Letter from the Jersey Shore

Driving down to the Jersey Shore, my spouse and I select the one and only obvious option for listening: a serial-killer podcast.

"What I want to know," says our host, the Crime Junkie, "is every last detail about the remaining bodies on Gilgo Beach. There are other bodies. Did Rex just focus on the (now-famous) four? How about the extra real estate in Las Vegas? You're telling me it's just a coincidence that Rex chose to buy in that particular city?"

Later that evening, the Times runs a story on serial killers. They--the killers--are a dying breed. In the eighties, if you were a psychopath, you would possibly take the Dahmer route. But methods of detection are getting so much sharper. You don't want to roll the dice with DNA technology. Now, if you want to do harm, you go to a school or a night club and murder twenty people in one fell swoop.

This is hard to accept. The logic doesn't work. If the fear of getting caught is the thing that keeps you from being a serial killer, then surely the "mass murder" route is problematic, too? If you plan something like Columbine, you're not going to sail off into the sunset.

At a Spring Lake bookstore, I choose a new memoir; it's by a woman who once knew an eccentric character in the Mississippi Delta, in the 1940s. The eccentric neighbor snapped, on a certain afternoon, and hacked her own mother to pieces with a pair of pruning shears. She slashed the body, with the shears, over 150 times. Unless she was innocent, and she was covering for her dotty brother.

These are special--these family times. We have our beach chairs and our small plastic buckets. On rainy days, we visit the aquarium. Our decorative flag is flying high above our hideaway: "JUST YOU, ME, AND THE SEA....."

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