Sadness, but also indignation

As I was spreading mulch yesterday, I was thinking a lot about the tragic development in the case of Jessie Davis, the missing pregnant woman from Canton, Ohio. Police have arrested her boyfriend -- himself a cop -- as well as a friend of his whom they claim helped him clean up the crime scene and dispose of the body. How a man could kill the woman who is nine-months' pregnant with his daughter, in front of his two-year old son, then call in help to drag the body away and leave the toddler to fend for himself is completely beyond me. But that is not the point of this post today. The point is this: Bastard took Jessie to the Summit County Metro Parks, within the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and buried them ("them" includes the unborn child, who had been named Chloe). I drive through this very section of the Park each day on my way to work -- incuding, of couse, the past week, during which time I've been listening to the news on the radio about the search for Jessie, all the while driving right past her "grave."

So. As I filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of mulch and hauled it around the house to my backyard, I started thinking about the sick and horrifying case of the father who killed his kids along the Ohio Turnpike, exited the road and buried them in my hometown -- where they remained, undiscovered for two years, as a national search went on around us.

I started to get mad. How dare these twisted fuckers use my hometown and my national park as the burial grounds for their innocent girlfriends and children? How dare they commit such horrible crimes and bring their own brands of hideousness to our pristine and idyllic spaces? This is not to imply that one's anger should be directed solely at the detail of where the bodies were disposed. I know this is not all about me, or the way I feel about my hometown and my national park (and yes, it is mine, in the way that it is all of ours who pay taxes). I understand that the greater outrage here are the crimes themselves, not the location where the criminal tried to hide the evidence.

But still. I look at the road in Hudson where that father buried his kids, and I look at the gorgeous Metro Parks where Jessie and Chloe were dumped, and I can't help but think that nobody and nothing deserves this. Woman and child, or landscape, flora and fauna.