Go Team Satan!
IN 2002, a couple of morticians were murdered in a Central Wisconsin funeral home. The investigation revealed that a number of funeral homes around the state-in Green Bay, Appleton and Hudson, where the murders had taken place-had received death threats from a local religious sect whose leader felt that embalming was an abomination in the eyes of the lord.
I'd tried to follow the case as closely as I could from out here, but last I'd heard, the police were interrogating the sect's leader and one other member. They both admitted to delivering the threats, but denied having anything to do with the murders. ("I am a mailman for God, not an assassin for the devil," the sect leader was quoted as saying.) It was unclear if any charges had ever been brought against them.
Last weekend I called my parents to see if maybe they could tell me about any more recent developments in the case. I wasn't sure they'd be able to, but I figured I'd ask anyway. News sometimes travels differently around Wisconsin.
"Oh yeah," my mom said when I brought it up. "I sure do remember that. They were cleared. Both of 'em."
"So do they know who did it?"
"Not a clue," she said. "Not yet. I guess they're still looking. But the religious people are off the hook."
"Oh." I found this vaguely disappointing for some reason. I guess I just liked the whole idea of crazy religious leaders killing off morticians. It sounded like something out of one of those Italian giallos.
We moved on to another, more recent murder in Central Wisconsin. In this case, a small-town golden boy-star athlete, class president, honor student, Eagle Scout-was arrested and charged with the brutal killing of a substitute teacher. Apparently the kid had bragged to friends, who didn't believe him, and a girlfriend, who eventually did. His only motive, it seems, was to see whether or not he could get away with it.
My dad had joined the conversation on another extension by this point, and after we'd decided all there was to decide in the golden boy case ("He's guilty as hell"), my dad asked my mom, "Do you suppose we should ask him?"
Ask me what? I wondered.
"About that guy," he said, still talking to my mom.
"What guy?" I asked.
"Do you suppose?" she replied.
"Yeah, let's find out."
"Ask me what!? What guy?!" I finally shouted into the phone.
They were quiet for a second. Then my dad asked, "Did you know somebody named Brian Bluncheon? I think he may be a few years older than you."
I scanned back through the people I knew in Green Bay, all those names and increasingly foggy faces. Then something clicked. A name and a face that actually went together. "Sure I knew him. Yeah. We were in school together from, what, fourth grade through graduation? He was an okay guy."
"Can you believe it?" my dad said to my mom, apparently a little shocked that I knew this fellow. Or maybe just that I could remember him.
"Incredible," my mom agreed.
"He was a big guy," I tossed in, just to prove I really did know him. "Red hair, glasses."
"That's him all right," my dad said. "This is really something. Can you believe he knew him?"
"I can't believe it."
Brian, I'll say right off the bat, was always nice to me. We weren't best pals or anything, but we were always pleasant to each other, which is more than I can say about most of the students in the various schools we attended.
He was a tall, thick kid. Not fat, really-just thick, with a small head covered in curly, red hair, a pug nose and large, tinted glasses. He wasn't a genius, but he was bright. Read a lot of science fiction, as I remember. In gym class, we were both assigned to the retard squad.
(In fact, one year he, about five other kids from our class and I were assigned to an after-school gym program specially designed for fat kids, geeks and retards. I guess they didn't want us muddying up the regular gym class. But that's another story.)
Seems that while he was in his late 20s or early 30s, long after our paths had diverged, Brian joined the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. A few months ago, one of the boys who'd been assigned to him reported to his parents that Brian had been molesting him regularly for years.
Yeah, I thought after they broke the news, I can see that.
Of course, had they told me that he'd just opened his own car wash, was lost at sea, or had donated $75,000 to charity, I might well have thought the same thing.
They could have told me anything. Like I said, when I knew him, he was a good kid and I never had any reason to suspect him of anything like this. In this case, though, working with this new information while recalling his pallid, pock-marked skin, flabby cheeks and blubbery, too-red lips, remembering the leer in his graduation photo, it all made perfect sense. Of course-how could no one have noticed?
I'm no longer surprised about much of anything I hear concerning the kids I went to high school with. At the time, there were the typical drag-racing fatalities and motorcycle accidents, the overdoses, anorexic chicks and the kids who learned they had some terminal illness or another. Nothing terribly unexpected in any of those. But there were no murders, no rapes, no mysterious disappearances, no charges brought against teachers. After graduation, though, all the weirdness began to lock in, and people I knew started going all creepy.
One kid I'd known since kindergarten was shot and killed by his brother in the family kitchen six months after graduation. I watched as another kid I'd known since kindergarten let a simple schoolboy crush on a girl we both knew evolve into obsession, stalking and eventually complete madness. Students with the most promise became suicidal drunk drivers, sloppy harlots and bar owners. Others slipped into manias requiring hospitalization and heavy medication. Others became publicly violent after their televisions began talking to them and still others took to robbing liquor stores. That Brian turned out to be a child molester is just the latest thing to add to the list.
I knew, even back then, that having Satan as a school mascot would lead to nothing but trouble.