Chapter 3
“Consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the
people, and that the whole nation perish not.”
- John 11:50
Thursday was a bright fall day. The sky was a brilliant, yet deceiving, blue
and the sun’s warm rays fell gently on the group of teenagers sitting on the grass
in a small circle. Still, the air held a
promise for the future inevitable fall season that was to come. The wind was light and cool, unlike the heavy
and muggy zephyrs that settled on Region 7 during the summer. Lilia’s group decided to meet together to
discuss where they were at for their week’s project. They settled underneath the large oak tree to
go over their assigned killer’s profile.
Isabella Marie Gray.
Isabella grew up in
an idyllic small town in the heart of the country outside of Region 7. She exhibited brightness, doing well in all
subjects in school, but lacked drive. She
was very charming, but found her calling in using her charm to manipulate the
other children. Her teachers remembered
her as a girl with a bright smile, brighter blonde hair, but ice cold blue
eyes. She connected with other children,
but only on a superficial level. There
were two types of people who lived in Isabella’s town in Region 3: those who
wanted to leave as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and those who were
content with the town, the people, the consistency of small town life. Isabella was a part of the former group.
Right after high school, she married a man thirty years her
senior. He was a religious man from
another town, and immediately Bella moved from her small town and settled into
his religious flock. Classmates who knew
her before said that when they ran into her a few years after her marriage, she
seemed to be a changed person. The ice
in her eyes had seemed to have melted. Still, her old classmates had their
suspicions.
Within nine months of her marriage, she had a beautiful baby
boy. The baby had her light blond
features and her husband’s warm brown eyes.
She named the baby John, and her and her husband believed the child
would grow up to be the new leader of their small congregation. Unfortunately, the baby’s life was short
lived. At five months old, the baby died
unexpectedly, the cause was attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Isabella and her husband seemed
devastated. They tried for years to have
another child with no success. After ten
years of trying, and at the age of fifty-eight, her husband died of a heart
attack.
As a young widow, it was no surprise that Isabella soon
found solace in the arms of another, younger, man. Within six months, she was remarried to a
young door-to-door salesman from her home town.
Within a year, she was pregnant again.
This time, she had a baby girl.
This girl had the strikingly blue eyes of her mother, and the dark hair
of the father. The little baby grew into
a beautiful little girl, and two other children were born into that family, two
more little girls who were the splitting image of their mother.
When the girls were five, seven, and nine, Isabella’s husband
disappeared. The rumor around the town
was that Isabella’s husband left his young wife and children for a high school
sweetheart in the city. Isabella began
acting like a wild teenager again, dating questionable men, and staying out late
with no regard for her children. The
townspeople pitied Isabella and dismissed her behavior as part of the grieving
process.
Three months after her husband disappeared, his body was
found badly decayed along a rarely used hiking trail. The police initially had no reason to suspect
Isabella, but grew suspicious when they realized that the hiking trail was the
trail that her husband proposed to her on.
And the death was much too personal to be a random killing. While the body was badly decayed, it was
obvious that the genitals had been severed.
His eyes were gouged out, his hands and feet were bound, and the
markings on what was left of his decaying skin showed signs of torture. He had also been viciously sodomized with a
tree branch. He had been left to slowly
bleed out from his wounds. His death was
not slow or painless. Whoever killed him
wanted him to suffer.
Initially, the police only casually interviewed Isabella,
but later began to notice that she was starting to act strangely. When her husband disappeared, she told the
detectives that she was working that night.
They didn’t give her much attention and moved on to the local druggies
and low-lifes. But she changed her story
when they interviewed her again. She
couldn’t remember that night, but she suddenly remembered that she wasn’t
working that night, she was actually meeting with her pastor. Or maybe she was watching her children all
night and, yes, she remembered she had to help them with a test they were
studying for.
The detectives proceeded cautiously, not wanting to raise
any suspicions. They interviewed those
who knew her. Some details they recorded
in their notes included that, as a child, she used to torture animals. One childhood acquaintance remembered
inviting Isabella over to play, when they were nine years old. The friend left Isabella alone for a few
minutes when the friend was called into the house to speak with her mom. When the friend came back out, Isabella had
tied a string around her little kitten’s neck and hung it on the fence. Isabella was just calmly watching the kitten
struggle, and occasionally poked it with a stick. The childhood acquaintance recalled being
horrified, yelling at Isabella, only to have Isabella laugh at her. Isabella couldn’t understand why people
connected with animals. All you’re doing is putting human emotions
to the stupid animal, the childhood acquaintance recalled.
The childhood sweetheart of Isabella’s late husband came
forward telling detectives of finding a dead bird on her door step, with a note
pinned to its chest with a nail through its heart. The note warned the woman that if the woman
ever so much as looked at Isabella’s husband, she would be next. The woman swore she was not seeing Isabella’s
husband, but told detectives that Isabella was extremely possessive of the
males in her life. Isabella defined
herself by who she was married to, and Isabella also felt that her husband
should not be able to live without her, even if she had to make that happen
herself.
The police looked into the death of her first husband. There was a rumor going on in the small
congregation that Isabella’s first husband had taken a liking to a new, young
woman in the church. Many church members
had their suspicions that the two were having an affair, but after the husband’s
heart attack, they were wary to speak ill of the dead. The official cause of death was myocardial
infarction, but after revisiting the file, an overseeing pathologist suggested
that the heart attack may have been caused by unnatural causes and more tests
should have been done. The cause of
death for the first husband was changed to “unknown,” and the police decided to
open a case against Isabella.
Unfortunately, by the time the police went to arrest
Isabella, she had snapped. The police
found her sitting in a rocking chair next to her bed softly singing hymns to
herself. Three small, wet bodies were
laid out neatly on the bed, facing up, with their arms crossed over their
chests. Isabella welcomed the police in
as any good hostess would.
The trial was quick. The
judge refused to allow the affirmative defense of guilty by reason of insanity
or mental defect. When asked why she
would kill her children, Isabella replied shaking her head and looking down, “My
husband didn’t love them, my husband didn’t love me. They were a part of my husband, and when I
saw that the police were going to arrest me, I only saw his face in
theirs. He never loved me, and they
never loved me.”
---
Lilia nudge Micah. He
looked up at her and found all his classmates were looking at him, ready for
him to share his portion of the report.
He gave a small cough to clear his throat.
“Okay, so statistics on Isabella,” he started. “It turns out, as soon as five years of her
sentencing was up, she was Listed.”
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