money that he was bringing to the meeting. So in the end he arrives with a briefcase full of money, everything put in place, the snitch end up going out in front and revin' up his new Harley that he got out of the deal with the FBI, it was like a twenty grand Harley, revin' it up makin' noise while the guys inside shot him. They rolled him in a carpet and threw him in a dumpster in the side of the building. So it comes down to, did the FBI pull the trigger? No. Did they release information that they shouldn’t have? Yes. So they put everything in place for the murder to happen, but they didn’t do the actual killing.
So it’s been going on here and there through a series of investigations, someone got reprimanded for the whole deal. Was the cousin a shady character, if you looked at him you wouldn’t think so, he didn’t do drugs himself, he looked like the all American guy, he looked like a Richard Greeko kind of thing, like a male model. Soft spoken, but it was a power thing, it was the wrong place wrong time, bad judgment.
His name was Lance Estes. He’s my cousin, and I miss him, made a lot of bad decisions, but in the end he was a good guy.
I have two murder stories in my family, but I don’t know either of them very well, I just know parts of it. Cause it’s something my family doesn’t talk about very much, its all on my dad’s side of the family and they’re Sicilian and small town and very like we don’t talk about things that might be embarrassing to the family because the neighbors might find out. And so there’s a lot of repression and buried intrigue and uh yeah, and things beneath the surface.
Umm so the most recent one that I know about, when I was ten maybe I found out that my great aunt had died and that my great uncle had died at the same time. But I didn’t know them very well. It was my grand father’s brother and his wife, and I’d met them. Like my cousin Tony who played the saxophone at everybody’s wedding, they were his family. I found out like, I think my dad told me, I was still pretty young, I was probably sixth grade maybe, and he didn’t want to talk about it very much. But he told me very briskly that this isn’t something we talk about but just so you know what happened, cause there was a lot of speculation, but my great uncle had shot my great aunt and then shot himself and he had recently had a heart attach and been on all this medication and something in the medication made him really paranoid. I don’t know if it was from the medication or if it was because he’d been through this really horrific ordeal but he became really paranoid and abusive and believed that my great aunt was cheating on him, and she moved out, and he found her and shot her and shot himself in the head. That’s all I know. Nobody talks about it.
Nobody’s talked about it since.
The other murder story I have in my family is much more removed, it’s the only famous person that I’m related to, apparently Sal Meneo, who was in Rebel Without a cause, he was the guy who was in love with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, umm he’s supposedly my sixth cousin maybe, there was a branch of my family, my grandma and grandpa, had moved, both moved up from New York city in the late 20’s early 30’s, and a branch of the family stayed in New York city, and that branch of the family was Sal Meneo’ descended from. And I found out probably in high school that I was related to somebody famous he wasn’t that famous any more and was at that time just a character actor, um but my grandmother always refers to him as ‘your cousin Sal who was in that movie Exodus?’ I don’t know if my grandmothers even seen Rebel Without a Cause, but he, my cousin Sal, he’s in that movie Exodus, and I didn’t find out that he was murdered until I was working in a bookstore and his biography came out, and his biography was like on the best seller list, and I picked it up off the table and was like ‘hey that’s my cousin Sal’, and took the biography home and I read it. And apparently my cousin Sal was Gay, and after his after his Hollywood career that went through until his mid thirties he became a stage actor and did a vaunt guard queer theater in New York, in the sixties maybe, and apparently one night as he was coming out of the theater he was stabbed to death. Nobody knows why they did it, they don’t know if it was a hate crime or a robbery or you know whatever, an ex lover anything. It wasn’t investigated at the time even though he was well know because he was gay. They hushed it all up so they never found out anything.
My family doesn’t talk about it, I’ve never asked my grandma if she knows the rest of the story, because it’s something we’d never talk about, so its basically the end of the story for them. The only thing they ever talk about is my cousin Sal who was in Exodus. My grandmother will watch exodus and point him out and say, that’s your cousin Sal that’s your cousin Sal.
It was back when grandma Mae was still alive. You kids were just one year old and Grandma Mae already had her Alzheimer’s and we were at the cottage and everybody was asleep and I got up because one of the girls wanted a bottle. I went out to the kitchen and got the bottle. Grandma Mae got up and she got a great big huge butchers knife and she chased me all over the house calling me a harlot and she was going to kill me and I was destroying her family. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. And finally Grandpa Joe and your Dad got a hold of her and pinned her down and I never slept again in that house with out looking over my shoulder thinking she was going to murder me. I don’t know why she got the impression, but she thought I was this person that they’d had as an exchange student when they were in high school named Sandy and who apparently she didn’t trust with her two sons at night. And she got me confused with her. She kept calling me Sandy, and I was spending the night with her son and we weren’t married and didn’t already have kids and all of this stuff. She thought I was somebody else. After she died – in the same room we slept in– she haunted me. She scared the socks off of me and she was already dead. She woke me up, I swear to god, she woke me up in this room. We were sleeping in the middle room with two beds and your Dad was sleeping over in, he was sleeping in the first bed, and I was sleeping by the window and something cold just covered my body and I woke up and there was Grandma Mae standing in the doorway just clear as day except I could see through her. She emanated this terrible feeling, just pure hatred, it was awful, she scared me to death and I woke your dad up and said, “your mother’s in here!” He laughed at me and went back to sleep.
There’s a story of this guy in our town who murdered his wife on Christmas Eve. She was missing and he was one the news and everybody was looking for her. And you know it was a really sad story because it was Christmas Eve. He made this plea to go look for her and everyone in the town was going out, I didn’t go, but everyone was going out in these teams and looking for her, in the fields and natural areas and everywhere where she might be. It was the third day and they were showing it on the news, it was Christmas and a sad story so it made big news. It turns out that in the end he killed her, he had killed her on Christmas Eve and taken her bags and stuffed her body in a bag and put it in a potato field on my friends farm. So the whole time she was dead in a field next to this house. They finally found her body and it was very apparent that the husband had killed the wife.
I just don’t understand that kind of stuff, where people go looking and they’re pretending that they don’t know, and they don’t think they are going to be caught. And then it’s just so sad and pathetic that all these people are looking for somebody and then the person who’s committed the crime, the murder, is leading this pack – like “Please help me find my wife I don’t know where she could be.” Well she’s in that field over there, you know? I don’t remember how he killed her. It was 20 years ago. I just remember it really distinctly because they found the body in my friend’s field.
The second story was about my friend Karen. She was in college and I was young I was in seventh or eighth grade. My Aunt had an arts camp in New Jersey and I went down to work there, to teach children art. And Karen, I think she was a music teacher and she was teaching at the camp for the summer and we got along really well, we had a great summer.
And then in the fall my aunt called and that she had this really terrible thing to tell me. I don’t remember exactly but, that Karen had been with her boyfriend – you know she was young, everything was going her way she was in college she’d been teaching and she and her boyfriend were in the car in front of her house, they’d been out on a date and he was dropping her off and this guy came up to the car in this suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, very quite and kind this was kind of an oddball event, and he was trying to rob them, to rob them in the car and he beat up Karen’s boyfriend and kidnapped her in front of her house in the car. There was this huge search for her, which lasted two days, and she had been, during the time she had been raped by this man. He had taken her to a field and raped her and beat her and shot her in the head and broke all her arms and legs and left her in the field to die, except she wasn’t dead. There was this huge search and everybody was looking for her and somebody found her, she’d crawled through the field with a bullet wound in the head and a bullet in her head and all of her arms and legs broken, she crawled through the field and made it to the road and they found her and took her to the hospital. She was in a coma and she died.
That was my first personal experience with murder, somebody I knew with a violent death. I did carry around the newspaper article for a long time. It was so sad and to me it represented every basic fear of the terror of violence, that you could be on this summer evening in the car with the windows down in front of your house, saying goodnight to your boyfriend and moments later be dragged of to your long and brutal death. And actually when you hear the story it makes you very aware of your surroundings, you grow up to be very alert. A similar thing happened, my sister and I were in our car with the engine off in front of my parents car late one night, and we were talking and finishing our conversation, we didn’t want to wake our parents up so we were in the car and I saw this man walking up the side walk. There was traffic but not a lot of traffic, but I saw this man out of the corner of my eye, and he was walking on the other side of the street, and he passed us and then I caught a brief flicker of him, he passed us and then he came back and he was running on the other side of the street and he had a crowbar and I started yelling to my sister to start the car, and she thought I was crazy and she didn’t and I said “start the car, we need to drive away” by the time we were driving away the man was at the window with the crowbar. I have no fuckin’ idea what he was going to do but it was not good. That’s the thing, that you hear stories, whether it’s in the news or a personal network you kind of learn from them I guess.
There was a party across town, this was in LA, and it was raining and I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go across town and then come back. So I went and rented a movie. I stayed at home with the dog and watched a movie. And so that kind of changed my night schedule, but it was around the time I would have been coming home if I had been out to the show and would have been out walking the dog, because I’d always take her out after I would come home. So my friend, he and his girlfriend, were walking home from a party around the corner, about three houses away from my house, you know I don’t know, I’m really bad at estimating, and I heard a gunshot. I’d heard them here before but I heard somebody screaming, I heard a woman screaming and I just knew, you just knew. I called the police. I couldn’t see around the corner but I knew something had happened, something really bad. There were a lot of police cars here immediately and he didn’t die on the curb. It was a mugging, two guys stopped him and they wanted his wallet, his girlfriend gave them her purse, but he didn’t want to give his wallet up. So he was resisting and the guy just shot him in the chest. And the bullet traveled interiorly, they took him away in an ambulance and he died in the hospital. Turned out he was a state senators son, and so it made it a news event, TV news was here walking around trying to get people on camera. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And I didn’t want anyone to know where I lived.
They caught the guy. A lot of the neighbors had come outside, it was the start of a very interesting time for this particular neighborhood where they had a series of very violent acts within a time of ten days, but that was the first and so people came out on the streets and I stayed in my house, but then a few nights later their was another violent happening and you begin to become very defensive about your neighborhood and people start to protect each other. So other people, my neighbors here had to talk to the district attorney, and they were ready and willing to testify, but the young man was convicted anyway without anyone in my building having to testify.
She was a friend, or a friend of a friend. A long time ago she told me the frame of the story. Later in a passing conversation she was saying something about making a film about her mom. And I was like why make a film about your mom and then I remembered that her mom had killed her dad when she was young. And it was like one of those things where you go ‘oh shit, how could I forget that’. Because I don’t know if she ever told me or if a mutual friend told me. She’s not secretive about it, but its not the kind of thing where she’s like “oh spaghetti’s my favorite pasta and oh yeah my mom killed my dad.”
I was raised to fear traffic. All traffic, and it was a paranoia shared throughout my entire family. I thought this fear had been instilled in us because of a cousin who had almost been run over. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I found out the source of the traffic paranoia and how my grandfather had died. They always told me he’d died in the hospital. Oh grandpa died in the hospital, no more no less. My mother told me one day that he’d actually been thrown in front of a train and run over. In Pennsylvania, the union bosses had done it. He had been anti union and been organizing on the part of the company so the union leaders killed him. Nobody spoke about how he’d died out of fear that there would be further retaliation.
It happened on February 2nd, 2000, I was a Junior in undergrad in North Carolina, and my cousin whose name was Sanga Thomas Willis was murdered in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the parking lot of a nightclub after the club was letting out and I found out at 3am in the morning, got a phone call, one of those ominous phone calls when you know the phone rings at that time of the night or morning that there’s some sort of bad news, either a baby is bein’ born or someone has died, that’s how I look at it.
My sister called me, I was the last person to know, first she talked to my roommate to tell her so my roommate would know what was going on, and then she told me that he had been murdered, that he had been shot. And that the next day she would be driving down, at the time she was in Durham and I was in Greensborough, and she would be driving to pick me up and we would drive up to Philly in the morning. So, we drove up to Philadelphia in the morning, and the whole family had like assembled overnight. There was hundreds of people, I come from a big family, and there where hundreds of people at my, my grandmothers house, and his mom, my aunt, is the actually youngest of three sisters, and you know she was devastated of course, distraught and she couldn’t talk. It’s hard actually remembering the initial stages because it’s so surreal when there’s something like that. They’re stories that you become desensitized to because you see it on TV or you hear about it so often and you never think it can happen to you until it does and the its like, how do you process this information, and somebody, somebody your used to seeing alive is no more. So um,
He was coming out of a night club, he was at home visiting, he lived in New York, he’d come home to visit, he went out with some friend he hadn’t seen in a really long time. They went out to the club. The club lets out, and it was an attempted robbery and so they attempted to rob him and his friends, and they told him to get down on the ground, so he was down on the ground. And his friends got away, like they ran away, and he was the only one left, and he didn’t have anything on him, so they shot him. They shot him. Two guys, in public, in public..
That’s the story.
Since them, the people who shot him have gone through the whole court process, they’ve been locked up they’re doin’ time. My aunt has since become a spokesperson for gun violence. My cousin who actually graduated from here two years ago has done a whole art piece about it. His cousin, we’re all cousins, but we grew up so close that we’re more like brothers and sisters. The piece, well one piece he did is Winter in America and it was at Bay Area Now exhibition, and he also has this other piece called ‘Bearing Witness’ where he’s sort of collecting all the faces of all the people who knew Sanga in his life so its this growing portrait of all the people who knew him. So it happened six years ago but its like, seems like, something that you deal with on a daily business. That’s my story of Murder.
Well, as you know, I lived in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was the ahh, leader, president, no not president, what do you call them, dictators? Anyway, he was the leader.
So he, what he did was, a friend, a friend of the families actually said something about him, you can’t just say something bad about him, there’s no such thing as Saturday Night Live there, you can’t just say something bad about your president. You make fun of your president, your dead.
But so, what happened was somebody ratted him out, was saying that he’d said something bad about the president, said something bad about Saddam. The next day, at night, his family, everybody, they were sleeping, in their house, and they couldn’t get out of their house, they got locked in. And then the bulldozers came and they bulldozed their house while they were in it, alive. The whole family was home, children, mother, father, all bulldozed, just killed, without a trace. And then, they came to our family and people who knew their family and said “if you ever say anything about this, your next.” So it’s forgotten, like disappeared, and you now, they were just forgotten, they had to be forgotten. I was living in Iraq at the time but I was a kid when this happened but I don’t remember it from then. I recently heard about it from my grandmother. I don’t know what we were talking about that brought it up, but it totally just came up, and it was a weird story, and I was like how come I’ve never heard of this, it was really strange.
My uncle is a uhhm, he works for the government in umm Ecuador and he’s sort of like a congressman. And a lot of the men down there have mistress and its sort of expected or accepted that that happened and the families are all just keeping it a secret the whole time, you know? Their children usually know up into their adult hood and the wives know but they don’t say anything because they need to kind of maintain this image.
So one of my uncles had a mistress and um his mistress was murdered and nobody knows why, and it’s kind of strange because it makes me think that its probably someone in the family did it, or arranged to do it but, but we don’t know, and it’s never been talked about.
This is a story from my friend Bill, he told it to me when we were camping in Bandoleer National Monument in April. Bill grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, his parents were both professors at Kalamazoo College, and his Mom and Dad grew up there around the area in Michigan, when they were first married they lived in a country house in a town outside of Kalamazoo, in a big old farmhouse, in an area where the farmhouses are all spread out by about a half mile. And Bill’s mom was alone at night, one night in the early evening, in the house by herself when Bill’s dad was off doing something. And a stranger came to the door, and knocked, and she answered. He was kind of a rough looking hitchhiker type, unshaven, old – well I don’t know how old he was. And he asked to come in and make a telephone call, and she felt kind of weird about it cause she was all alone, and she ended up saying no, and turning him away. Anyway, the next morning a ton of police were at the neighboring house and it turned out that the house next door, the, the, the woman there and daughter had been brutally raped and murdered and it appeared that it was that guy, and about a year later they found the guy and Bill’s Mom testified in the case against him and they locked him up, and it could have been her.
I lived in San Louise Obispo for seven years and there were three girls who went to Cal Poly who disappeared, and the first one was, they still don’t know what happened to her, she’s gone, they never found her body, but then the second and then the third one, this person was, I think his name was Rex Allan Crebs, he was let out of prison, he was a rapist and then he ended up killing these two girls and he was, and my husband was working with this woman named Cindy, and her husband and her were trying to live all ecologically friendly and somehow they found out that his house was being torn down, through a person and so they were given permission to go to the house where these girls had been killed and then buried on the property and salvage the wood burning stove and appliances from this property, because nobody would buy this house.
The house ended up being sold to the city, so then somehow she knew someone who worked for the city, so then her husband, Cindy’s husband had broken his leg, so he couldn’t move all the stuff out, so she asked my husband if he could help her move all this stuff out. So we started to move out all of the things, and they had two daughters, and the daughters started to say all of this crazy stuff when they were inside the house, they were six and seven and they started to say, they were witches and they were dead things, and Cindy said “this is so bizarre because they’ve never said anything like that before,” and I took an entire roll of film all around the property, and the whole role of film didn’t come out. It was blank.
On the door, it ended up coming out, because he’d been caught, and the trial was this big thing, and he’d said that he’d, that there was this garage underneath the house that he’d hog tied the first girl and then raped her repeatedly, and he didn’t kill her. She killed herself. She hung herself, she killed herself because she’d tried to escape. She was hogtied and so on the outside of the door there was literally, you could see blood like literally like somebody’s handprints, and none of it was touched or cleaned up or anything, it was really bizarre. It was like they’d just left the house, and you could see where the, the umm, investigating people had dug holes, where the bodies had been buried on the property, because you could see where the piles of dirt had been put back.
So they were tailing behind our car, and Cindy had told my husband at work the next day that a big branch got caught beneath our car, it was down this really remote dirt road in this kind of ravine area, in San Louis Obispo, and so there was, umm, a tree branch that got caught beneath the car, and the little girl says, it’s like a skeletons arm its like a its like a its trying to kill them its trying to kill them. Cindy, she didn’t realize that that was the actual house until the next day, because there were two houses that were actually on the property, and one had been condemned and leveled and then this one had some salvageable things in it. So the next day she was told that this was the house that those girls had been killed in. So she ended up not wanting any of the things she’d salvaged. She got it all and took it to the dump cause she had no idea that it was what it was.
This is a story from long, long ago, takes place in New Mexico, Albuquerque to be exact, and while I was in College there, I lived in a college dorm that was known because it was haunted, and it was kind of one of those rumors that you never thought was true, but I happened to live across the hall from the exact room that was said to be haunted, and spent the entire semester just kind of passing by , in the hall, the woman who lived there but never really engaging with her. Towards the end of the semester I met her in the bathroom and she was sobbing uncontrollably. Of course I asked her what had gone wrong, and then out came this story of how she had been trying to survive in this room while it had been haunted.
Apparently when she first moved in nothing was amiss and then every night she would wake up and the door to her room would be unlocked and would be open. So she assumed that somebody had a key and was just fucking around and wanted to scare her. And this happened two or three nights in a row and she said, “what the fuck?” so she started putting things behind the door, she played guitar, so she put the guitar handle beneath the door handle so there was no way that somebody from the outside could open the door. She went to sleep that night, woke up in the morning and the guitar had been moved across the room and the door was wide open.
Another night when she was sleeping she woke up in the middle of the night to this loud noise, and this shelf on the wall which held all her records looked like it had been pushed from behind and all the records had been flung out into the room in one big kind of like shove. She was like what the fuck, had their been an earthquake? And she got up and she stood on one of the records and she remembers hearing it break. Umm and she ran out of the room, went to the bathroom, and splashed water on her face. Came back into the room and kind of hurriedly put them back into a stack and went back to bed. When woke up in the morning all the records were back in the shelf and she looked through the whole stack trying to find the one that was broken and she couldn’t find it, although she swore it was broken.
Then the third thing happened. She woke up one night, and there was like a red light inside of her room, flashing around the room, and a shadow of a person who kind of spun around the room as quickly as they could. She felt like she couldn’t move, she could here us in the next room talking and laughing but she felt that she couldn’t move, she felt paralyzed.
So she started to get really scared, she asked friend and other people to sleep over. She once had her little sister sleep over and umm, they were getting ready to go to bed and her little sister who was about ten was sleeping on the floor, she asked her to turn off the light, and it was one of those dimmer switch lights. So she, the little sister, got up and turned off the light and jumped back into bed, and about two minutes later the light turned on and she kind of spun around to yell at her sister for turning the light back on, and her sister was lying in bed with her eyes wide open, hadn’t touched the light switch. And all of a sudden there was like a ringing from inside of the refrigerator in the room, like an alarm, and she was obviously very scared, but her little sister got out of bed and came over and touched her arm, and said “don’t worry it’s a good ghost”. Her sister apparently had seen, or felt like she had seen the ghost. So all this stuff had been going on all semester, and I think she just finally just got fed up with it and decided to start telling people about it.
So we decided to try the oiji board in her room. Which always seems like a good idea when you’re a freshmen in college. So we got a group of people together and late one evening gathered in her room and sat and tried to contact her, and so we did. I was actually on the ouigi board and I’ve done it before, and this was definitely, and I’m not a superstitious person, this was definitely very strange, it was definitely moving and I was taking my fingers off of the thing and it was still kind of moving, and the woman I was doing this with as well we were kind of “are you doing this are you doing this” and it was flying across the board, and you know we first asked if she was there and it went to the yes and then asked her name and she spelled her name, which was Christine, and we asked how old she was, and she was about our age, she was about nineteen or twenty. And we found out that she had died in that building, that she had committed suicide, and we asked her who her professors were and what were her favorite classes, and we tried to just get personal information about her. And we were on the board for about two hours. When it was over we were very tired, and we decided to break up into teams and the next day go an research some of the stuff that she had told us, so one of the group went to this guy who knew a lot about the dorm and had first told us that it was haunted. Another person went to one of the professors that she had mentioned was her favorite professor. We had decided that the next day we would go out and find out all of the stuff and the meet the following night, talk about it, and do the ouigi board again.
So after everybody went and talked to all the people the next night we came back, it turns out the professor, there were some really close things to what she had said but not exactly, for example there was a young girl who had committed suicide in that building, and it had happened in the early eighties she had shut herself inside one of the closets in one of the bedrooms and shot herself. She told us that one of the professors who always has different nicknames for students had called her rude girls, and so we went to the professor and the professor, sure enough, had said that he had used the nickname on a student of his, but as far as he knew she was still alive and he actually e-mailed her. But he did have a student around the same time who had committed suicide, but it was a boy, so there were a few things that just didn’t fit the story, but we got back on the board, contacted her again, and she spelled her name exactly the same way the same sort of feeling where it was flying across the board. And she basically told us, we started asking her more questions about why she was here, she said that she was kind of stuck there and she was kind of unhappy and sad, and she could move around the building but no further and yeah, that was about it really, it was a crazy experience it definitely made me think again about believing in ghosts.
She stayed in the room for the rest of the semester, she seemed to kind of get used to it. I wouldn’t have stayed in that room.
That’s the story.
This is a story from the second World War, about my mother in-law, and most of her family went away during the holocaust but this is a specific murder that I think she was a witness to. It was about her father, who was taken away with all her brothers. She was maybe I think, ten years old. And what happened is he was taken away, she was in the street, she heard some shots, and when she went back to the street she saw him on, how do you say, a cart, with lots of dead people, they were basically just piling them up on that cart, and he was on top of it and she just saw his face there, so basically she was just witness to just a few minutes after his death. And I think that’s it, and the only that she’d done after that was she went behind some buildings and cried for hours and then she pretended everything was ok, and then she went on with her life.
That was in Romania I think in I don’t know, Forty something? I didn’t hear about it for a long, long time, and she never talked about it. And I’m her daughter in-law and the only time my husband, which is her son, heard about it was four years ago, I was pregnant, and umm, umm, Stephen Spielberg is doing this Holocaust recordings of a lot of people and she was invited to do this and she was reluctant at first and the she decided to do it and when I came back to Israel she told me that she has a tape of her recording and that was the only way that she could actually let us know about it and we were sitting four people, me, my husband and my sister in-law and her husband, both of us were pregnant, and we just herd it, and I think most of the stories there were told for the first time to her kids, and they were in their mid-thirties, and we were just shocked, she’s an amazing woman, she’s really quite and you would never think that she went through anything, we know that she went through rough times but you don’t understand what she really saw. I think it’s a story she can’t really believe it’s a true thing, I think sometimes she doubts herself if it’s actually happened or if she really dreamt it because she was so young, but I know it’s true, I know it’s true. So. The end.
I grew up in a Kibbutz in Israel, one of the people in the Kibbutz they were a couple, Cilibrione and Mitcheva, Cilibrione had a history, he was a hero in the Israeli army, he was in the six days war. He was a tank commander and he did a lot of good things in the army but he kind of a, his head went messed up, he turned to be a pretty crazy man, that nobody knew about. And um after a few years, they had a few kids, and she left him. She left him with another man. One of these days he actually followed her – she was with her boyfriend driving, and he was following her in the intersection, he went in the intersection and he opened the window and he shot a fire gun into their car. Injured her boyfriend but they didn’t hit her. And um, and after realized what he’d done, I don’t know if he thought he’d killed them or not but he backed up, going back home, called someone in the Kibbutz telling them that he’s coming back and he’s going to shoot himself. So everybody was waiting for him at the gait of the settlement, and he went through the fields, he went to his house and burned the house, his house down and shot himself, in the fire and died.
I knew him pretty well, but was here at the time. My family told me about it over the telephone, it was kind of a crazy crazy story. It was a person that you kind of knew that he was capable, Israel is a kind of crazy place sometimes and where I grew up it was pretty safe place but some people felt like something might happen so they had guns in their shoes and knives just in case something might happen, so he always had a gun, he always carried a gun. The potential was always there. He was a big army man and was kind of traumatized by things he had been through in the war.
Let’s see, about four years ago I was coming home from the studio, and it was about midnight, and it was about a block away from my home, and two boys, one was seventeen and one was eighteen, jumped me with a knife actually. And like stabbed me in the kidney, got me in the back of the head and the back left shoulder. And uh, so it really, it’s really weird thing, that’s the best I can term it, but uh, its strange, it was one of those days, one of those fourteen hour days, you know I was working really hard, putting together a portfolio, some slides for a scholarship, so I was really tired. I was walking on the side walk and there were these two young kids, and one of the kids I made eye contact with and I kind of smiled at him, and he smiled back. He , next thing I know they pounced on me, and started beating me about the head and I was kind of, shi…, I was putting my hands up on my head, trying, my effort to avert blows, and the next thing I know I’m doing this kind of dance, I’m just going in circles, and it was just one guy that was hitting me, I’m not sure how that happened, not sure how it transpired, cause it happened really fast. And somehow, we glided back into this driveway which was gravel and I was swirling, making all of these crunching noises. Next thing I know I’m getting these pains in the back, like someone was kind of punching me in the back. Well it turned out the guy, as I was dancing in circles this one guy was hitting me, he was like, stabbing me. But I didn’t realize it, because I mean, it’s a bit of a redundance, but they were so stupid that they had actually, had like a bread knife so it was a knife that had kind of a blunt edge, so it was meant for carving, but I think they thought that just because it was a long knife they thought it was… cool? I don’t know, I mean this is just my deduction. I never actually talked to them about this. And um, so, uhh, yeah, after I realized, I looked up and I saw the kid, the other kid, standing off to the side with the knife in hand and I just started screaming at him “look I don’t have any money I don’t have any money”, and the other guy said “We don’t care”. And so um, eventually you know, it goes on too long for them, they don’t want to be there. It’s not doing enough damage and you don’t want to be, instinctively you don’t want to sit there and beat the hell out of someone on a street corner and even though it was midnight it was a pretty frequently visited corner. But right before, just as one of them, the kid that was starting to leave, I was you know on my knees, he came back and clocked me one more time.
There was no witnesses, nobody around, and I could of sworn I could have heard somebody, there was like a neighbor, there was a building facing us , like maybe five stories high. I could have sworn I’d just heard someone laugh, cause I’d just yelled at the top of my lungs, like, “Fuck!” cause it was just so frustrating, and I reached back and realized I was bleeding and my back was starting to seize because it was trying to overt, you know keep myself, I was trying to keep myself from bleeding, or my body was instinctively doing that. And uhhh, so it was a block away from my home and somehow, it was a really, like, this part of me came out, sort of this defiant person, persona, I’m starting to think, there’s no way that I’m going to be taken away in an ambulance. So I start to walk home, and I’m leaving a trail of blood. And I start to limp home, I had my bag on me, had my camera in it and maybe five bucks in it. So they didn’t, clearly they were not interested in taking it or taking the money. Except like a piece of me, so I walked home.
Elizabeth was in bed, we were living in a studio, at the time and I’d built this loft, that was so high. It was maybe two and a half feet of clearance at the top. So she was basically facing the ceiling, and she was like, she was like totally naked at the time, and I come in and I just like, I was just pleading for her, and I was like hey, I uh, I just got stabbed, and I’m just leaning on the door. And she just immediately jumps into action, and um, she’s like we’ve got to call an ambulance, and the defiant part of me was just, no we can walk. And I was also thinking, I can’t afford an ambulance, you know, I was putting myself through school. Well I had school health insurance but I had no idea to what extent. Later I realized that there are programs set up for victims advocates, the state helps you out. You know, to whatever degree they can. So Elizabeth and I walk back, we actually follow the trail of blood. And she’s like, holding it together the best that she can, she was really strong. And before we got in the car, it was her car, her father had given it too her, it’s like a 1988 Oldsmobile like sedan, uhh, we, I, I was like, I’m going to bleed all over the car, so I wanted to line the seat. I was clearly in shock. Because I was, I was really concerned about her and when I got to the hospital I was really concerned about the nurses and the doctors, and I was trying to concern myself with everyone else’s pain at the time, because if I thought about my own I - it was just awful.
So, ehh, it gets, at one point the police come in, and they can’t really come to see me, cause I’m all f’d up and laying on a gurney. So they approach Elizabeth, and there were no witnesses, and they walk up to her and they start asking her questions and the first thing they ask is if they were black. And that was only half true, only one person was black, and it was really fucked up, what happened was, this is uhh, after, they wrote down the report even though Elizabeth said, “I don’t know, you know I don’t know what they looked like” they wrote down they were black anyway. Which caused problems to some degree. Anyway, I managed to survive, obviously, I was in the hospital two and a half days, my family came up, all the way from DC, all my friends were really supportive. And it turns out the guys were my neighbors, yeah, yah, you know it’s the city, you have neighbors, and you don’t really talk to them, and sometimes you don’t really notice them. But I did.
And the police had told me that you know, if I see the culprits I don’t have to even finger them out, I can just describe what they looked like and tell them what , tell the police where the are and they would come pick them up. And that was what I did, because I was really nervous about it and about facing them, and just I was really nervous about it. Umm. And there are, selfishly also I was concerned about some other factors involving the things I needed to do that night. I was about to, I was actually about to, to go on a trip. And uhh I had to get a lot of things done, I was like, man I can’t afford to like spend time dealing with this. I mean I wasn’t think this directly but essentially I was like, why should I give any more time to these guys you know I need to take care of my life. If the police say I can do this, I’ll do it that way. But it turned out to be a real problem, because the police were not clear, and when I said it was them they thought I was unsure, so they only took their names. And umm, later after I followed up on it, and this was a couple weeks later, I was like, “what happened?” and like, “how come no one called me back or told me anything, and ahh, the police told me that, that they thought I was unsure about it, so they didn’t, they decided not to do anything but take the names, well I did tell them, so they sent out a subpoena, and they didn’t have to spend one minute in jail. And uhh, leading up to this, they weren’t arrested, they were just sent to summons.
So anyway, it took two years, one guy pled and the other guy played the system well enough because he was technically a juvenile at the time, and the statute of limitations, as a juvenile, had run out so he didn’t actually face anything, yeah, well, it was really disappointing to experience that because it was clear that there are different priorities for different people. I’m just this, I’m just a kid putting myself through school you know it’s not really a sexy story, so priority, me as a priority, and the community as a priority, it just didn’t jive, I mean in regards to weather or not these guys were viewed as threats, I mean, I’ve come to the conclusion that the police didn’t even believe me in the first place, and that’s why they didn’t push it. Same thing, they didn’t believe in my testimony, same thing with the lawyers, they just kind of putzed around with the idea and anyway. So I had to live in the same neighborhood with them even afterwards, it wasn’t smart to do anything to them, implicating them was enough, it was as much as I could do.
The guy who pled, he pled, he asked that I only give him, if he says he’s guilty that they only give him probation. And I was actually satisfied with that because they’ll be watching him, I wanted a mandate, or I asked that they mandated like therapy for him and community service and he ended up getting an obscene amount of community service, like 300 hours or something like that, but he was on probation for two and a half years, or no, it was a year and a half. But if he screwed up in any way, if he’d broken the law and been caught, umm, that means he would have gone to jail, he would have started his sentence right then and there for a year and a half.
So my Dad, he was adopted, he was born in Philadelphia, and raised by a woman in the neighborhood, Grandma Eva, who was known to take on a lot of kids that the families in the neighborhood couldn’t take care of. So she knew my Dad’s Mom. Took my Dad when he was a baby. She raised him in Philly. And so I never really knew the circumstances around his adoption, but apparently I found out from my mom that my dad’s father went to prison for murder, and when he was sent away to prison he sent his best friend to take care of his wife while he was away. And boy did he take care of her. He got her pregnant, and that was my dad. So there was a lot of controversy surrounding my dads birth, so she gave him up. He was born in the 1950s.
My mom, I’d always asked her questions about my Dad’s adoption. Actually, it might have been my dad himself, I can’t remember. But when I was much older, kind of the age I am now, he kind of revealed more about himself, and his natural family when he found out about them, he didn’t know much about them for a long time, until they contacted him when he was in his forties asking him for money. It was pretty hard, you know your family comes and they find you and or you find them, and that whole time, you think they have some kind of interest in you and they’re calling because they are having a hard time and they wanted to get some cash.
So my Grandma Eva who adopted my Dad was a very aggressive woman, my early childhood I remember her reprimanding me with the flat end of a butcher knife, the flat blade of the butcher knife on the ass. She was always really aggressive, and so were her sisters. My grandmother was really mean for example, she used to come up and call me fat and piggy, and would whisper in my ear your fat and ugly when I was younger like seven or eight, and all of her sisters were pretty rough like that. Except for her one sister, Mama Lizzy. There were four sisters total, And Mama Lizzy was actually the sweetheart and where Grandma Eva would whisper in my ear your ugly your fat Mama Lizzy would come up and say, “Your so beautiful”, and come up and buy me all these dresses and stuff like that.
They were born, Grandma Eva was born in 1907, so her sisters were in that part of the decade, and they were domestic workers in the 50’s and 40’s working for the wealthy families in Philadelphia. One of the coolest things was that they spoke Yiddish because they worked for these families for so long they learned how to speak it, so they would speak Yiddish to each other, the sisters would, when they were together in the market when they didn’t want anyone to know what they were saying.
One story was in ‘20s Mama Lizzy brought home this guy that the other sisters didn’t like so they chased him off with a shotgun. This might have been in rural areas of New Jersey at that point, and then apparently in their twenties, I’m not sure which one it was, probably grandma Eva, or one of her other sisters, they used to go to one of the little juke joints out in the rural area. They used to dress up nice, they used to lure men outside, beat them and steal there money. So it was like these flapper women, you know! They’d just dress up, seduce guys to come outside, and jack them for their wallets, it’s great.
My Dad’s Aunts used to tell him stories when he was growing up of all the mischief they used to get into, so they were a rowdy bunch of women growing up.
When I was growing up in rural North Carolina, it was a horrible atrocious place to grow up. At my school, they had this, I guess it was for black history month they had this woman come in and she was teaching about African Diaspora and stuff. She was one really one of those warm people. You know when you meet someone and they just look in you and they’re touching you and they’re just really sweet to you. So she was about twenty two and she just she, I don’t know she just did that to me, she just was talking to me in that way and I met her husband and as soon as like, her husband was there too, teaching with them, teaching with her, and there was something off, there just like, something, as soon as you meet someone and you feel like something’s wrong, and your just like “ueeghhhh’ not that he was doing anything wrong it was just a bad vibe, the point where I, I didn’t want to, I felt so uncomfortable I didn’t want to talk to him at all. So I didn’t talk to him. And, so I met this woman, Nani, and she would tell me, she was always telling me how beautiful I was, and she had young daughters too, and there seemed to be some urgency to her friendship, because I was maybe twelve, or eleven, and she’d always just tell me beautiful encouraging things that I needed to hear as a twelve year old living in North Carolina at the time. And that was the first person who actually told me I was beautiful who I believed. I had really low self esteem. So it was really sweet to me.
So we formed a friendship. She used to take me to the fabric store, and then my Mom would go with, stuff like that. She would travel around doing these talks and performances on African Diaspora and stuff like that. Then, she was going to Charlotte North Carolina, and she said “When I come back I have to tell you something” and it was really weird, and I was like, “ok”. You know, I’m twelve. And that was it. She went to Charlotte, and I never heard from her. Maybe a year later I was sitting in the living room talking to my Mom, and I was like “oh I wonder what happened to Nani” and you know my Mom never said anything, and then the next week my mom was like, I didn’t want to have to tell you this, actually I think I was younger at the time, I think I was eleven, she was like, “I didn’t want to tell you, she died” I was like “how did she die?” and she said, “remember her husband? He stabbed her to death, they were in the hotel room and he killed her in Charlotte when the kids were playing outside”. So that’s always kind of haunted me, this very special person in my youth, who played a pivotal role in my development and like, cause I had such horrible self-esteem, especially concerning where I grew up, and this was the first person who raised me up and I actually believed it, I didn’t go “you’re a liar”, I actually believed it. And then it always haunts me, what did she want to tell me. And she was always so sweet, and it confirmed that kind of icky feeling that I got from her husband when I first met him and shook his hand. That haunts me to this day.
My Dad, his father died when he was two, my Dad’s the youngest of six. And when my Dad was growing up, because his father had died, and left this big family they grew up kind of poor, on the poorer side. They were always struggling trying to make ends meet. And when my father was in Middle School he was in a history class and his history teacher was telling them about Korean history and was like, “Is anyone from, with the last name Kim” and my Dad’s like “My last name’s Kim”, and he was like, “Well what kind of Kim are you”. Because there’s different kinds, you know how there are so many Kim’s and so many Lee’s and so many Parks, there’s only like four or five different Korean last names, and that’s because there’s different lineages of last names. So even though there are billions and billions of Kim’s there not all from the same lineage. There’s different branches and you tell which branch your from, and that tells you, I’m An Dong Kim Chee. If I tell another Korean that that’s the kind of Kim I am, it informs them that I come from, what my heritage was, what my ancestors were, and my ancestors were actually queens. And so I come from a lineage of queens and so my Dad was like, to his history teacher, “yeah, I’m An Dong Kim Chee”, and his history teacher was like “Oh, is your family not doing so well now?” and my Dad was like, “well yeah, actually you know, my Dad died, we are struggling.” And he was like “Well, it’s because your ancestors, the history of your ancestors, you are bearing the burden from all the malicious things that they did.” And what happened was my Great Great Great Great Grandfather, he was, his daughter had married a king, and so his daughter was a queen, and he was the prime minister, or something like that, and he was like the kings right hand man. And he, and it was because when the king got married, and when he came into power he was really young, like too young to really make decisions so he would go to his father in-law and ask him for advice, and his father in law would tell him to kill all these people. So he basically perpetuated this massacre of people, I’m really bad about the dates. My Dad’s history teacher told him that that’s why his family was going through so much strife then, and he was like “Don’t worry, you guys are going to come out of it, your children won’t bear that much of a burden that you have, and that your father did and so forth”, which is kind of true. My dad, losing his father, when his father was only thirty, thirty-four, my Dad, he’s struggled, but he’s done really well with himself, considering. And, because of that my sisters and I are able to have a better life in our beginning because of that struggle. It’s kind of at this upswing now, and those burdens have started to unload and disintegrate.
It was really interesting to hear that the first time, and know that that was what my history was like, and my family’s history. My Dad just loves to talk about that, my family, and my family line. That’s really important in Korean culture, heritage, there’s a lot of pride and Koreans love to talk the back up other Koreans. Everyone’s patriotic and he just loves history period, and the fact that our history is so heavy and deep, he just loves to talk about it. So I’ve heard him talk about it at dinner lots of times. I like to brag that I’m a descendent of a queen. My dad’s side of the family, there are a lot of women in the family. Four out of six are females, and out of all of those, the males in the family, the two males each had three daughters. There’s actually the line of An Dong Kim Chee from my Dad’s part is, is, has ended, through my Uncle and my Dad. That branch through my grandfather has now stopped.
When I was in graduate school a fellow student shot someone.
She was from Mansfield, Ohio.
Her dad was this artist - but her mom was from this total mobster family, the real deal.
when she moved out to school her cousin, Jenny gave her a pistol, because that's what their family did, and she was followed one night in a parking lot and this guy was giving her trouble, so she pulled out her pistol and shot him.
I remember being completely impressed by that
she started dating my roommate in chicago and she was pissed when I told him.
Apparently this was a deep dark secret.
But I thought it was great, imagine you're dating someone, and they say "don't mess with me I've shot someone" |
