pepper 34
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- May 17, 2016
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I fear that what comes out at trial will be ghastly beyond words. It's already all ghastly, but for me there's a looming sense of awfulness like the leaden antifreeze-green sky before unspeakable weather. I don't normally follow true crime. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. Because, I'm a domestic violence survivor. Not at the hands or the mind of a spouse, but at those of a family member. True crime isn't my thing because for decades I lived true crime - if that makes any sense. I could have been, in the end, one of those family headlines. I'm safe now, because he is dead, happily, from a pickled liver. Yay! But - when I saw Leonard Manley, from the beginning - clear, honest, endearing - he's like a lot of old-timers I knew when I was a kid in New England in the late '50s-early '60s - all long long gone now . There's a clarity to these people. The reporters asking him "how he felt" - he finally, exasperated, said, "We lost eight people!" He didn't say, "Can't you understand?" But he'd have been justified had he done so. I knew people like Leonard when I was a kid, then later in other places as an adult. They have a refreshingly short rope for nonsense. You can lean on them. They might live in tin shacks but you can lean on them. Between the sheer logistical insanity of the crime and my instant identification with what I saw of some of the extended family, I never could take my eyes away from the thing. Defense may well try to chuck the Rhodens under the character bus but as others have noted it will backfire if they do. I daresay perhaps the Wagners thought that no one would care about this crime and these people. Think again. I've awoken in the dark to a family member standing over me with a gun or kitchen knife in hand. I know what that moment, those moments are. They are beyond description. Time elongates, stretches out like a rubber band, you think of the dark and its comforts and the stars and how these have just been perverted into a nightmare and how this is the end and you shall shortly travel into those stars forever. And what it takes, for the person doing it to do it, is the absolute vacating of one's soul, assuming one is present to begin with - because you look, and see this, in their eyes.
Beautiful comment.