When Cases Misbehave
Ambiguity: the quality of being open to more than one interpretation.
My criminal justice mentor, John Graham, wrote two things on the board the first day of my intro to criminal justice class.
CYA and Remember OJ.
He said, if you don’t remember anything I teach you this semester remember these two things: CYA or cover your ass because no one will do it for you and Remember OJ. Do not walk into a scene and automatically assume. Assume makes an ass out of you and me. We all have a natural bias, but when you are working a scene, you leave that at the door. Every scene, every time.
Researching the death of people is no different. As a lover of history, deep diving into not only how they die, but how they lived memorializes the human spirit. Many of these graves are old, pioneer times with many stories to tell. Stories of loss, love, and perseverance during the hardest of times. I can not imagine leaving my whole family and traveling across country to a new world that is exciting and yet deadly. Loved ones dying of dysentery (hello Oregon Trail), giving birth with no assistance, and avoiding Indian attacks in some of the worst weather imaginable in a covered wagon. Many would not make it by the number of cemeteries scattered across the plains.
The flip side is, you also see the worst. You see the evil, the trauma, the pain. Mass graves of children who dies at a young age. Cemeteries of yellow fever epidemics and desecrated cemeteries of slave families who were forgotten in life and in death. Even those without a tombstone, do not erase the past. But without the darkness, there would be no light.
As we have seen with the Comfort Cemetery piece, there were more questions than answers. We will never know why graves are covered in seashells. To this day there hasn’t been any documentation located to specific why this occurred. No books, journals, papers, not even a napkin. Based off history, I was able to make some interpretations as to why, but the truth is I could be completely wrong.
And sometimes, sometimes there is no answers. Only questions. Why did Lou Brown share a headstone with another woman? Why was she buried over on the white part of the yellow fever epidemic long after it was over? Is she even buried in this location? If her body is elsewhere, why did someone proceed to carve her name into a obelisk that was used by another lady?
Some secrets literally are taken to the grave. Secrets that leave many with thoughts of wonder. Secrets that we can only interpret as being something when it maybe nothing.
But that is the beauty in this research. The beauty in self-discovery, the story of the soul, and where life takes you.
Not all cases behave, not all have answers, but that is the thrill of the chase.
This was such an interesting read. My grandfather has loose change on his gravestone. My dad started doing it shortly after he died so "Poppy could buy his packs of cigarettes in heaven." After my dad passed, my siblings and I started leaving loose change on his grave as well. He didn't smoke. We just thought he would appreciate it. Maybe the graves with shells have some interesting family lore attached to them that we'll never know.