Van der Sloot Nuptials

Normal, attractive, respectable women seem attracted to these predators. Is it some kind of weird perversion of the evolutionary female wiring that seeks to find a dominant male that will protect her home and DNA? A simple exaggeration of the bad boy attraction? I hate to slip into cliches, but this is a pattern, not an isolated event. Associated memeware: think biker thugs, ghetto pimps, Stanley Kowalski, rock musicians. Here’s a bitter memory from my own memoirs. Time frame: late nineteen seventies, context: Eastern Tennessee.

I was starting to wonder what kind of family I was getting ready to marry into. Margaret had decided to forget about her Catholic restrictions on divorce and to remarry. Her husband-to-be was Johnny, an inmate at Brushy Mountain State Prison, the same place where they kept James Earl Ray locked up. Johnny was in for life, murder during a gas station hold up, he claimed he was framed. I took one look in his eyes and knew that sonofabitch was guilty as sin. They were reptilian. Margaret had met Johnny during some Catholic Relief Mission to the prisoners, she eventually married him in prison (I gave away the bride) and immediately went to work at trying to get him released, money, lawyers, letters to the governor, the whole nine yards.

It was sad, I really liked Margaret, and I appreciated that she had taken the time to get to know me and had given me a chance with her daughter. Soon Margaret’s home became a halfway house for released convicts from the prison, all of them with Johnny’s thousand yard stare. Their women were always around as well, helpless pathetic middle-aged girls dominated by these predators, they too had met their husbands while doing charity work in the joint. Carol didn’t need this, she could see clearly what had happened to her mother, even if she couldn’t see what was happening to her. She cried herself to sleep at night, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do about it.