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FIRST PERSON Letter to Christi’s Killer

You know who you are, and someday, I will too.
By BOB HOLLEMAN |

I THINK ABOUT YOU OFTEN, USUALLY

at the oddest moments-driving to the grocery, mowing the lawn, standing in line at (he bank. Your image unaccountably leaps to mind, produced by some randomly firing neuron in that section of my brain normally reserved for recurrent night terrors and childhood bogey-men. Since January 19,1985, you have never been far from my mind. That day is indelibly etched in my psyche. As it must be in yours, but, of course, for different reasons.

Let me introduce myself. I am a policeman-maybe you saw me on TV, babbling to some earnest reporter about “the incident.” At the time, I was a detective assigned to the Youth Division of the Mesquite Police Department. Since 1985 I have moved on to different police assignments-three years investigating child sex crimes took an emotional toll that is frankly inexpressible. But there are some cases one never truly relinquishes.

Our relationship began five years ago this month, at an apartment complex near Highway 80 in Mesquite. Two small girls were playing by a dilapidated fence at the rear of the complex when they were approached by a man. One girl walked away from the stranger. The other did not. Christi Lynn Meeks, age five, accompanied the man-you-to a small car parked nearby and climbed in.

Soon alarmed by their daughter’s absence, Christi’s parents located the girl’s young playmate, who innocently reported that Christi had “left with a man.” Police were called, and after preliminary investigation by patrolmen, I was notified.

The weeks and months that followed are forever embedded in my memory. You will pardon the cliche “emotional roller coaster,” but I have no other adequate means of describing the false starts, deadend leads, and blind alleys my colleagues and I encountered during that terrible time. And worn cliches do little to convey the anguish of parents simultaneously consumed with hope, horror, and dread.

Several months later, two fishermen noted what they thought was “a large bird” floating in an isolated cove of Lake Texoma. On closer examination, they discovered that the “bird” was actually the decomposed body of a small child. The body was eventually identifled as that of Christi Meeks, presumably drowned in the murky waters off Eisenhower State Park.

As a police investigator, 1 have been involved in the investigation of other murders-most of which are banal “Mom shoots Pop” affairs with little question as to the identity of the perpetrator. The taking of any human life is tragic. But it is different when a child is killed. I do not know if you understand tragedy in its truest sense: real, visceral tragedy. As yet having been spared the loss of loved ones, I must confess that I possessed only an academic comprehension of the term until January 1985-and the sense of tragedy I feel now is but a pallid approximation of that inflicted upon the parents of Christi Meeks.

You have educated me about other extreme emotions as well. As you might reasonably expect, I have a considerable amount of hatred for you.

And while you do not know me, I do know a little about you: your approximate age, height, weight, and hair color. These mundane details recorded on a crime report form the basis of our acquaintance. They represent the raw material, the monochromatic details from which we are expected to compose a completed portrait of you.

In any police investigation the “canvas” is added to by degrees. The bold brush strokes represent hard information gleaned from witnesses and physical evidence; the more subtle shadings are the result of experience in dealing with your kind.

As you are doubtless aware, your portrait is presently far from finished, but after several years of dealing with individuals who abuse, maim, and kill children, I have some inkling of your background. Laymen, repelled by the horror of these crimes, often have the mistaken impression that people like you bound fully grown from some wellspring of unfathomable evil. Some may even believe that an aberrant twisting of DNA doomed you to commit your offense.

I can only speculate as to the horrors of your youth. Perhaps the atrocities you endured fomented a rage so profound that you were compelled to repeat them, to “act them out,” as pop psychologists term it.

It is easy to be seduced by pity for you, to want to see you only as a product of a disordered and abusive environment. This provides an explanation for your crime. And people desperately seek explanations for such horrific crimes. But an explanation, no matter how rational, does little to alter the brutal reality of your offense. I am deeply sorry for you. But do not expect forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a measure of understanding and mercy 1 am unable to muster.

I often wonder how you feel, how you exist. 1 know you must fear the late-night knock at your door. The consuming dread must tear at you. Do you sleep soundly? Or have you awakened at some early morning hour, sweat-drenched, heart pounding, because of a child’s face thrust into your dreams? Do you remember? The face. That of a five-year-old girl.

That face will reappear again and again, perhaps sometimes accompanied by another face as well-one you might not recognize, a visage vaguely defined and hazily indistinct.

To suggest that your night terrors are caused by simple fear of capture does you an injustice; more sinister devils torture you. You have a conscience, albeit one stunted by abuse, and you know that you will be visited forever by an innocent, open, wondering face-and its avenging companion. Just as you are my nightmare, I am your.

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