The Strange Curse of Trailer 356

The strange curse of trailer 356

A Christian Tingler Detective Story

“The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done--these are traits of the human race at large.” --Mark Twain, Following The Equator

   I had disjointed pieces of it--out-of-sequence verbal histories, rumors, and even a few facts, but in the end it was The Colonel who helped me put it all together. What there was of it. I know there is more because there is always more. And that is why I waited until I had completed my own investigation before going to the Colonel--having it done would really free him up to finesse the details--do the gap-fill. He’d lived in Florida during the time when selling swampland was still good business--and beyond that had spent the last seventeen years in Siesta Village, the God-forsaken trailer park where the thing went down. A retired P-51 fighter pilot, he was now pushing eighty, and was a fountainhead of knowledge, including the kind of seamy, underbelly stuff you need to get your hands on when you’re trying to figure something out.

   My girlfriend Doreen “Sparkles” McDermott and I had rented one of the units that adjoined the park but wasn’t, thankfully, a part of it--making us exempt from their strange, but rarely-enforced regulations. The whole neighborhood was rife with drama and various kinds of small-time intrigue, and that made it a good place for picking up side business. It had the perfect mix: degenerates and grifters of every sort, bound, perpetually together in a gooey web of petty criminal behavior, toxic intake levels, and tragically weird social metaphysics. The few who were sane consisted mainly of the permanently-disabled and the retired, and they kept themselves well-bunkerized; it wasn’t the kind of place where you saw a lot of open windows--and if you did, it was probably because an air conditioning unit had been stolen out of it.

   The first thing was getting the lay of the land. What were these locals really up to? What were the games here, and who were the major players? We slapped the office together, including throwing up some basic surveillance gear. We had what was needed: outdoor web cameras, parabolic microphones, surplus night vision goggles, and the like. For reconnoitering missions, the requirements were simpler: a golf cart jacked up with a speed microchip, Bell & Howell “Sonic Ear” jacked into a clip-on digital recorder, Mini Maglite, cell phone, pepper-spray, and a Smith & Wesson tactical knife. The rest of it was just a matter of discretely inserting ourselves into the social mix. We didn’t have too many major problems, but there were a few incidents. For one thing, Sparkles tends to bring out the competitive worst in other women, who generally view her as a threat. She makes it clear that she doesn’t steal men, including toothless alcoholic ones, and such, but to no avail. The main reason she gets all that friction is men spend too much time staring at her tits. Once again, she was limited to only one female neighbor-friend: the rest began to refer to her as “that loud-mouth, fat-ass, hoity-toity bitch.” It settled down after a week or two and the deputies came out only a couple of more times than usual. The worst incident (involving me performing acceleration and maneuverability tests on an old Cadillac that we ended up buying) took a bit of doing to fix up, but you can always count on memory degeneration when you’re dealing with dope fiends and drunks. It rapidly faded into Park History; the kind of history that reminds you of a worn-out flophouse blanket.

   When you’re starting up an operation like this, the early moves are the important ones. The worst part is that you never have enough data to feel completely confident--the best you can do is go with your gut, and if you stray from that, you are surely going to get fucked, prison-style. Interaction with the natives has to be kept to a minimum, while at the same time establishing strategic alliances, if they are to be found. Communicating with these kind of people often comes down to a weird language comprised mostly of grunts, nods, and hand signals. Strange, hybrid dialects. You have to get a bead on the craziness.

   The entire place was overrun with cats, and that was so because the inhabitants had the habit of thinking that they owned them, yet didn’t. They would feed them, but not do anymore than that, other than to endure their progeny, and the fleas that came with them. Sparkles and I weren’t going to have that, which caused the tenants to revolt against us in a strange kind of unknowing. We knew that stray cats are miniature ecological nightmares, because they will eat anything in sight that is smaller than they are. We weren’t there long before a kindly neighbor (the only rational one I knew; a Colorado conspiracy theorist) alerted me about two dead ones dumped in the ditch in back of our trailer. One was an adult model, gray, with its innards ripped out. The other, a black kitten, bore no discernible marks, and the rigor had frozen both of them into hideous poses. The big one was showing its fangs, as if it had been about to attack, and the little one was left in fully-outstretched running mode. It appeared that the bodies had been dumped and positioned, just like some kinds of serial killers position bodies after they dispose of them in remote areas. It didn’t look right, not right at all. But one thing for sure: they had been marinating in the Florida heat, and by the time I found them, the stench of death was permeating my pad; you taste it more than you smell it. It takes over your entire system. Let’s just say that lunch was out of the question.

   Lee County, Florida, is not like what Northerners are used to, in a number of different ways, the least of which being how you deal with animal control. They do have an agency, and a very good one, but they are undermanned, under funded, and trying to keep hygiene on about 10,000 semi-domesticated creatures, insane owners, snakes, the occasional alligator, as well as various other types of fauna that remains, to this day, largely unclassified. You have options here. If you are comfortable with burial. The other is paying for a professional to come and fetch whatever diseased-ridden meat you have in your yard. There are a number of tertiary options, one of which I took. The pre-disposal process involved masks, shovels, and plastic bags, I will leave it at that. The flies continued to circle around the site, despite the removal of the corpora delicti and my endless bug-spraying. The garbage men didn’t have a good day, and the stench permeated all the way down Orange River Blvd.

   That moment was when I started, just barely, to get a feel for the Hell-Hole, and incidental research I was performing did not provide comfort.

Associated Press

updated 5:48 a.m. ET, Fri., March. 30, 2007

FORT MYERS, Fla. - Detectives are weighing several theories after the discovery of eight human skeletons in a remote wooded area. The remains might have been abandoned by a shady crematorium or come from an old cemetery. But authorities are most concerned about a possible serial killer.

The investigation into the bones has taken on the look of a "CSI"-style television mystery. A forensic anthropologist is studying the remains and reconstructing them like puzzle pieces. A botanist and an entomologist will examine plants and insects at the site to determine how long the skeletons have been there.

"If it was a body dump by a funeral home, they probably would have dumped them all in one place, and these are not on top of each other. They're spread around," said Karen Cooper, supervisor of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Fort Myers crime lab. "I think we're more likely dealing with a serial killer or something of that nature."

The skeletons were found down a dirt road in a brush-covered area just a few miles from downtown Fort Myers. The first was found March 23 by a surveyor checking the industrial site for potential development. Seven others were soon discovered in a 200-yard radius.

Flesh is gone
No clothing or personal items were found, and no flesh remained on the bones, which were believed to be from adults.

The skeletons were not buried but appear to have been placed on the ground. Cooper said the bones were also chewed by animals.

Police are keeping quiet to avoid scaring residents of this southwest Florida town known as a warm-weather haven for retirees and spring-breakers, and for white sugar-sand beaches and gently lapping Gulf of Mexico waters. "I've heard probably 10 different theories thrown around out here, everything from an old cemetery to some alien thing," said Lt. Brian Phillips, head of the major crimes unit for Fort Myers police. He stopped short of mentioning murder.

"Who knows what we'll find in the next week or so," Phillips said.

Heather Walsh-Haney, a forensic anthropologist from Florida Gulf Coast University, is helping reconstruct the skeletons to determine age, gender, race and cause of death. Investigators are looking for nicks and cuts on the bones that could have been made by a knife or a bullet.

Walsh-Haney said a cause of death will be difficult to determine without any tissue or organs, and it's unclear how long the bones have been there.

"In Florida, because of the humid environment, you can get to a skeleton within a few weeks," she said.

Experts say it's not uncommon for serial killers to dump their victims on the same site or in the same type of terrain.

Serial murderer graveyard?
Authorities would not speculate on whether they suspect the skeletons are connected to Daniel Conahan, who was sentenced to death in 1999 for the strangulation murder of a homeless man whose body was found in a swampy, wooded area north of Fort Myers.

Conahan is also suspected in a string of other slayings dubbed the Hog Trail Murders because of the wooded locations where the bodies were found in Charlotte County in the mid-1990s. Those cases remain unsolved.

   Meanwhile, business started to get pretty good, and not only that but I was pretty happy that I had disposed of the cat situation before Sparkles got a whiff of it, literally. Women have an extremely acute sense of smell, and, for many reasons, this gets in the way of things if a man is trying to simply make he, and his woman happy via the joys of primal coupling. We had found a few jobs, mostly involving providing media proving that one local or another was doing exactly to the other what the other had suspected--we gave them the assurance they needed, the kind that can only be provided by empirical data. Sometimes our fees were collected in cash, other times, in barter. Before we knew it, not only were we a bit flush, but were also being provided with various other types of compensation, including lawn-mowing, recreational substances, and random gifts, delivered by night onto the table sitting inside our lanai.

   But we couldn’t get the general pallor of things out of our minds, and it seemed that I couldn’t even get them fully out of my nostrils. That’s where things took the shift. That’s where my gut took notice and, after awhile, kept sending me a message I couldn’t ignore.

   In Southern Florida, the monkeys run wild and opposable finger joints are optional. Small, ad hoc liaisons of every sort exist, as well as do small, meanly-run tribes, and dedicated loners. It is, especially at night, a dangerous place and one of the only ways to avoid some funky shit happening has to do with how you carry yourself when you are walking around the territory. This place had started as an orchard, but the old man that had run it quickly surrendered the property, at which point it became the trailer-infested hobo jungle in which I now existed. It was a jungle, within a jungle, and there were all kinds of ways to get hurt. In essence, it was random chaos theory. My edginess began to increase.

   One thing I had noticed, during the course of my business undertakings, was one trailer that stood out strangely. That is a hard thing to come by, because almost all of them look that way, even to the well-accustomed eye. But this one had the odd, dead vibe to it--when you walked by it, the hot sick air seemed to just crush down on you. It made you want to move past it more quickly, for no reason. I took note of my feelings, even though they were unproven ones. I listen to my gut.

   It interested me further because it was pretty much the only case in which I knew nothing about who had, or currently, inhabited it. That was quickly solved one day. The fellow that lived there was very forthcoming, intelligent, friendly, when he introduced himself to me, as is generally the friendly manner of even the most psychotic of Floridians (we wave at each other, unlike Northerners who walk straight past, eyes locked forward). He seemed, to me, like an old, weird hippie. I like hippies; they know a lot more things than most people, plus, they tend to be more sharing and forgiving. On the other hand, the thing you have to know about the hippie movement is that the Peace and Love Generation was, and always will be, feeding ground for criminals that pass as hippies. That the acceptant nature of real Flower Children, loving and pure though it is, also makes them easy prey. Measure twice, cut once is my philosophy when required to make such evaluations. But this guy, Bobby Freeland, seemed to be just fine, in the end. I spent some time with him, and he gave me a few books, books from the Old School--Kerouac, and such. I gave him beers and cigarettes, because, like most hippies, he was usually broke. He said that he and his family owned a farm in Costa Rica. I eventually figured out that they had put him here and were paying him a stipend because they didn’t know what to do with him, being that he was so out of the mold of normal society.

   We both quickly came to the sad-but-true understanding that we were down to talking to each other, being that most of the people around us could not complete sentences nor read books. That they would consider it a good thing to be selected for the Jerry Springer Show. Even Sparkles, who is my muse and ultimate judge of character, liked him.

   The locals did not like that we were associating with him, and made that clear, as well as they could, given their generally indisposition to clear communication.

   Sparkles and I, though, started to notice a strange force that seemed to partially govern this man. He would do the strangest things, and defend them later with great passion. He was being worn down. On the other hand, he had strange telepathic abilities. He was a fairly strong “empath.” We liked him, and could see past all his misfortunes and sorrows. We liked him, even though he was so angry about his situation.

   Metaphysics is a strange thing-- even if one has spent years in attempting to understanding how it supposedly works. The Universe just works the way if fucking wants to: “As Is Above, So Is Below” in-fucking-deed. Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear<tm>.

   Where this man lived, this trailer, used to be inhabited by these two Brothers. I put it together after a time, but could only distill it to a few salient details. Like I said, it is disjointed. Like I didn’t say: most myths are based in fact, and you can take that one to the bank.

   One of the first things I did right after Sparkles and I arrived here was to run a search for sexual offenders. This, nowadays, is easily done. I found that two brothers (brothers, though they looked different and had different last names; brothers nonetheless) had inhabited the very trailer where Bobby Freeland now lived. These brothers had brought a young woman into this trailer, and had been convicted of two various charges, one worse than the other (one being battery).

   It was classic hill whack violence. I cannot say which one happened before the other--I can only deduce.

   It came to believe that, during the fight between the brothers, the one fact I knew came to hand: the older brother hacked off the arm of the other., by way of a machete. In fact, one way the Colonel had verified things so well for me was that he had managed to snag that before the cops got it--he plucked it out of the ditch where the older had tossed it. The Colonel is a practical man, and he had some brush to trim around his place. There is proof, and then there is proof, and this was more than enough for Sparkles and I. We traded the Colonel a carton of smokes for it and I mounted the thing above our loveseat.

   Certain forces of Evil lie just beyond a man’s control, and will continue to remain so. At this point, we did not know who was killing whom; all we knew was that there seemed to be a damn lot of it going on, and that is when you either bug out, or settle in for a fight.

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,"--Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV (Marcellus, having just seen the ghost of Hamlet's father, the late king of Denmark.)

   Sparkles and I concluded that whether you believe in ghosts, or not, whether you believe in the omnipresence of things, or not, you better trust your fucking guts--the alternative is finding them in a ditch somewhere. Whether it came from one hand, or many, the serial killer was still at loose, and his Name was Legion: he had propagated himself. There was a hot, sick wind blowing through this place, and it smelled like dead cat, this not being the only place where that was the case. There was no running. So, we battened down the hatches extra good, and waited to see what was going to happen next. I took the machete off the wall, and applied a fresh edge to its blade.

-To Be Continued-