Maybe you grew up in a small town like I did; my village was population 600 souls. Maybe in your hometown, like mine, truth is sometimes definitely stranger than even NON-fiction.
Story Number One
This week in the hometown, everyone is talking about Hundred Cat Lady. This poor soul, an ‘old before her time’ 59 year old woman out in the Township, was found to have 85 cats, two dogs, and… well, 30 additional cats.
Not sure who counted the animals, but the last 30 cats were all made up into TV dinners. Ok, ok, they weren’t made into TV dinners. But they were in the food freezer. Dead.
“As for the frozen cats,” she said, “[I] decided to go that route when a cat would die because a neighbor had complained about them.”
Neighbors complained…that is, about the dead cats, one would presume. But maybe don’t ask too much further because it’s possible that before ‘freezer perpetuity’, the deceased cats might have been laid out on the hood of cars on front lawn, you know, to kind of desiccate before being burying?
…Or they could have been laid out nicely around the concrete bird bath. Or else. Trust me, this is not disrespectful. Where I come from, dead animal decor abounds.
So, the sentencing judge today said the poor woman can’t possess any cats while she’s on probation. The two dogs have been returned to her. She’ll be required to receive counseling. She must pay $600 in fees and court costs. And, she must make $10,237 restitution.
Dang. It’s hard to imagine if you haven’t the money to take adequate care of 85 cats and two dogs, and God forgive me, the monthly electric on the box freezer… that you’ll soon find over 10 Grand to pay the courts. If that isn’t evidence that in odd corners of our great nation judicial sentencing is not always realistic.
Story Number Two
Also back to home this week, people are excited about a brand new twist on an old story that used to scare the ‘A, B and C-jeezus out of us when we were little kids.
A woman by the name of Belle Gunness had lived not that far down the highway across the farm roads. She was not a good-looking woman people said. She was in the habit of advertising in the big city Norwegian papers over in other states, saying she was a rich widow looking for a husband.
When a prospective “catch’ would write to her, she’d woo them and then convince them to sell everything and bring themselves and their cash to come live with her.
Thus, the groom-to-be came out to her farm, and she’d live with him a while. Then, she’d kill him.
Then she’d run another ‘rich widow’ ad. Then another man would show up with his life savings. Same. Same. Then she’d run another ad. This went on and on. Until people became suspicious. I know, I know, sounds like people were really slow on the uptake, but back then in that part of the country, it wasn’t that people were slow.
It was that they bent over backward to try to ‘mind their own business,’ which meant looking away a lot. A good thing perhaps. But, often, in terms of inhumane cruelty to others, and worse…not good. Not good at all.
But Belle Gunness murderer is not what people are talking about back home this week. They’re talking about a group of graduate students from up to the University of Indianapolis who recently “worked into the night,” to exhume the century-old remains of Belle Gunness.
They will use DNA from the remains and DNA from envelopes of letters written by Gunness to see if they match.
Belle Gunness and three beautiful young children died in a fire in the farmhouse in 1908. But the rumor has persisted that she staged that, and was seen getting on the west-bound train that same night of the fire, that the adult corpse in the fire had no head.
It gets worse.
Digging in her garden, they found 40 corpses… men who came to her farm to be her grooms. And one young female, a niece that Gunness had told others had ‘gone away,’ when in fact the niece had began telling others that men were disappearing in the night out at the Gunness farm.
The whole thing still gives me ‘the full Williams,’ because where I grew up farmers sometimes sat on their porches with shotguns over their knees just daring anyone to trespass on their property, threatening to shoot them dead if anyone defied them…
and there were plenty of bad characters who came off the freight trains half a minute down the road…
there were children who drowned and disappeared under the ice, and just plain disappeared…
and, in further child knowings, often in the woods where we played, we found all manner of weird stuff, clothing and shoes and bottles and purses and mirrors and other things that poor folk would never leave behind–
So, not counting some of our parents’ pronouncements “I brought you into life and I can take you out too in a Chicago minute”… well, surrounded by so many stories of threat and mayhem, we were always convinced that murderers were either afoot in the woods and field, or else ready to drop from like human bats from the hay bales in the barns or from the old oaks overhanging creek banks.
And that’s why a visit to the small northwoods ‘historical museum’ that told Belle Gunness’s story in horrible photographs, imprinted all of us when we were kids. It just verified what we already feared: that there were normal looking humans, who weren’t human.
But, back to the future, for reallies, today, the LaPorte County Historical Society Museum noted that they are very proud to now have real “pieces of Belle Gunness’ casket that were dug up during the exhumation.”
One thing is pretty sure: If the people of our hometown are weird, sweet, crazy people and saints, an insane person or two, that might be one of the few ways we know we’re back again, just for a moment, in that home place where stories are often, truly, stranger than even SCIENCE fiction.
CODA
Here is the page on Belle Gunness from the Historical Society which sweetly and sincerely warns, “The following two photos are rather gruesome.” It also carries the picture of a local cutie smiling while posing before the murder artifacts… People from small towns will understand this seeming disparity.
http://www.laportecountyhistory.org/belleg1.htm
