Latest update March 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column
There was a time when parents simply let their children go out and play without worry; well not all the time, because back in the 1960s there was a serial killer who operated as a handyman while he kept an eye out for an unattended child.
While he was operating, parents began to keep an eye on their children. Great police work led to his capture, but not before he had killed seven children across the country. A colleague reminded me of a saying that a vampire cannot enter your home unless you invite it. Of course, my colleague is into things supernatural, so that observation would not have been far from his mind.
The nine-year-old was said to be going to fly his kite when the monster tripped him up and abducted him. I will not go into the sordid details of the child’s last moments, but I can say that whoever effected the capture did the society a great favour.
Yet this monster is only one. I was in office when a reporter showed me photographs of a burn victim. The woman was so badly burnt that the doctors have concluded that she cannot live. Her eyes were burnt out of her skull and there was no part of her body that was not destroyed.
On Friday, I was surprised when the reporter told me that she spoke. The initial reaction was that the woman had set herself on fire. Immediately, I concluded that she had to be a mad woman. I was wrong. When the woman spoke on Friday she said that her paramour was the one who set her alight.
I am not a violent person, but immediately I wished all kinds of horror on the beast who could do that to any human being, much less a woman who shared his bed and was prepared to bear his children. The man is in custody and he is going to be treated humanely because the United Nations Human Rights Convention so dictates. Society is going to give him the chances he never gave the woman. And I will be among those who will be paying for his comfort.
The most vivid example of the vampire being invited was reflected in the case of the Buxton woman who was dismembered. This woman actually invited her killer into her home and had him doing work around the place. She provided him with food and shelter.
The society is still stunned. Decency prevented the media from displaying the grisly sight that the killer left. In any case, sometimes I conclude that there are people in the society who are farces. They want to pronounce on cruelty, but they refuse to see the extent of the cruelty. The jurors who are going to pronounce on the killer will never see the scene that caused the man from being taken before them.
And to think that the police were hunting this man. His photograph was never posted to alert people. It was the same with the Kaneville killer who managed to flee to Berbice to live a normal life until he died in a car accident. He too was living among people who never suspected that he was a wanted man.
Of course his relatives would have known, but as my mother would say, “Every hen cares for her chick.” The mother would not have given up her dearly beloved son who was a borderline saint in her eyes. I am left to wonder if she would bury him.
And no more than a month ago someone killed a 14-year-old girl and left her naked body on the Kitty foreshore. At 14 a child has not even begun to appreciate the joys of youth which one writer said, is wasted on the young.
There have been other cases of cruelty that were so shocking that people were actually able to push the information from their minds. During the crime wave, there was the case of gunmen chasing a man who sought to go up the stairs of a woman he didn’t even know. Suffice it to say, the woman did not know him and did not open her doors. The gunmen caught up with this fellow and killed him.
We had the case of bodies being burnt in a car trunk. This was so shocking that people did not talk about it until someone would remind them a few years later.
There was the man, who for what he called love, brutally killed some people including the man who was said to be sleeping with his estranged wife. This man killed a little girl by severing her head; he killed her grandmother, and he narrowly missed the woman because despite being severely injured, she kept her cool and hid under a step while the killer stood above her looking into the darkness for her.
When one thinks of such cruelty one is astounded that people could descend to such levels. There is another matter before the courts but I cannot help but comment. There was this man who had a problem with his wife who left home to go about her business.
The man become so incensed that he whipped out a cutlass and slaughtered his children as they slept. Even as I write I shudder, because I have children of my own, and at no time when I saw them sleeping was there anything but love in my heart.
I got news that the prisoners exacted some revenge on this man when he joined them in Camp Street. While there has been no word, I am certain that the man who killed the nine-year-old has either got his dose or will soon, no matter what.
And what makes matters even scarier is that there are still many monsters in our midst. Two men had their throats slit on the seawalls. Their killers are still at large despite the passage of some years. And we wonder why people hasten to leave this land which can offer so much, but for the absence of protection.
Listen to the man that is throwing Guyanese bright future away
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