Our dad says this is favorite photo of him with Julie, his firstborn, the oldest of five daughters.
Julie, holding the black sheep, with sister #2 of the 5
Our little mommy on her 25th birthday with four of the five daughters
Our high school senior pictures
Children are not supposed to die before their parents.
Broken Heart Syndrome by Angela Miller:
It is an out-of-order death. It feels wrong on every level. There truly are no words for the depth of pain a parent endures from child loss. The pain is so great, it really can kill you. And if it doesn’t kill you, you live with a broken heart for the rest of your life. There is no cure for the pain...This is why child loss is a loss unlike any other kind of loss. A parent never “gets over” the loss of their child. Their grief lasts forever because their love for their child lasts forever.
Fact: “Broken heart syndrome,” also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy, is real. You absolutely can die from a broken heart. Child loss really is that painful.
Good Parents know
the hours, the weeks, months, and years, of tending to a baby's needs, teaching babies to walk and talk, nursing them through fevers, teaching them alternatives to temper tantrums, cheering them on through all the milestones of childhood, school functions, and to path to adulthood. We breathe a sigh of relief when we get them to age 18 and they're now independent, autonomous, capable. My mom married at age 18; a year later, she had the first of five babies; she washed cloth diapers and hung them out to dry on the line, she fed us, bathed and dressed us yet worked on a farm with our dad, and they worked HARD, as any farmer can tell you. Five daughters, at one point ranging from age 12 to 18, are a major undertaking. When the first one leaves home and ventures into the world, great expectations go with her.
Having her abducted, strangled, stripped, and left dead in a ditch: that was never part of the deal. It's not supposed to work that way. Parents sacrifice so much to bring a child up, but rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers and serial killers don't care whose child they steal, whose lives they destroy.
Yesterday I read about other Iowa Cold Cases,
and conspiracy theories about sex traffickers, pedophiles, Hunter S. Thompson, Jeff Epstein, Iowa's missing newspaper boys, and other horror stories. It's happening all over the world, to people we know, and getting covered up by the FBI and the highest-ups whose job is to uphold the law and protect us from stalkers, thieves, and killers.
The snuff film that Thompson allegedly made ... is believed to have been filmed at Bohemian Grove, a summer camp of sorts for the rich and powerful" in 'a secluded area outside Sacramento, Calif., where world leaders and dignitaries meet annually for a retreat that involves neo-pagan activities, including mock human sacrifices...
The Gannon/Gosch connection was first made public early in the morning on Feb. 20. Later that same day, Hunter S. Thompson was found dead in his home, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot. source
It was all so sordid, so awful,
I don't even want to share links to any of it here. What follows, believe it or not, is the Less Horrific stuff:
This boy looks so similar to my cousins, it's chilling; it's too close to home
One of these young women is my sister (right, middle):
source
Anamosa State Penitentiary
and their prison guards in the 1970s were complicit in drug trafficking and other kinds of trafficking, and somebody's daughters paid the price for the sins of others. All the girls pictured above had parents and siblings who loved them.
Silenced. Killed. Disposed of like trash.
As a mother,
I came to realize the magnitude of a parent's loss. To move on, after the loss of a child, is beyond imagining. To move on, when the body has never been found, when the killer has never been apprehended, just magnifies the horror of it all.
They're getting better at hiding the bodies. I won't even list the cases here. Too many of 'em.
Across the ocean, a journalist in France
reports on true crime. Jousse Delphine commented to me on Twitter:
"Butler County is the only county in Iowa that does not have any stop lights, a hospital, or a movie theatre. There are also no national fast-food chains in Butler county." (wikipedia)
And the only county in Iowa known to "lose" an extremely important document, the case files of an unsolved murder. A "flood" in the basement has made Case # 76-00382 disappear? Really?
Someone, somehow, pulled down a post I had shared
from Twitter to Facebook. Who removed it--and how?
source: Twitter
GREENLEE: TIME’S RUNNING OUT TO SHED LIGHT ON WAVERLY'S COLD CASES
Rich Greenlee, chief deputy with the Bremer County Sheriff’s Office in 1976 | Anelia K. Dimitrova photo
On May 7, 2010, state and Bremer County officials exhumed Lisa Peak’s body with hopes of discovering new DNA evidence. They found that Peak’s coffin was too broken down and her body too deteriorated to preserve her killer’s DNA.
Never mind that a crime lab in Denver, CO, specializes in degraded DNA, even decades old, even from caskets that were water damaged.
How long can they keep trying to hide their crimes?
I don't know who she is,
this French journalist, but my sister Julie aspired to be a broadcast journalist. Lisa Peak was a journalism major. If they're alive somehow in some kind of afterlife, I hope they're getting a kick out of the attention.
Though they'd rather be alive and kicking, as the saying goes.
Jousse Delphine @DelphineJousse
Journaliste indépendante. Passionnée de criminologie. Je m’intéresse tout particulièrement aux affaires judiciaires non résolues. Mes tweets n'engagent que moi
Saint-Etienne, France