At Least They're Committed

The police gave me a description before they’d been able to ID her: Brown or red hair, about 5-2, maybe 14 to 17 years old.

Then they ID’d her: Blond hair, about 5-9, in her late 20s.

Yeah, Shayanne was that messed up.

The people who found her thought at first she was a mannequin; a sick twisted ploy to frighten the homeless who dwelled in the 12 feet between the railroad track and the loading dock in Alamosa. She wasn’t. It wasn’t. She was stabbed 127 times in the upper body.

I didn’t see her. Not much of her anyway. My clout as editor of the tiny newspaper didn’t extend quite that far. One of the lieutenants, when he saw me approaching, camera in hand, pushed his way through the mob. He was nearly tripping over people trying to get to me.

“Trust me on this one, kiddo, trust me please,” I’ll always remember the look on his face. “You don’t want to see this and you don’t need to. We don’t want to, but we got to. Trust me.”

From the angle I was at, peeking through the crowd of local, state police, the coroner, bystanders and so on, all I saw was the crown of Shayanne’s head, or at least that’s what I think it was.

As was my routine, I took crowd shots. Evidently criminals do return to the scene but they don’t stick around long when police photogs are taking pics of anything other than the immediate crime scene. I never bought into the “journalists and cops at odds” nonsense, so we worked together. They gave me everything they could and some awesome leads; I gave them my photos.

That time, my shots showed nobody we didn’t know. The next day I talked to the lieutenant on the phone.

(I’d already been chided by a reader who was outraged that I’d called the victim a “girl” instead of a “woman.” When we’d gotten the ID late in the day, I’d quickly updated the story, but golly, having worked 14 hours on this, I’d missed that edit. Stupid reader. A young woman is brutally murdered and she’s going off on me over her personal, overblown feminist perception? And wtf is wrong with being called a “girl?” I actually like being called a girl, well, Little Girl to be exact.)

Anyway, back to the local PD.

“Nothing in the pics?”

“Just you guys,” I said. “I heard it was Charlie M@#$%^*& though.” (Pardon the faux name; don’t want this guy to get out, hunt me down and kill me; got kids to raise and all that.)

“Oh yeah? We might have heard that, too; who’d you hear it from?”

I don’t remember now who I’d heard it from. Ruth, maybe, who probably heard it from her brother who was troubled and eventually ended up killing someone in a bar fight.

A couple years later, they convicted Charlie M@#$%^*& in Shayanne’s murder. He was her boyfriend at one point and, upon being released from prison, enacted his revenge on her because she’d ‘cheated’ on him with a woman, who also was implicated as an accomplice. He’d slit her throat then stabbed her repeatedly. I was never clear on what role the girlfriend played, maybe just along for the ride so the victim’s lovers could confront her together.

Regardless, it was sad and it was bloody and it always amazes me the fucked up messes we get ourselves into.