hit him with the paperweight. I’m pretty sure I did that just as he turned back toward my little pile of rocks and started to stand up. It all happened so fast. I was so frightened. I knew he was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him, but I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing.”
Crandall went on to say that she did not own a gun. Her deceased husband, Roscoe “Deck” Decker, had told her that a gun is liable to be seized by an attacker and used against the victim. “In a surprise attack,” he told her, “you won’t be able to find and fire the gun before he sees what you’re doing and grabs it.” Prior to his death, Crandall’s husband had disposed of his own gun collection for her protection. And even if there had been a gun in the house, she explained, she wouldn’t have thought to get it before entering the garage. She hadn’t expected any of this. It was just some kind of nightmare.
When the man toppled over and didn’t get up, she thought he was faking. She thought that as soon as she moved, he’d spring up, roaring. She said she stopped breathing. She said she lost control of her bladder standing there, frozen with terror in the slice of light from her kitchen door. But the man didn’t move. Finally she kicked his shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she forced herself to feel his neck for a pulse. There was none. She knew he was dead.
I poured another cup of coffee and made a few notes. So far the woman’s story seemed implausible yet very familiar. It was every woman’s nightmare; the reason women fear noises in the dark. Rape, defilement, brutal death. This is the repetitive mantra bequeathed to us from hairy ancestors, cousins to chimps, gorillas, and humans. A glance at any chimp enclave, with the exception of the matriarchal bonobos, will reveal the source of the nightmare. Male chimps randomly batter females to ensure wholesale female subordination. And when she’s in estrus a female who refuses sexual penetration by a male may be beaten to death by him as his companion males hoot and whistle and hop about. A glance at any newspaper will reveal that the nightmare has not been extinguished in human enclaves, either.
It’s not hard to trace the primate archetype. It’s there. But humans are different from other primates in numerous ways. One of them is that the human female, unlike her chimpanzee sister, is not statistically likely to be bludgeoned and raped by a gang of strangers creeping across the landscape beyond her dwelling. That popular terror is the shadow of our past, although it can and does still happen. More often now, the human female will be bludgeoned, raped, and possibly killed by a male who is no stranger. A male she knows and may even like. A male who believes that he must control her, that he owns her.
Muffin Crandall’s story with its rock-wielding monkey ghost played to the old brain. I wondered whether she knew that. Then I wondered how she’d explain the heavy-duty trash bag and the years that had elapsed since that night in her garage.
“I don’t know why I did what I did then,” Crandall’s statement went on. “It was like I was in a trance or hypnotized. I don’t remember thinking anything except ‘Nobody can know. You’ve got to hide the body. Nobody can find out or you’ll die!’ ”
The remark brought me up short. I dreamed once that I had killed a man and hidden his body in a little-used closet beneath the stairs of an old house I shared with four other graduate students. The man looked strangely like Beethoven. And the dream bore that certainty of not being a dream, of being an absolute reality somewhere other than the waking state. I sat up drenched in sweat and locked in such agonizing fear that ten digital minutes traveled through my bedside clock before I could move. And there was a slurred chirping in my head, like a distant siren. I knew the sound meant the body would be found and I would be killed.
Muffin’s words echoed my dream, which I later learned is a common delusion in women at a certain stage in the progression of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. A terror of being put to death for killing a man may lie encoded in every female brain. It may be released by the neural plaques and tangles of brain disease or the nightly neurological housecleaning which results in dreams. Muffin Crandall’s narrative began to assume a particularly interesting framework. If it was the fabrication her brother believed it to be, it was brilliantly done.
“I tied him up with part of the clothesline I have in the garage for drying rugs and things I don’t want to put in the dryer,” her story went on. “I still wasn’t really sure he was dead, but even if he was I wanted him tied up. Somehow I knew I had to get rid of the body right away or I’d die. Don’t ask me how I knew that, or where the thought came from. I just knew that.”
Crandall’s story went on to describe her various approaches to removing the body. Getting it into the kitchen would be no problem, but cutting it up seemed too disgusting. Besides, the garbage disposal could not be employed out of fear that its excessive use at that hour would attract the attention of neighbors, or that “something would get stuck” and require a repairman.
Deck Decker had been a sportsman prior to his death at fifty-three from a massive heart attack two years before his widow’s encounter with a stranger in her garage. He maintained the rented locker near Borrego Springs for game he killed and stored for home use. At the time of his death the locker was only partially stocked. Muffin Crandall said she kept up the rental fees and made regular trips to the locker, both using the game left by her husband and restocking the space with bulk-buy bargains and gifts of fish and meat from her husband’s friends. She said she was used to making trips to the locker, and the idea of freezing the body “just seemed natural.”
Long before sunrise on that night five years in the past, she had trussed the body in a fetal position, gotten it into a trash bag, and transported it to the Roadrunner cold storage facility. Muffin said she may have spoken to friends on the phone the next day, but she didn’t remember. She said that no one was present at Roadrunner when she used the freezer’s hand cart to stash the new package behind boxes containing eighty pounds of chicken wings she’d purchased for a civic theater fund-raising picnic. She said the only thing she remembers from that time is terror, but after leaving the freezer, “it was as if none of it had really happened.”
“When I’d try to think about it, think about taking that bag out and getting rid of it someplace, the fear would come back,” she said. “It would just fill me up like black, cold ink in a bottle. My hands would shake and I’d want to throw up. I couldn’t even walk, it would be so bad. So I just kept paying rent on the locker and going out there with stuff, taking stuff out to use. I knew someday I’d have to do something, but I just couldn’t think about it.”
Diminishing the rest of Dan’s material, I opened a new file. “Crandall, Muffin—Initial Profile,” I centered in fourteen-point type. Then I typed a list of factors which seemed, even at this point, potentially significant:
1) Subject a fifty-six-year-old widow at time of the assault, uses her own surname rather than her husband’s.
2) Subject apparently living alone at time of assault, but maintains frozen food locker for bulk quantities of food. Why?
3) Subject does not mention children, friends, or family other than her deceased husband. Odd. Women typically refer to social cohorts in all narratives.
4) Subject displays a thorough comprehension of archetypal primate female fear in her narrative, leaving out no element but rape. Nowhere does she admit to fearing rape, only murder. This deletion from the usual fear profile is significant.
5) What was weight and physical condition of subject five years ago? Now?
6) What is estimated weight and physical condition of victim at time of assault?
7) Subject presents as self-sufficient and capable, yet permits herself to be called “Muffin.” Check origin of this nickname.
8) Subject mentions that bulk chicken wings in her locker were for a civic theater fund-raiser. What civic theater? How was she connected to it? Who else was connected to it? Does it still exist?
9) Subject’s deceased husband, Deck. Who was he, what did he do, what was the marriage like, and how did she cope with his death? Children of this marriage? Previous marriages?
10) What was/is her source of income? Education? Avocations?