I was born in the Age of Missing Children. It was a time when a missing child’s face on a milk carton resonated deeper with a person than it would now. I still remember how I felt as a little child, seeing the faces of the missing and the runaways on TV, and how hard they hit my young heart. I felt like their eyes were calling for me to do something to help them. But what could I do? I think those moments, that always seemed to last forever, were the first times in my life that I was so affected by someone else’s grief, and not the tiny frustrations of my own little world of Legos and bullies. In 1986, a missing child ripped at the world’s heart more ferociously than today.
By 1986, child killers like Albert Fish were forgotten fifty years after his gut-wrenching crimes. I think that, in the public’s subconscious, serial killers or child killers were once thought of as almost anomalies; depravity that reached such levels as Fish must have been seen as somewhat isolated incidents in society, criminology, and even psychiatry. In 1986, two high profile serial killers, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, waited on death row. When the weight of their deeds hit the news years before, it was a weight for sure. The viewing world hadn’t seen anything like Bundy or Gacy since Richard Speck. And even so, the public wasn’t nearly as hypnotized by the crimes of Speck as they were with Bundy and Gacy. But over time, more and more vacant eyes continued to kidnap and rape and torture and kill. And over time, with the world’s increasingly morbid sense of humor (if there exists life on other planets, do they have an entire category of jokes devoted to dead babies?), the serial killer became such a contemporary of the world’s culture to the point that they’ve come to be thought of as grisly novelty.
After Ariel Castro was caught and sentenced to life in prison in 2013, I heard astoundingly little about him and what he had done, considering the heinous nature of his crimes. A month into his one thousand year sentence, when Castro hanged himself in his cell, it was as though a seal had been shut on the whole evil thing, tossed into a box of archives and evidence. Save for a Lifetime network TV movie in 2015, Ariel Castro, and the story of his victims, seemed like an afterthought.
Today, though we have an almost endless array of sciences to document and explore the mind of the killer and the sadist, and Amber Alerts and social media to make the public even more aware of missing and exploited children, I feel as if the world has become desensitized to the horror. It’s almost like mass shootings – Charles Whitman’s 1966 Austin rampage, the 1984 McDonald’s shootings in San Ysidro, the 1991 Luby’s massacre in Killeen, the school shootings at Jonesboro and Columbine, and the Aurora theater massacre all shook the world. But, after twenty children were gunned down in cold blood at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the ensuing debate about guns and gun control was so heated, the nutcases that claimed it didn’t even happen were so vocal, that it almost overshadowed the precious lives that had been stolen – in the media anyway, but certainly not for those in Newtown, Connecticut.
Slowly they became everyday occurrences. Every day someone shoots someone else in full public view. I don’t feel I’m hyperbolizing when I say “every day.” And I likewise don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that, although every day, a child is abducted, raped, or murdered, the world’s heart by now has been broken so many times over these things, that the world can’t grieve as heavily for every life. Maybe it’s the same reason I can’t watch the news when a specific killing is featured, by Nancy Grace or whoever – I don’t have enough emotional stamina to break down for every child, for every life. I suppose that’s why what happened in January of this year affected me so severely.
Not to compare myself to a man like Stonewall Jackson, but there’s an incident of Confederate lore in which the otherwise stoic general broke down and sobbed after learning of a little girl who had died of a fever. His staff was perplexed – Jackson had lost many a friend and companion to war, but he’d never wept for one of them.
Someone remarked, “He’s weeping for all of them.”
In some maudlin way, I believe that’s what happened to me this winter.
On January 11th of this year, my already-beaten and bruised brain was subject to a photograph that did me much harm. On the internet, one doesn’t always happen upon what they were originally looking for, and one can’t always prepare themselves for what they’re about to see. To put it simply, without melodrama or poetry, I was a witness to a crime.
There’s something about what happens to a photograph of disturbing nature when it’s been circulated on the internet or elsewhere, to show the unique split second of pain it holds, that makes the image so dead somehow, so lifeless. It’s as though the image is an excerpt from a mother’s diary that’s been ripped from the book and passed around for people to read, people who weren’t meant to read it, people who have no attachment to the pain that’s been written. And the heart behind what’s written is forgotten, and the words become morbid entertainment. There are lots of photographs like that, that wind up in the vast electronic graveyard. Crime scenes, suicides, tragedies; when those images are tossed into cyberspace, for faceless usernames and unfeeling avatars to observe for the sake of the gore and darkness they show, like some museum of horrors, the people in those images are forgotten. They’re seen – their blood and guts, their expressions of fright and pain – but the people don’t seem to be there anymore. Their story isn’t there.
On February 5, 1990, a fourteen-year-old girl named Regina Kay Walters, and her eighteen-year-old boyfriend Ricky Lee Jones were hitchhiking in Pasadena, Texas. Regina, in love with Ricky, had run away from home with Ricky. They were eventually picked up by an interstate trucker named Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades had been abducting, torturing, raping, and killing women along the interstates for years. He soon killed Ricky, whose remains were not identified until 2008, far away from Texas, in Mississippi. But he kept Regina as his hostage, violating and abusing her.
Rhoades liked to take pictures of his victims. Their discovery would eventually be his downfall. On March 17th, Regina’s father received a phone call from a man telling him he knew where to find her. A similar call was made to Regina’s mother the same day. The man told Regina’s father that he had “made some changes” and that her hair was shorter now. Later, in the fall of the year, Regina’s remains were found in an abandoned barn, far away from Texas, in Illinois. She had been strangled to death with bailing wire, nearly to the point of decapitation.
Through a winding series of events, Robert Ben Rhoades was eventually captured while holding another woman hostage in his truck in Arizona, extradited to Illinois, and sentenced to life in prison for Regina’s murder. Over a decade later, he was returned to Texas to face two new murder charges, and was given two more life sentences. He remains incarcerated and alive as of May 2015.
Rhoades’ collection of photographs of his victims, before and during their abuse was what sealed his conviction. He took a picture of Regina moments before he killed her. One detective, morose over the fact, drew the conclusion that “he told her what he was going to do.” While he held her captive, he had cut her long, curly brown hair, leaving it a choppy boys-length. He made her wear a black dress and big black shoes. Her hands were raised as if trying to shield herself as she was backing away. Her face was pale and frightened, her nose red from the cold, from abuse, or from sobbing.
That image, burned into my mind, is like a postcard forwarded from hell.
Seeing this image sent me into an irrational depression. I had been unprepared to see it, but I think that even if I knew what I would see that day, it would have still torn at my heart and mind. In the weeks following, I began recklessly cutting my own hair with a big pair of scissors, to imitate what had been done to Regina. My emotions somehow reasoned that I was supposed to suffer what she had suffered. I began to hate when my brother would leave our apartment to go to work at night; I’d developed the fear that Regina, or others like her who had been killed, were in the apartment. I began leaving lights on for a fear of the dark.
There were a few times I’d contemplate going to the Amarillo police station and confessing to Regina’s murder. I’m sure the police would know that I wasn’t quite four years old when she was taken, and that I was babbling under the weight of some mental breakdown, and again to the hospital I’d go. But I contemplated this not out of psychosis, but unnecessary guilt, in which Satan delights. It’s not easy to shake such guilt when your mind constantly shows you horrible, violent, blasphemous, perverted images which you despise to no end. It’s as if a gear turns some sort of projector that shows me nothing but horror all day, every day.
It’s the same reason that, among the absurd stories I tell people about my background, some of them are dark and morbid – they reflect the guilt I feel for the despicable things in my head. One such story is my claim that my great-grandfather was a suspect in the unsolved 1912 Villisca, Iowa axe murders. He wasn’t, of course. But I often feel that somehow by making my relatives and ancestors to be violent characters, or to have died from violent deaths, I cry out for judgment and scorn for the ugly images I see seemingly each minute. But of course, no one to whom I tell these things knows that. So they take it at face value.
I also developed the horrible feeling of wanting to kill Robert Ben Rhoades. My mind suggested schemes that involved befriending him via some prison pen pal system, traveling to the facility where he is held, to visit him, and killing him with some crudely fashioned instrument of death.
But I thank God that I was always able to identify these things as irrational and terrible. Other plans involved traveling – maybe even hitchhiking – to the Mount Zion cemetery in Pasadena where Regina is buried, and leaving flowers at her grave. I reasoned that doing some sweet thing like that would make this awful nightmare stop. I thought of writing poems or leaving memorials for murder victims in Amarillo. But I knew that she, being with God, wouldn’t know of my leaving flowers for her. At least, I don’t think she’d know. I don’t know yet if people in heaven can see what we do on this earth. If they can, I’m sure they only see the beautiful things – when I get to heaven, I don’t want to see the terrible things that happen down here. So no one would know but me; I certainly wouldn’t try and find her parents and tell them about it, some mentally ill stranger from out of nowhere, making them relive, in a compressed and babbling moment, twenty-five years of pain.
And, the flowers would just wither or blow away.
I knew where Regina’s remains were buried, because as my mind showed me this vision, not caring if she had a name, I began to read about the case, but specifically about Regina. I had to show her to my mind as the real person she is, not just an image of the moments before a murder, over which ghouls pour in some depraved way to pass the time with WiFi. All that I could read about her of course came from articles that documented Robert Ben Rhoades’ killings. I wanted to know Regina’s birthday, I wanted to know who her parents are, I wanted to know what life was like for her growing up. I couldn’t just let her become some unnamed, residential haunt of my brain. I wanted to know the things that, slowly, made my mind understand that she is a human being who God loves and cherishes.
I know that I cannot let this fixation, this fear, continue. A mind for Christ is not meant to dwell on such things. Paul writes to the Philippians, “whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy – meditate on these things.” Jesus calls we who believe and heed Him “the salt of the earth.” I mustn’t set my mind on death. The prophet Elisha once healed a bitter water supply by putting salt into it: “Then he went out to the source of the water, and cast in the salt there, and said, “Thus says the LORD: ‘I have healed this water; from it there shall be no more death or barrenness.’””
I am the salt of the earth.
I thank God that I believe in Him and everything He’s said. I thank God that He believes my story so that I can believe His. Looking at the burden I put upon myself these past four months makes me shudder to think of what could have happened if I didn’t believe.
Nature without Christ tries to tell me why Regina died. The fact is, Regina made an irresponsible choice. She ran away with an older boy, and hitchhiked with a stranger. But nature without Christ tells me that Regina’s death was the result of the grand scheme of the passive-aggressiveness of nature and genetics. That she wasn’t as likely to survive as someone with better genes. Her parents just didn’t have the genetic variations to pass on to make her successful in the competition for food, shelter, and reproduction. That her genes didn’t contain characteristics favorable to survival, to adapt to the pressures of her environment – the change in climate as she entered those emotionally charged teenage years, or to the number of predators like Robert Ben Rhoades.
The dismissal of the word of the risen Christ tells me it’s best for the human population, if it wants to perpetually survive, if girls like Regina die out. With the elimination of girls with traits like these, the survival and reproduction of the human race will continue for those with more favorable genetic traits, that certain variations in our descendants will be highly valuable, and if those with more favorable genes continue to reproduce, small variations will develop over the span of many generations, and someday, will result in a better human race.
The dismissal of the word of the risen Christ tells me that our population won’t be perfect, but without Regina, and girls with traits like hers, it will be a better world.
A lot of people say it’s easy to believe in Christ. They look around themselves at the wealth of horror in the world and dismiss a God who watches over us and loves us. They say faith in Jesus Christ, or any sort of religious feeling, is a quaint way to bring comfort to superstitious people. But I say it’s one of the hardest things to do. I say it’s much easier not to believe in Him. When we lock ourselves in a box of cynicism and limit ourselves to what we touch and what we see, we take the humanity out of every heartbreaking thing in the world. The girl who died too young is seen as mere matter, though some in this soft palace of disbelief may sprinkle a “triumph of the human spirit” cliché over the strength of the carbon-based lifeforms whose daughter was taken from them. The thick windows of hardened cognitive content help to keep out the pain. The dismissal of God makes the motive behind the murder that much easier to explain, the body that much easier to bury.
But when I believe in abundant life through Christ Jesus, this girl means something. When I embrace the promises of Christ, many of them hard to take, Regina Kay Walters becomes a human being again, instead of the ghoulish image tattooed onto my brain for torment. She becomes a precious soul, and her name is no longer attached to a wide-awake nightmare. When I accept the fact that God has placed every one of us here for a reason, and that His Spirit rejoices over good and is grieved by evil, a man like Albert Fish becomes a human being again, instead of the Werewolf of Wysteria, some mechanism of flesh and organs who did what his DNA destined him to do. When I rejoice in the sheer life that Christ has given me, amidst the pain and the weariness, I believe and jubilate that His command of love trumps what my DNA suggests. It’s only when I acknowledge that life has more sanctity because we are more than mere matter, that Regina’s loss can break my heart. And it’s only when I believe in the love of Christ, the true and sole Source of love, that I realize love and joy and sorrow and empathy are not viruses of the mind.
When I believe in the life given by the Creator, when I believe there is a reason, and nothing is random, only then does a Langston Hughes poem mean something, only then does a crashing wave or a fresh snowfall ignite the imagination, only then does a newborn baby take its first breath in hope; hope, that word that means something, that word we’ve overwrought and overused to become so shopworn; hope, that thing which atheism and nothingness cannot offer, nor does it claim to.
Growing up in Seminole, Texas, a town of less than six thousand people, my mother knew just about everyone, having lived there all of her life, sixty-three years. It seems like ever since I was a child, I can vividly remember my mother being able to seemingly tell the life story of anyone we happened upon while out and about, or some event that happened at any given spot. There was the junkyard of a man known as “Black Joe,” untouched for thirty or more years, located not too far from one of the Dairy Queens my mother used to manage; she recalled one night after closing time when Black Joe’s wife appeared outside, bloody and bruised, banging on the door and pleading to be let inside. It turned out, Black Joe routinely beat his wife, savagely. She later shot him dead.
Then there was the Thurman house on the edge of town. My mother had gone to school with the daughter, who was confined to a wheelchair due to a debilitating illness. “She collected dolls,” my mother said. In 1970, Mr. Thurman, having been fired from his job at a prominent oil company, shot his wife and teenage daughter to death, before turning the gun on himself.
Another time, I was looking through my mother’s high school yearbook from 1969 and came across a student named McNew. In 1982, Mr. McNew disappeared from the oil rig at which he worked. He was later found to have been a victim of serial killer Michael Eugene Sharp, who was later executed in 1997 for another abduction and murder.
My mother also told me of a childhood friend who was raised by an abusive grandmother. One afternoon, the girl’s grandmother made her eat fried eggs that she hadn’t finished before going to school that morning; it made the girl sick, but she would have been punished if she threw up. So my mother and a few of her friends, living just across the street, undercover of night, snuck to their friend’s bedroom window with a waste basket, so she could throw up and feel better.
I also heard the story of a man with a mental disability; when he was a child, he would become frightened that the sky was falling, would point upwards, and scream uncontrollably. Unfortunately, the worst detail of the story was that one of my older brothers would often instigate these episodes by pointing to the sky and mocking the boy’s screams.
I don’t think the boy’s fears that the sky is falling are unfounded.
All of these sad stories never affected me in a negative way. I thank God that I had a mother who never kept the world as it is hidden from me, nor sheltered me with fairy tales. She never told these stories with morbidity, but with genuine sorrow. Whether intentionally or not, I can never be sure, by sharing these people’s painful stories, my mother taught me that life is gritty. I thank God that the Bible does not paint a euphoric picture of life on Earth, but rather the stark opposite. People do evil to other people. But people also do good to other people. Before God, not one fallen sparrow and not one hair on our heads is forgotten, and neither are these people whose lives were taken, or who endured such ugliness at the hands of others. He’s taught me through my mother that everyone has a story. I find it no coincidence nor gesture of sarcasm that my mother’s favorite song, despite all the ugly things she knew in that town, was “What a Wonderful World.”
My mind and heart that see such horrible things all day don’t want anyone’s story to become faded and discarded. I don’t want any heartbreak of any creation of God to become lifeless in the eyes of others. I thank Jesus Christ for the life He’s given me, so that maybe I can look in the eye these ugly things, this violent, unfeeling world, these hideous visions in my head, and say to them – much less melodramatically than with my own words – what God says by the prophet Hosea:
“O Death, where is your punishment? O grave, where is your sting?”
Believe it or not, it is possible for those of us who pray to an invisible, omnipotent God to be rooted in reality. After all, the Book from which we learn about our God is far from a child’s bedtime story. It’s full of ugly days and painful nights, a God who often must perform difficult and sorrowful deeds, and it tells us of all the rotten things people do to one another. Many of its heroes are flawed – adulterers, murderers, backsliders, and some who even turn from God completely.
This is the strange, gritty beauty that is faith. We must remember that the event in this Book that all of its prophets and laws foreshadowed and foretold, the centerpiece of this Book’s meaning, occurred on a bloody, gory day at Golgotha – a day on which our God, so cynically called a figment, a superstition, a Santa Claus, in flesh and bone suffered worse than you and I ever have. He, Jesus of Nazareth, Immanuel, God-with-us, endured such a down-to-Earth yet somehow celestial agony. And He did this so that those who believe will never know the pain He knows, but will be restored and redeemed from our old sins by His precious blood and by His glorious resurrection – new creations given “life, and life more abundantly.”
“Abundant life” means pain that’s more painful, joy that’s much more joyous, sight that better sees the beauty of true good, and the ugliness of true evil. The words “I was blind, but now I see” in the hymn we sing, they resonate so much deeper with abundant life. We can see the good in the world, so that it delights our hearts, and doesn’t fade in the cutest social media post of the day – and we can see the bad so clearly that it singes itself in our memories, haunting us, wailing for us to do something about it, not to forget the faces of those taken away.
Our Lord suffered a very real and ugly death, all for the sake of life.
Today is May 5, 2015. Today would have been Regina Kay Walters’ fortieth birthday. Instead of all the grandiose plans I had to do something to try to make her come to life in my mind, instead of being a specter of death – traveling to Pasadena to place flowers on her grave, writing an attempt at a beautiful poem – I got a haircut. My hair had grown out to a proper enough length that would allow a stylist to see the damage and to even it out. Now I could repair what I’d done when I took it upon myself to sabotage my hair, so that I could somehow suffer with Regina, rather than look forward to someday rejoicing with her in heaven.
The rain poured down on me as I waited for the bus. As cliché as it sounds, it was fitting. My uniform hat’s brim is so wide though, that I stayed mostly dry as the bus ran ten minutes late. I just kept thinking of how fitting and how poignant this was – repairing what I’d done to myself because of death, on the anniversary of Regina’s birth. When I got to the mall and found the hair salon, I was troubled. It was hard to explain to the stylist why I needed my hair cut, and why she’d find it in such a state. But she didn’t give me the slightest of weird looks or ask questions. She seemed very understanding. Maybe she sees this kind of thing all the time. Her name was Mandy.
I felt so uncomfortable as I was guided to a chair, my head pressed back as Mandy ran warm water over my head and shampooed my hair. I’d never had a haircut with the shampoo beforehand. I felt so awkward. What’s more, I felt less and less like this was a beautiful thing done to quell thoughts of death, and celebrate a life. I felt more and more like I was undergoing some sort of sterile surgery.
I hate getting haircuts, because the lady cutting my hair always has to make such close contact. I feel somehow guilty about her tender fingers in my hair, her body brushing against mine. I always keep my hands centered between my legs under the wrap they place over me, because I feel so awful if they make contact with my leg and my hand feels it. My body first, and then my mind, tell me that the woman thinks I’ve tried to grope her. I often keep my eyes closed or looking away from the stylist, for the fear she’ll think I’m trying to look her over. I suppose misusing women as I’ve done over the years could contribute to those horrible feelings. I know God doesn’t want me to feel such torture over things that have been forgiven and removed as far as the east is from the west.
The preparation for the haircut itself proved to be a chore, as I had to remove my cloth cravat and my uniform vest so that Mandy could pull down my collar and cut where necessary. When the haircut was over, I didn’t feel a weight lift from my heart. I didn’t weep tears of joy. I just hung my head, my hair repaired and shorter, and thanked Mandy for fixing it. “It means a lot to me,” I said. As I paid and tipped her, she told me to come see her again, and with an awkward, weakly, hoarsely spoken goodbye. I walked out into the open bustle of the mall and stood there for a brief moment, watching everyone go by, all those people, all those lives. Good gosh, all that life.
Someone could take a lot of heat for believing the world is only eight-to-twelve thousand years old. I don’t know how old the planet is. You’d have to ask someone far smarter about that. But I do think that maybe the earth isn’t as old as it looks; maybe the earth is like a face that’s seen too much that its skin becomes wrinkled before its time, its eyes grow dark and weary when they should still beam with youth, and its hair becomes gray and thin when it should be waving in the breeze in a Corvette with the top down.
I think of every human life that’s ever been lived, and I add up all of the pain, joy, heartache, jubilation, misery, redemption, waste and fulfillment in each of those lives; then I think of the earth itself, and every war, victory, crime, loss, storm, every broken promise and every kept promise this planet has seen since man first appeared; and whatever the true number, all of those things add up to billions and billions of years of sheer life.
(from the book Sheep Named Spike, (C) 2015)
By 1986, child killers like Albert Fish were forgotten fifty years after his gut-wrenching crimes. I think that, in the public’s subconscious, serial killers or child killers were once thought of as almost anomalies; depravity that reached such levels as Fish must have been seen as somewhat isolated incidents in society, criminology, and even psychiatry. In 1986, two high profile serial killers, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, waited on death row. When the weight of their deeds hit the news years before, it was a weight for sure. The viewing world hadn’t seen anything like Bundy or Gacy since Richard Speck. And even so, the public wasn’t nearly as hypnotized by the crimes of Speck as they were with Bundy and Gacy. But over time, more and more vacant eyes continued to kidnap and rape and torture and kill. And over time, with the world’s increasingly morbid sense of humor (if there exists life on other planets, do they have an entire category of jokes devoted to dead babies?), the serial killer became such a contemporary of the world’s culture to the point that they’ve come to be thought of as grisly novelty.
After Ariel Castro was caught and sentenced to life in prison in 2013, I heard astoundingly little about him and what he had done, considering the heinous nature of his crimes. A month into his one thousand year sentence, when Castro hanged himself in his cell, it was as though a seal had been shut on the whole evil thing, tossed into a box of archives and evidence. Save for a Lifetime network TV movie in 2015, Ariel Castro, and the story of his victims, seemed like an afterthought.
Today, though we have an almost endless array of sciences to document and explore the mind of the killer and the sadist, and Amber Alerts and social media to make the public even more aware of missing and exploited children, I feel as if the world has become desensitized to the horror. It’s almost like mass shootings – Charles Whitman’s 1966 Austin rampage, the 1984 McDonald’s shootings in San Ysidro, the 1991 Luby’s massacre in Killeen, the school shootings at Jonesboro and Columbine, and the Aurora theater massacre all shook the world. But, after twenty children were gunned down in cold blood at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the ensuing debate about guns and gun control was so heated, the nutcases that claimed it didn’t even happen were so vocal, that it almost overshadowed the precious lives that had been stolen – in the media anyway, but certainly not for those in Newtown, Connecticut.
Slowly they became everyday occurrences. Every day someone shoots someone else in full public view. I don’t feel I’m hyperbolizing when I say “every day.” And I likewise don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that, although every day, a child is abducted, raped, or murdered, the world’s heart by now has been broken so many times over these things, that the world can’t grieve as heavily for every life. Maybe it’s the same reason I can’t watch the news when a specific killing is featured, by Nancy Grace or whoever – I don’t have enough emotional stamina to break down for every child, for every life. I suppose that’s why what happened in January of this year affected me so severely.
Not to compare myself to a man like Stonewall Jackson, but there’s an incident of Confederate lore in which the otherwise stoic general broke down and sobbed after learning of a little girl who had died of a fever. His staff was perplexed – Jackson had lost many a friend and companion to war, but he’d never wept for one of them.
Someone remarked, “He’s weeping for all of them.”
In some maudlin way, I believe that’s what happened to me this winter.
On January 11th of this year, my already-beaten and bruised brain was subject to a photograph that did me much harm. On the internet, one doesn’t always happen upon what they were originally looking for, and one can’t always prepare themselves for what they’re about to see. To put it simply, without melodrama or poetry, I was a witness to a crime.
There’s something about what happens to a photograph of disturbing nature when it’s been circulated on the internet or elsewhere, to show the unique split second of pain it holds, that makes the image so dead somehow, so lifeless. It’s as though the image is an excerpt from a mother’s diary that’s been ripped from the book and passed around for people to read, people who weren’t meant to read it, people who have no attachment to the pain that’s been written. And the heart behind what’s written is forgotten, and the words become morbid entertainment. There are lots of photographs like that, that wind up in the vast electronic graveyard. Crime scenes, suicides, tragedies; when those images are tossed into cyberspace, for faceless usernames and unfeeling avatars to observe for the sake of the gore and darkness they show, like some museum of horrors, the people in those images are forgotten. They’re seen – their blood and guts, their expressions of fright and pain – but the people don’t seem to be there anymore. Their story isn’t there.
On February 5, 1990, a fourteen-year-old girl named Regina Kay Walters, and her eighteen-year-old boyfriend Ricky Lee Jones were hitchhiking in Pasadena, Texas. Regina, in love with Ricky, had run away from home with Ricky. They were eventually picked up by an interstate trucker named Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades had been abducting, torturing, raping, and killing women along the interstates for years. He soon killed Ricky, whose remains were not identified until 2008, far away from Texas, in Mississippi. But he kept Regina as his hostage, violating and abusing her.
Rhoades liked to take pictures of his victims. Their discovery would eventually be his downfall. On March 17th, Regina’s father received a phone call from a man telling him he knew where to find her. A similar call was made to Regina’s mother the same day. The man told Regina’s father that he had “made some changes” and that her hair was shorter now. Later, in the fall of the year, Regina’s remains were found in an abandoned barn, far away from Texas, in Illinois. She had been strangled to death with bailing wire, nearly to the point of decapitation.
Through a winding series of events, Robert Ben Rhoades was eventually captured while holding another woman hostage in his truck in Arizona, extradited to Illinois, and sentenced to life in prison for Regina’s murder. Over a decade later, he was returned to Texas to face two new murder charges, and was given two more life sentences. He remains incarcerated and alive as of May 2015.
Rhoades’ collection of photographs of his victims, before and during their abuse was what sealed his conviction. He took a picture of Regina moments before he killed her. One detective, morose over the fact, drew the conclusion that “he told her what he was going to do.” While he held her captive, he had cut her long, curly brown hair, leaving it a choppy boys-length. He made her wear a black dress and big black shoes. Her hands were raised as if trying to shield herself as she was backing away. Her face was pale and frightened, her nose red from the cold, from abuse, or from sobbing.
That image, burned into my mind, is like a postcard forwarded from hell.
Seeing this image sent me into an irrational depression. I had been unprepared to see it, but I think that even if I knew what I would see that day, it would have still torn at my heart and mind. In the weeks following, I began recklessly cutting my own hair with a big pair of scissors, to imitate what had been done to Regina. My emotions somehow reasoned that I was supposed to suffer what she had suffered. I began to hate when my brother would leave our apartment to go to work at night; I’d developed the fear that Regina, or others like her who had been killed, were in the apartment. I began leaving lights on for a fear of the dark.
There were a few times I’d contemplate going to the Amarillo police station and confessing to Regina’s murder. I’m sure the police would know that I wasn’t quite four years old when she was taken, and that I was babbling under the weight of some mental breakdown, and again to the hospital I’d go. But I contemplated this not out of psychosis, but unnecessary guilt, in which Satan delights. It’s not easy to shake such guilt when your mind constantly shows you horrible, violent, blasphemous, perverted images which you despise to no end. It’s as if a gear turns some sort of projector that shows me nothing but horror all day, every day.
It’s the same reason that, among the absurd stories I tell people about my background, some of them are dark and morbid – they reflect the guilt I feel for the despicable things in my head. One such story is my claim that my great-grandfather was a suspect in the unsolved 1912 Villisca, Iowa axe murders. He wasn’t, of course. But I often feel that somehow by making my relatives and ancestors to be violent characters, or to have died from violent deaths, I cry out for judgment and scorn for the ugly images I see seemingly each minute. But of course, no one to whom I tell these things knows that. So they take it at face value.
I also developed the horrible feeling of wanting to kill Robert Ben Rhoades. My mind suggested schemes that involved befriending him via some prison pen pal system, traveling to the facility where he is held, to visit him, and killing him with some crudely fashioned instrument of death.
But I thank God that I was always able to identify these things as irrational and terrible. Other plans involved traveling – maybe even hitchhiking – to the Mount Zion cemetery in Pasadena where Regina is buried, and leaving flowers at her grave. I reasoned that doing some sweet thing like that would make this awful nightmare stop. I thought of writing poems or leaving memorials for murder victims in Amarillo. But I knew that she, being with God, wouldn’t know of my leaving flowers for her. At least, I don’t think she’d know. I don’t know yet if people in heaven can see what we do on this earth. If they can, I’m sure they only see the beautiful things – when I get to heaven, I don’t want to see the terrible things that happen down here. So no one would know but me; I certainly wouldn’t try and find her parents and tell them about it, some mentally ill stranger from out of nowhere, making them relive, in a compressed and babbling moment, twenty-five years of pain.
And, the flowers would just wither or blow away.
I knew where Regina’s remains were buried, because as my mind showed me this vision, not caring if she had a name, I began to read about the case, but specifically about Regina. I had to show her to my mind as the real person she is, not just an image of the moments before a murder, over which ghouls pour in some depraved way to pass the time with WiFi. All that I could read about her of course came from articles that documented Robert Ben Rhoades’ killings. I wanted to know Regina’s birthday, I wanted to know who her parents are, I wanted to know what life was like for her growing up. I couldn’t just let her become some unnamed, residential haunt of my brain. I wanted to know the things that, slowly, made my mind understand that she is a human being who God loves and cherishes.
I know that I cannot let this fixation, this fear, continue. A mind for Christ is not meant to dwell on such things. Paul writes to the Philippians, “whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy – meditate on these things.” Jesus calls we who believe and heed Him “the salt of the earth.” I mustn’t set my mind on death. The prophet Elisha once healed a bitter water supply by putting salt into it: “Then he went out to the source of the water, and cast in the salt there, and said, “Thus says the LORD: ‘I have healed this water; from it there shall be no more death or barrenness.’””
I am the salt of the earth.
I thank God that I believe in Him and everything He’s said. I thank God that He believes my story so that I can believe His. Looking at the burden I put upon myself these past four months makes me shudder to think of what could have happened if I didn’t believe.
Nature without Christ tries to tell me why Regina died. The fact is, Regina made an irresponsible choice. She ran away with an older boy, and hitchhiked with a stranger. But nature without Christ tells me that Regina’s death was the result of the grand scheme of the passive-aggressiveness of nature and genetics. That she wasn’t as likely to survive as someone with better genes. Her parents just didn’t have the genetic variations to pass on to make her successful in the competition for food, shelter, and reproduction. That her genes didn’t contain characteristics favorable to survival, to adapt to the pressures of her environment – the change in climate as she entered those emotionally charged teenage years, or to the number of predators like Robert Ben Rhoades.
The dismissal of the word of the risen Christ tells me it’s best for the human population, if it wants to perpetually survive, if girls like Regina die out. With the elimination of girls with traits like these, the survival and reproduction of the human race will continue for those with more favorable genetic traits, that certain variations in our descendants will be highly valuable, and if those with more favorable genes continue to reproduce, small variations will develop over the span of many generations, and someday, will result in a better human race.
The dismissal of the word of the risen Christ tells me that our population won’t be perfect, but without Regina, and girls with traits like hers, it will be a better world.
A lot of people say it’s easy to believe in Christ. They look around themselves at the wealth of horror in the world and dismiss a God who watches over us and loves us. They say faith in Jesus Christ, or any sort of religious feeling, is a quaint way to bring comfort to superstitious people. But I say it’s one of the hardest things to do. I say it’s much easier not to believe in Him. When we lock ourselves in a box of cynicism and limit ourselves to what we touch and what we see, we take the humanity out of every heartbreaking thing in the world. The girl who died too young is seen as mere matter, though some in this soft palace of disbelief may sprinkle a “triumph of the human spirit” cliché over the strength of the carbon-based lifeforms whose daughter was taken from them. The thick windows of hardened cognitive content help to keep out the pain. The dismissal of God makes the motive behind the murder that much easier to explain, the body that much easier to bury.
But when I believe in abundant life through Christ Jesus, this girl means something. When I embrace the promises of Christ, many of them hard to take, Regina Kay Walters becomes a human being again, instead of the ghoulish image tattooed onto my brain for torment. She becomes a precious soul, and her name is no longer attached to a wide-awake nightmare. When I accept the fact that God has placed every one of us here for a reason, and that His Spirit rejoices over good and is grieved by evil, a man like Albert Fish becomes a human being again, instead of the Werewolf of Wysteria, some mechanism of flesh and organs who did what his DNA destined him to do. When I rejoice in the sheer life that Christ has given me, amidst the pain and the weariness, I believe and jubilate that His command of love trumps what my DNA suggests. It’s only when I acknowledge that life has more sanctity because we are more than mere matter, that Regina’s loss can break my heart. And it’s only when I believe in the love of Christ, the true and sole Source of love, that I realize love and joy and sorrow and empathy are not viruses of the mind.
When I believe in the life given by the Creator, when I believe there is a reason, and nothing is random, only then does a Langston Hughes poem mean something, only then does a crashing wave or a fresh snowfall ignite the imagination, only then does a newborn baby take its first breath in hope; hope, that word that means something, that word we’ve overwrought and overused to become so shopworn; hope, that thing which atheism and nothingness cannot offer, nor does it claim to.
Then there was the Thurman house on the edge of town. My mother had gone to school with the daughter, who was confined to a wheelchair due to a debilitating illness. “She collected dolls,” my mother said. In 1970, Mr. Thurman, having been fired from his job at a prominent oil company, shot his wife and teenage daughter to death, before turning the gun on himself.
Another time, I was looking through my mother’s high school yearbook from 1969 and came across a student named McNew. In 1982, Mr. McNew disappeared from the oil rig at which he worked. He was later found to have been a victim of serial killer Michael Eugene Sharp, who was later executed in 1997 for another abduction and murder.
My mother also told me of a childhood friend who was raised by an abusive grandmother. One afternoon, the girl’s grandmother made her eat fried eggs that she hadn’t finished before going to school that morning; it made the girl sick, but she would have been punished if she threw up. So my mother and a few of her friends, living just across the street, undercover of night, snuck to their friend’s bedroom window with a waste basket, so she could throw up and feel better.
I also heard the story of a man with a mental disability; when he was a child, he would become frightened that the sky was falling, would point upwards, and scream uncontrollably. Unfortunately, the worst detail of the story was that one of my older brothers would often instigate these episodes by pointing to the sky and mocking the boy’s screams.
I don’t think the boy’s fears that the sky is falling are unfounded.
All of these sad stories never affected me in a negative way. I thank God that I had a mother who never kept the world as it is hidden from me, nor sheltered me with fairy tales. She never told these stories with morbidity, but with genuine sorrow. Whether intentionally or not, I can never be sure, by sharing these people’s painful stories, my mother taught me that life is gritty. I thank God that the Bible does not paint a euphoric picture of life on Earth, but rather the stark opposite. People do evil to other people. But people also do good to other people. Before God, not one fallen sparrow and not one hair on our heads is forgotten, and neither are these people whose lives were taken, or who endured such ugliness at the hands of others. He’s taught me through my mother that everyone has a story. I find it no coincidence nor gesture of sarcasm that my mother’s favorite song, despite all the ugly things she knew in that town, was “What a Wonderful World.”
My mind and heart that see such horrible things all day don’t want anyone’s story to become faded and discarded. I don’t want any heartbreak of any creation of God to become lifeless in the eyes of others. I thank Jesus Christ for the life He’s given me, so that maybe I can look in the eye these ugly things, this violent, unfeeling world, these hideous visions in my head, and say to them – much less melodramatically than with my own words – what God says by the prophet Hosea:
“O Death, where is your punishment? O grave, where is your sting?”
Believe it or not, it is possible for those of us who pray to an invisible, omnipotent God to be rooted in reality. After all, the Book from which we learn about our God is far from a child’s bedtime story. It’s full of ugly days and painful nights, a God who often must perform difficult and sorrowful deeds, and it tells us of all the rotten things people do to one another. Many of its heroes are flawed – adulterers, murderers, backsliders, and some who even turn from God completely.
“Abundant life” means pain that’s more painful, joy that’s much more joyous, sight that better sees the beauty of true good, and the ugliness of true evil. The words “I was blind, but now I see” in the hymn we sing, they resonate so much deeper with abundant life. We can see the good in the world, so that it delights our hearts, and doesn’t fade in the cutest social media post of the day – and we can see the bad so clearly that it singes itself in our memories, haunting us, wailing for us to do something about it, not to forget the faces of those taken away.
Our Lord suffered a very real and ugly death, all for the sake of life.
Today is May 5, 2015. Today would have been Regina Kay Walters’ fortieth birthday. Instead of all the grandiose plans I had to do something to try to make her come to life in my mind, instead of being a specter of death – traveling to Pasadena to place flowers on her grave, writing an attempt at a beautiful poem – I got a haircut. My hair had grown out to a proper enough length that would allow a stylist to see the damage and to even it out. Now I could repair what I’d done when I took it upon myself to sabotage my hair, so that I could somehow suffer with Regina, rather than look forward to someday rejoicing with her in heaven.
The rain poured down on me as I waited for the bus. As cliché as it sounds, it was fitting. My uniform hat’s brim is so wide though, that I stayed mostly dry as the bus ran ten minutes late. I just kept thinking of how fitting and how poignant this was – repairing what I’d done to myself because of death, on the anniversary of Regina’s birth. When I got to the mall and found the hair salon, I was troubled. It was hard to explain to the stylist why I needed my hair cut, and why she’d find it in such a state. But she didn’t give me the slightest of weird looks or ask questions. She seemed very understanding. Maybe she sees this kind of thing all the time. Her name was Mandy.
I felt so uncomfortable as I was guided to a chair, my head pressed back as Mandy ran warm water over my head and shampooed my hair. I’d never had a haircut with the shampoo beforehand. I felt so awkward. What’s more, I felt less and less like this was a beautiful thing done to quell thoughts of death, and celebrate a life. I felt more and more like I was undergoing some sort of sterile surgery.
I hate getting haircuts, because the lady cutting my hair always has to make such close contact. I feel somehow guilty about her tender fingers in my hair, her body brushing against mine. I always keep my hands centered between my legs under the wrap they place over me, because I feel so awful if they make contact with my leg and my hand feels it. My body first, and then my mind, tell me that the woman thinks I’ve tried to grope her. I often keep my eyes closed or looking away from the stylist, for the fear she’ll think I’m trying to look her over. I suppose misusing women as I’ve done over the years could contribute to those horrible feelings. I know God doesn’t want me to feel such torture over things that have been forgiven and removed as far as the east is from the west.
The preparation for the haircut itself proved to be a chore, as I had to remove my cloth cravat and my uniform vest so that Mandy could pull down my collar and cut where necessary. When the haircut was over, I didn’t feel a weight lift from my heart. I didn’t weep tears of joy. I just hung my head, my hair repaired and shorter, and thanked Mandy for fixing it. “It means a lot to me,” I said. As I paid and tipped her, she told me to come see her again, and with an awkward, weakly, hoarsely spoken goodbye. I walked out into the open bustle of the mall and stood there for a brief moment, watching everyone go by, all those people, all those lives. Good gosh, all that life.
Someone could take a lot of heat for believing the world is only eight-to-twelve thousand years old. I don’t know how old the planet is. You’d have to ask someone far smarter about that. But I do think that maybe the earth isn’t as old as it looks; maybe the earth is like a face that’s seen too much that its skin becomes wrinkled before its time, its eyes grow dark and weary when they should still beam with youth, and its hair becomes gray and thin when it should be waving in the breeze in a Corvette with the top down.
I think of every human life that’s ever been lived, and I add up all of the pain, joy, heartache, jubilation, misery, redemption, waste and fulfillment in each of those lives; then I think of the earth itself, and every war, victory, crime, loss, storm, every broken promise and every kept promise this planet has seen since man first appeared; and whatever the true number, all of those things add up to billions and billions of years of sheer life.
(from the book Sheep Named Spike, (C) 2015)
