by DL Benning
Despite her independence, M never missed a Sunday family dinner. She loved seeing her family. Her mother made the same creamy food every time. The family would eat together and play cards. Then M and her sisters would gather upstairs and share stories with each other. Her sisters looked up to her and wanted to be just like her. They were all dancers, but never with as much love and passion as M. They longed to live on their own and work. Maybe even move in with M someday. M would laugh at them and tell them to keep dreaming.
Their father was a solemn man. They were not sure why he was so quiet, but he seemed sad. Often on these Sunday visits, he would look at M and then at her mother with disappointment. He felt M should be living at home. He disapproved of her living as a single woman and wanted her to find a husband. She was the oldest, and he felt she should set a better example for her sisters.
“Oh, Daddy, you are so old fashioned!” she would tease him.
Sundays went by quickly. M enjoyed her visits, but was always excited to get back to her new life with her friends. The girls loved making plans and talking about their upcoming weeks. Some weeks, they would prepare for the monthly trip to their favorite dance hall.
The dance hall was a large brick building. Inside was a dark, wooden dance floor. Large, dark wood beams lined the room’s perimeter. Fifteen round and rectangular tables with mismatched chairs surrounded the dance floor. Two refreshment tables offered snacks, punch, and coffee for patrons to purchase. In the back of the hall, a small bandstand sat mostly empty while records played the night’s music. But once a month, a local band would deliver a live performance.
Every weekend night, the dance hall would be packed with people who enjoyed dancing and socializing. Once a month, the girls would be among the crowd, dressed up and dancing together. One warm September night, the girls walked in to find their favorite band playing. The girls quickly set down their purses and headed straight to the dance floor.
At the end of the night, as M was putting on her coat to leave, a well-dressed, slim, and attractive young man approached her. He asked her not to leave because they hadn’t danced together yet. He introduced himself as Fred. He said he had wanted to talk to her all evening, but she was always dancing and surrounded by people.
She was flattered by the stranger’s approach but politely declined. Her friends were already at the door, watching her impatiently. They giggled and yelled to her, “Come on, M, we have to get home. It’s getting late.”
M headed to the doorway to meet her friends. She looked back at Fred. He seemed sad, so she promised she would look for him next time. Out the door the girls all went, giggling and dancing out to the sidewalk.
In M’s free time, she loved learning new things. The local library was close to the boarding house. She loved to read and had been going to this same library her entire life. It was at this library where M met Clark, a handsome, tall man with thick, dark, wavy hair and tanned skin. Clark was a service man and wearing his uniform that day. He politely approached M as she made her way to the check-out desk. He introduced himself, and they talked quietly for a few minutes. She was very flattered by his interest and caught herself blushing. After an awkward pause, she excused herself to check out her books.
Inside, she was bursting with excitement. Who was this handsome man named Clark, and why was he interested in her? She wondered how—or if—she would see him again. What a story she had to tell the girls at the boarding house!
As she stepped outside the library, there was Clark waiting for her. He was smoking a cigarette and smiling at her. She shyly walked up to him. He asked if he could walk a pretty girl home. Inside her head, she was screaming, He called me pretty!
“Sure,” she said, shrugging and giddy.
They exchanged general introductions as they walked to her house. Stopping at the bottom step of the big boarding house, Clark asked her if she would like to see a movie with him Friday night. She accepted. He would pick her up at 6:30. She watched him walk down the sidewalk. When he got to the street, he turned around to smile at her. She felt a rush of excitement and ran upstairs to tell the girls.
Once Clark and M started dating, they became inseparable. Clark was a great dancer, just like M. They frequented the local dance club. He took her to new and different places, too. They always had great fun.
Clark was tall and successful, M said. He wanted to become an officer when he returned from his overseas tour of duty. Clark was quite taken with M, and she felt the same way. He eventually had to go back to his post, but they wrote to each other every day. She felt like she was cheating on him if she went out without him. The letters kept them connected, both impatient for his next leave.
One day M came home from work to find a telegram from Clark’s parents. Clark had been killed in a bad Jeep accident while he was on duty. She was devastated. She went to the funeral and wept for weeks that turned into months.
The girls kept asking her to come back to the dance hall. They were worried about her and kept trying to get her to go out with them. They didn’t want to leave her home alone to cry over Clark’s picture. One night, after some pleading from the girls, she reluctantly surrendered. She hoped the music and the dancing might be healing for her.
M didn’t really care much about anything these days. She went to work every weekday, visited her family’s house every Sunday, and cried herself to sleep most nights. She daydreamed about what could have been with Clark. M was lonely and depressed.
One night that winter, the girls’ car broke down on the side of the road. Fred, the shy young man M had met last September, stopped to help them. He was kind, and M was grateful; they all were. From that evening on, Fred would talk to them whenever he would see them at the dance hall.
Weeks before Easter, there was a special spring dance at the dance hall. As the girls got settled in at their table, Fred approached them. He made a joke about their car trouble and playfully boasted about how his mechanic skills had come in handy. Then he invited M to dance with him. She accepted. They talked a bit throughout the evening—idle chitchat about the dance, their jobs, and their families. She liked him, but he was no Clark. She couldn’t imagine Fred as a suitor—he was almost three inches shorter than she was!
M suddenly realized she wasn’t feeling well. She was sitting quietly at the table. Fred seemed to notice and offered to drive her home. M was ready to leave. She told her friends goodbye and left. None of the girls seemed worried about her. They were having too much fun, and they knew Fred would get her home safely.
Fred drove her home and walked her to the door. When they reached the door, Fred leaned in for a kiss. M declined and pushed him away. She started sobbing and told him about Clark. Fred seemed to understand her pain, and he quietly walked to his car and left.
M kept going to the dance hall but stopped seeing Fred there. She was a little embarrassed about rejecting his kiss and then sobbing to him about Clark. She thought maybe he had left town or found a girlfriend. She didn’t think about it too much. He was a regular, and she hadn’t seen him, but that was okay.
At the law firm, M was offered a bigger role in the secretarial staff. The boss thought she had a lot of potential and wanted to promote her to a position as his private secretary. She loved the offer of advancement and accepted quickly. This was a huge promotion! The girls were excited for her and teased her, saying that she was the boss’s girlfriend. M said they were being silly. She told them it was about her efforts as a secretary, and that was all. One night, her boss asked her to work late. Then he made an advance that she was barely able to escape.
Shaken from the incident, M began to walk home. Fred happened to be driving by and stopped to see if she was okay. He was angry about what had happened to her. She agreed to let him drive her home.
Shortly after the encounter with her boss, M quit her job and decided to move back home for a while. Her parents weren’t sure what had happened but welcomed her with open arms. She missed her job and her friends, but
she liked being home. It was a safe place.
She applied for a job at a women’s clothing store and got the position. The pay wasn’t great, but she needed money. From time to time, she’d run into Fred outside the store. M didn’t think much about it. Fred seemed nice enough, and she thought he was funny.
One day on her lunch break from work, M noticed Fred at the restaurant counter. She smiled and waved hello. He walked over and asked if he could join her for coffee. She offered him a seat. Fred complimented her locket and said he noticed she was always wearing it. M told him the story about her father giving it to her after a dance recital when she was a young girl. Fred seemed really interested, like he enjoyed hearing the story. A little later in the conversation, he invited her to lunch the following week, and she accepted.
This went on for a while. M never saw Fred as a boyfriend and didn’t think he thought of her as more than a friend. Her girlfriends thought the friendship was weird. They didn’t think it was a coincidence the two kept running into each other. M just laughed it off.
One rainy afternoon, M wasn’t prepared for the weather. She had walked to the library without her umbrella. Eager to get out of the rain on her way home, she ducked into the local coffee shop. Fred was at the counter. M saw him but chose a booth by herself—she was just waiting for the rain to stop so she could be on her way home. She took off her scarf and gloves and stirred milk into her coffee. Fred saw her and came over to say hello. He asked if he could join her. She was feeling a bit lonely, so she said yes. They talked for a while, about nothing in particular. Just friendly, polite conversation. The rain had gotten heavier, and the sky was dark. They talked awhile longer. When the rain started to ease up, M was ready to go.
She had lost track of time, and it was getting dark. She knew she should be home for dinner, and Fred offered to drive her home. He had a bluish car with paneling on the sides. The car was old but seemed like it was in okay condition. He opened her door, and she thanked him. He headed toward her house, but he passed her street. She told him he had missed his turn. He said he knew but wanted to show her something first. She didn’t think much of it. Maybe he wanted to take her by his house or something.
Fred kept driving and started going faster. It was raining harder now. M was starting to get concerned. He was heading for the country, and this didn’t feel right to her. They drove down an unfamiliar road that led right into the woods. M started talking faster; she could tell she was nervous. Fred kept saying he had something to show her. She couldn’t see the road anymore and asked if they could go back, that she really needed to get home.
He said, “Oh, come on. I need to show you something.”
He slammed the car into park and threw himself on top of her, straddling her body. He was trying to kiss her. She turned her face back and forth and started screaming, trying desperately to push him off her. He kept coming back for more. She scratched at his face and hit him with both her fists. She tried to get out of the car but couldn’t find the door handle.
Fred’s eyes filled with fury. He started ripping her clothes off while trying to put his lips on hers. M kept pushing him off. He shoved her back down onto the seat. In the struggle, her head fell off the seat, hanging down towards the floor mat. He grabbed her head and forced her to kiss him. She wouldn’t give in—she kept trying to fight him off. She tried several times to scream, but the words would not come out. He kept pushing his face on hers. She twisted her body every which way, struggling to get out from under him. He was small but strong.
He kept saying, “Come on, M. Come on.”
Then he grabbed her neck with both hands to subdue her. She quit fighting almost instantly. Fred thought she had passed out. Lost in rage and fueled by lust, he seized upon M’s inability to resist him. He raped her. Afterwards, he laid on top of her, smacking her face, hoping she might wake up. When she didn’t move or open her eyes for several moments, Fred realized that she was not breathing. M was dead. He panicked and scrambled out of the car.
He started yelling, “Oh no, oh no, oh God no! What have I done?”
Fred ran to the trunk and found an old blanket. He wrapped M’s half-dressed body in it and dragged her into the woods.
Mud, overgrown bushes, and the surrounding wetlands seemed to conspire against him. He was slipping all over as he struggled to pull her body into the woods. He made his way to a muddy, isolated area and dropped her there. He ran as quickly as he could back to his car. He was soaked from the rain, and his clothes were dripping with mud. Fred felt crazed. He was shaking, afraid and confused. He didn’t mean to kill her, he didn’t. He kept saying that to himself—he didn’t understand where all his rage had come from.
Fred drove back to town in a hurry, despite the rain. As he was getting out of the car at home, he noticed something shiny on the passenger-side floor mat. M’s locket. He panicked, grabbed it, and shoved it into his front right pants pocket. He wanted to cry. He wanted to tell someone but knew he couldn’t. It had to be a secret.
Inside the house, Fred’s mother was waiting for him. She wanted to know where he had been, and why he was so wet and muddy. She asked him what had happened to his face; it looked scratched and had been bleeding. Fred ignored his mother’s questions. He was still trying to grasp what had just happened and didn’t answer her. She complained about making dinner and not feeling appreciated by him. He was not interested in talking or eating, but he did. He didn’t know what to do, so he pretended nothing was wrong. He moved the food around on his plate and then went upstairs to his room.
When his mother went to sleep, Fred made his way to the basement. He took the locket out of his pocket and shoved it into a cigar box for safe keeping. He crept back upstairs and lay awake in bed, replaying what had happened with M.
Days and nights went by. Fred went to work and came straight home. One evening, his mother was listening to the radio, and M’s name came up as a missing person.
“I wonder what happened to that girl,” she said to Fred.
He shrugged his shoulders and played dumb. “I don’t know,” he replied.
The next day, Fred came home from work and noticed a police car in the driveway. He went around back and overheard the detective asking his mother if he was home. She said no. The detective explained that they had questions for him, that he was seen having coffee with the missing woman. They wondered if he had any information about the night she disappeared. A few hours later, he sat down with his mother to eat dinner. He didn’t ask about the police being there, and she never brought it up.
A few weeks later, some young boys were playing in the woods and found a dead woman’s body. They were scared and ran home to tell their parents what they had found. Their parents immediately called the police. The police scoured the area, took pictures, and collected whatever evidence they could find. They cataloged the blanket, the ripped clothes, the blood and skin under the victim’s fingernails. It was M’s missing body.
The detective returned to Fred’s address. He asked for Fred, but his mother explained that he was still at work. When Fred got home, she told him that a detective had come looking for him. Fred played it cool, but his mother knew by his reaction that something was off with him. She asked him why the detective would have come to talk to him. Fred was as cool as a cucumber.
“I don’t know why,” he said, “but I’ll go to the police station and find out.”
Fred left the house for a while. His mother thought he had gone to see the police, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t get M off his mind and decided to drive by the woods. He wanted to go in and look at where he left her body, but he couldn’t. He was scared and felt terrible. He kept replaying that evening in his mind, over and over. He didn’t know why he had turned into a monster. He was ashamed and felt guilty.
M’s spirit would appear to Fred in the night. She didn’t come to him to scare him, but to tell him she was okay. She was in heaven with Clark, and all was well. Fred was really spooked by this. He would lie
in bed at night and wonder whether M was really there in the room, or if his imagination was running wild.
The detective came back for a third time to find and question Fred about the murder. This time, he asked him to come into the station. Fred and his mother, who was annoyed that this detective would not leave her precious Frederick alone, drove to the station together.
The detective interviewed Fred. He asked Fred how he knew the victim. He asked about Fred’s whereabouts the day of the girl’s disappearance. Fred was vague and said he could not remember. Then the detective confronted him. Fred was seen having coffee with M the afternoon that she disappeared. The detective showed both of them the blanket that was wrapped around the dead body. Fred’s mother recognized it—it was hers! She stayed very silent. She stayed silent forever and never, ever discussed it with him. Fred’s mother was now certain Fred knew more than he was sharing, but she also could not imagine her beloved Frederick killing someone, especially a young woman.
Fred was nervous. The detective knew he had more information about the killing.
He looked Fred straight in the eye and said, “You know what happened that night, and so do I. I will find a way to give this woman and her family justice.”
Fred remained unfazed on the exterior but scared to death on the inside. He left there quietly, and guarded his secret for many, many years.
—Chapter 5—
Carol
Carol grew up near Hammond, Indiana, in a middle-class family of seven. Like almost everyone that lived in northwest Indiana in those days, her dad worked long hours in the steel mill to provide for his family. Carol’s mother was a housewife.
Her parents had met at the steel mill’s annual company picnic. It was love at first sight for her father, who fell madly in love with his “city girl” from Chicago. This nickname lasted throughout their whole marriage. Their courtship was very short, and they married the same year they met.
