A 57-year-old woman was found murdered in her Butler Street apartment on Saturday. Ruxton Springs police discovered Agnes Hanson, known to her neighbors as Gretchen Roda, after several complaints were filed of a bad odor coming from her third-floor apartment. Based on the condition of her remains, police said she had been dead for more than a week. Her assailant apparently surprised her while she was cooking a chicken dinner.
Hanson was wanted for several crimes, including multiple murders, which took place in the mid-1970s across the Midwest and western United States. The identity of Gretchen Roda belongs to a Carson City, NV woman who disappeared along with her boyfriend, Mark Rodriguez, near Spokane, WA in 1978.
The presumed cause of Hanson’s death is a blow to the head with a hatchet.
—The Colorado Springs Sun-Times, October 29
Robert O’Neill was everything I wanted in a presidential candidate: idealistic, crusading, with an outside-the-Beltway commonsense approach that appealed to my transplanted Ohio values. He was a populist cut right from the cloth of William Jennings Bryan, an anti-tax, anti-bank, pro-small-business fighter for social equality. I remember when he burst on the political scene after giving a fiery speech at the last convention. He became the darling of C-SPAN, Fox, and MSNBC, stirring up trouble with his sententious oratories in the Senate and bringing anyone who dared to interview him to their knees with his encyclopedic knowledge and sharp wit. No one wanted to be questioned by his sub-committee and no one wanted to oppose him.
It’s been said that a Democrat is a Republican that’s been arrested and a Republican is a Democrat that has been audited. I’ve had both happen. My living comes from managing several rental properties I own around the Ruxton Springs area and my last tax assessment increased by 25% in the midst of a recession. I went down to the county assessor to lodge my objection to the gouging and…well, it got heated and I ended up being arrested.
So came my involvement in politics. My wife was working the local phone bank for O’Neill on the weekends and mentioned that they needed canvassers to roam the neighborhoods to get out the vote. With nothing constructive to look forward to other than a court date, I volunteered.
I showed up at the campaign office with its rented tables and secondhand chairs, rows of true believers with cell phones plugged into their ears and wide-eyed twenty-somethings tapping out Facebook postings, and crunching voter registration data. The building, which two months before was a shoe store, still had the smell of stale leather mixed with fresh coffee. Half-eaten breakfast sandwiches and donuts lay on tables. Papers, pens, and pencils were scattered about with bumper stickers and lawn signs and the Red Hot Chili Peppers played the campaign’s unofficial theme song—“Snow”—in the background. I listened to the words and had no idea how they related to O’Neill’s message of low taxes and strong regulation of Wall Street, but went along with the mostly younger, hipper people in the room.
Cindy was the office coordinator and an exception to the idealistic college kids at the phone bank. A middle-aged woman with gray hair and grotesque feet squeezed into Crocs, the faint herbal smell of pot lingered on Cindy and she had the dried-out hair of someone that had recently undergone chemo treatments. Was she a cancer survivor? I didn’t ask because I didn’t care. People are not my forte.
“Great,” Cindy said with a sigh, “you’re going to make a fabulous canvasser.”
She sighed again and walked me over to a long table with clipboards and brochures. “This is your precinct,” she said, pointing to a map on the wall. I saw Ruxton Springs laid out in all its squiggly-line glory. This Colorado town was planned more than a hundred and twenty years ago by a Philadelphia-based firm that had spent barely three days roaming the hills before heading back East to sketch out streets and avenues. Our town had roads that stretched into the foothills and streets that plunged straight off cliffs, and still others that didn’t exist at all. My precinct encompassed the lowlands east of the cemetery near the big red rocks that marked the town’s border with Colorado Springs.
Cindy handed me a clipboard. “This is a list of likely voters, party members, and independents. Your job is to knock on the door and ask them if they plan on voting for O’Neill. Then mark their answer right here. If they say yes, thank them for their support and ask them to volunteer, and if they say no, give them a pamphlet.”
“What if they want to get into a debate?” I asked.
“That’s up to you.”
She gave me a campaign button and a hat, extra pens, and a stack of pamphlets. I was on my way.
My first two houses nobody was home and I stuffed flyers into the door and went on my way, enjoying the walk in the warm, fall sunshine. The third house was a mid-century, flattop Usonian obscenely covered in cheap stucco and painted pink to give it a roughly southwestern feel. The man and woman that lived inside were math teachers at a neighboring school district and had a deep hatred of O’Neill’s education policies, which they shared for the next forty-five minutes.
My next potential voter was in an apartment in a converted motor court style motel. The dirty, run-down apartments smelled of cooking meth and old tires, with dour-looking, prematurely old women herding children inside for Chef Boyardee lunches as idle men tinkered absently with broken-down Ford pickups.
I knocked on the door and it opened a crack. “Hello,” asked the sleepy voice from the dark interior.
“Hi, I need to talk to Mary.”
The man retreated back into the shadows. “She’s not here, dude. She’s at work.”
“Oh, I’m canvassing for Robert O’Neill and I just wanted to see if you planned on voting for him.”
Instantly the door was flung open and the jean-clad, shirtless man in his thirties greeted me like a long-lost friend. “Oh, holy shit. Yeah, come on in. Dude, I love O’Neill. Did you see him at the convention?”
“Uh, yeah,” I stammered, still keeping my feet on the exterior side of his abode. “It was one of the things that got me fired up enough to volunteer,” I lied.
“Do you have a candy bar?”
I caught a whiff of oregano-like aroma and decided to play along. “No, but I thought about bringing cookies.”
“You’ve got cookies?” he asked quickly.
“No,” I turned to the clipboard. “So, are you planning on voting this year?”
“No cookies,” he said, disappointed. “Ah, dude, you should’ve brought cookies.”
“Yeah, maybe I should’ve. So are you voting this year?”
“Yeah, man, I’m going to vote. But first I’ve got to…” His eyes cast up to the corner of the door. “What’s it called?”
I took a shot. “Register.”
He smiled. “That’s it. Hey, man, you got any cookies? Ah, I already asked that.”
“Are you planning on voting for O’Neill?”
“You should bring cookies.”
“I should.”
He bounced on his feet for a couple of seconds so I repeated my question. “Dude, yeah,” he said with a smile. “Of course, I’m voting for O’Neill. Even though you didn’t bring any cookies, your man still has my vote. Hey, have you met him?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I pondered the next question and then decided what the hell and asked. “Would you be willing to volunteer?”
“Do they have cookies?” he asked, wide-eyed.
I shook my head but added, “Donuts.”
He smiled. “Oh, yeah, man. I’ll volunteer.” Then he glanced over his shoulder, opening the space between the house and the door so that I could peer inside. I caught a brief glimpse of a naked young woman deep in the apartment, stumbling and lost like a zombie in a George Romero movie. “But I’ve got something to do first,” he said with clarity and he shut the door.
So much for the stoner vote, I thought.
The next ten houses were either empty or their residents were pretending not to be at home. I could see shadows moving through the blinds as people went to great effort to avoid talking to the guy outside with the clipboard and the red, white, and blue button. The day was warm and the mid-October smell of the changing trees drifted into my nose as I sucked in deep breaths to climb the steep inclines on the far end of my precinct. As I headed back into the hills near the cemetery, the old nineteenth-century Victorian, Anne, and Edwardian houses sprouted up like English weeds among the western ranches and Frank Lloyd Wright rip-offs of the lower flatlands. Glancing down at my clipboard, a bead of sweat dripped on the board and marked my next address—a tall, slope-roofed, shingled house converted to apartments.
Green, tar shingles hung on the house like a sad dress. Paint peeled from the wood frames around the leaded glass windows and lay in big flakes on the sagging porch, a testament to the last time anyone had been on there. A chicken pecked at small rocks in the yard and I remembered that the Ruxton Springs City Council let folks in this neighborhood keep chickens for fresh eggs. Walking to the edge of the porch, I glanced around the corner and saw an awkward coop of irregular plywood panels and a wire fence. Buried in an old tree stump was a hatchet. Chickens strutted around with their stupid heads bobbing as they walked apparently oblivious to their fate on the stump.
I pushed the heavy, old oak door open and entered the stale dry warmth that added to the sweat already dripping down my cheeks. Old metal mailboxes were tacked to one wall with bits of paper featuring the names of tenants Scotch taped to the fronts. Blood dried in tiny droplets on the worn lime green carpet and the place smelled like old Milky Ways and rotten fruit. The doors to the first-floor apartments seemed to ooze blackness and the hallway was immersed in a darkness that grew as I stood near the staircase. Silence hung heavy in the air. Except for my breathing and the sound of steam moving through the radiator, making the place stifling and uncomfortable, there was nothing. Not a TV or radio or conversation.
My next contact was on the third floor.
Only a cheap red-and-green stained glass window casting sickening Christmas glum over the place lighted the hallway. The door to the sole apartment on the floor was covered in flaking brown paint and the numbers 3-0-1 in cheap brass figures were nailed to the wood. The heat from the lobby had stopped at the second floor so that this level left a chill on my back. I knocked and heard the occupant move toward the door. On the floor, in the dirty carpet, I noticed more droplets of dried blood. The door opened revealing a small, thin, gray-haired woman that I guessed was a worn-out sixty. Several hundred packs of cigarettes had stained her fingers brown and left bruised bags of loose flesh beneath faded blue eyes. Her grin was as vacant and cold as the hallway.
“I’m canvassing for Robert O’Neill,” I said.
“What does that mean?” she asked in a loud, firm voice.
“Well, we have a record that you’ve expressed an interest in his campaign and I just want to confirm that you’re voting for O’Neill.”
She opened the door wide and motioned for me to come in. The apartment was warmer than the hall so I slid inside. Piles of magazines ranging from Time to Hustler littered the floor and there were hypodermic needles and crack pipes lying about. She must have a drug-addicted grandson, I reckoned. A small, ancient TV sat in the corner with its rabbit ears held together with foil. Cups crusted with the brown remains of Folgers sat on a heavy oak table in front of the sagging sofa that smelled of urine and cigarettes.
“You live alone?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, crossing back to the kitchen. The needles were hers. I followed her into the kitchen and saw on the table a headless chicken half plucked and leaking blood on the plastic tablecloth. The old lady sat in a chair with the dead bird between us and resumed plucking the feathers.
“So,” I said, getting down to business, “are you going to vote for O’Neill?”
“Why are you doing this?”
Interesting question. “I suppose I like his message of smaller government that works for the people.” It’s funny how those two things never seemed contradictory until I said them out loud.
She smiled and ripped a handful of feathers from the chicken. “Bullshit.”
“Freedom,” I guessed as if she were a teacher and I were a poor student hoping to deflect attention.
“You don’t know what freedom is.”
“I believe that our founding fathers set up a Constitution with a small limited government that allowed men and businesses to flourish or fail without the interference of the state,” I said in my best talk radio parrot.
“Says the pawn to the hand,” she said, as she pointed a handful of bloodied feathers at me.
“I’m not a pawn.”
“Sure you are. You’re out here working for the man.”
Really? Did she say “the man?” Good lord, the woman was a good forty years behind. “I work for O’Neill because I believe in his message.”
“Blah, blah, blah.”
“Are you going to vote for O’Neill?”
“How far would you go for freedom? Real freedom.”
“I’d fight for freedom. I think, in my own way, I’m fighting for freedom now. You know I believe in a system…”
“Would you murder your own children for freedom?”
“How…how is that an act of freedom?”
“When the Twin Towers fell on nine eleven, the politicians—including your Mister O’Neill—said it threatened our freedom. How? How did the murder of three thousand strangers affect my freedom? Was I suddenly barred from speaking my mind? Could I not own a gun? Walk down the street? Live where I wanted to live?”
I shook my head, “But what does that have to do with…”
“I was married. Lived in a little house in Eden Prairie outside Minneapolis. I volunteered at the church, cooked dinner for my husband, and took care of my three-year-old son and nine-month-old baby. Was I free?”
“Of course.”
“My son drowned in the bathtub.”
“I’m sorry.”
She turned the chicken over; blood poured from the neck, and she began to work the feathers on its back. “I took my daughter and placed her in a Glad trash bag with her teddy bear and then wrapped it over and over in two-inch packing tape…” She said this and made the motion with her hands over the chicken.
“I’m sorry, I thought you said your son had died,” I asked.
“My son drowned in the bathtub,” she snapped. “I got up to check on my daughter and he slipped and hit his head on the faucet.”
“My God…but your daughter…” I was trying to put it together.
“I wrapped her up then placed the bundle on the old carpet we kept in the bedroom and rolled it up. She squirmed and cried but I was…he’d be so pissed off if he knew.”
“Who?”
“I tied the carpet with a rope and placed it in the trunk of our Chevy.” She held up a single white feather and studied it for a moment as I made my way for the door. “Was I free?”
“I’ve got to…”
“I threw the whole thing in a dumpster behind a dentist’s office in St. Cloud and then stole a Plymouth and drove south. Do you want to know what freedom is?”
I shook my head. No, lady, I thought, I’m not interested in your crazy, drug-induced delusions of infanticide and freedom.
“Sure you do. Every man who’s ever thought of raping a pretty woman walking a street alone or killing his boss or ramming his car into the car that cut him off has wanted freedom—that kind of freedom. Do you know why you don’t do those things?”
“Because they’re wrong. They’re immoral.”
She laughed and went back to the chicken but now I was intrigued. I didn’t believe her story for a minute but her insanity held me. I watched as she plucked the bird and threw the feathers on the floor.
“Morality is the chessboard and every move limits your freedom. You can’t walk across the street without risking a ticket for jaywalking. Don’t kill. Don’t rape. Stop at the stop sign. Pay your taxes. Go to church.”
“I don’t believe in God,” I said.
“Of course not, you’re too smart, too modern. I imagine you never steal because you know the system, which is our secular society’s substitute for God, is watching.”
She spoke of the system like a character from The Matrix. If she offered me a choice of the red pill or the blue pill I was gone.
“But I found freedom. I slept with men or women when the urge came. Killed men or women when I needed money. I used. I took. Then in Vegas in 1978 I met a man—a free man—and we traveled north to Alaska. We ran out of money outside Yellowknife—that’s in Canada. There ain’t nothing to steal there. So we held up for the winter in an abandoned cabin about fifty miles outside town.”
She took the chicken to the sink and ran it under the water.
“Until we ran out of food.”
“Ah, God, you didn’t eat him,” I asked.
She laughed as she pulled the small feathers from the bird. “No,” she said, “but I maybe I should have. Ha! We went into town and tried to sell some of the coke we had left and the Mounties busted him. I hitched a ride south with a truck driver.”
She carried the bird back to a counter and sliced open its back end to remove the guts. “I made it to South Dakota and was hitching outside Deadwood when a family picked me up. I forced them to drive out to the Badlands and there I popped the old man in the head. I was going to kill his wife and two little boys when I realized something.”
“What,” I said.
“I didn’t have to. Don’t you see? I killed my own children, left my husband, was the center player in a sex orgy, used drugs, and stole money. I killed whole families with no more feeling than I had for this chicken and nothing. Nothing. No consequences. I could act outside all of your rules and morals and laws and nothing was going to happen because I was truly free. You? You live in fear of the law, in fear of God—oh that’s right, you don’t believe in God. What do you believe in? Man?” She laughed sarcastically. “It’s right there in front of you. Man created society to control man. Control is the game and fear is the hand on the pieces. Escaping that, my canvassing friend, is the freedom you’re looking for.
“You think Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and the rest wanted to build a free nation,” she continued. “A nation of any design is just another chessboard. That’s why they included a president and a congress and a court system and a way to make laws. Don’t litter. Don’t smoke. Don’t walk on the grass. It’s all just little reminders that the system is watching you.”
She shook her hand and splattered the chicken blood over the floor. “Not me. I act as I want to act without consequences. I’m above your conventions. I’m free.”
“By free you mean to kill at will and take what’s not yours.”
“Choices. Choices. Can’t you see, freedom isn’t on that clipboard,” she said, holding up the chicken. “It’s in the will and the strength and choosing the truth that your personal freedom is superior to all. That’s the rational object of my reality.”
“To kill or not kill,” I said. “You decide because you’re free and the rest of us are pawns or chickens.”
She frowned at me. “You’re a coward. And now you’re beginning to bore me.”
I looked at the knife in her hand and saw a bead of sweat mix with a drop of chicken juice and drip down her face. My heart pounded hard in my chest as the fear welled up and my legs stopped debating between “fight or flight.” I hightailed it for the door. Looking back over my shoulder I saw the old lady lighting a cigarette, pulling out the chicken’s entrails, and placing them in a bowl. I glanced around the filthy apartment one last time with its copies of Nietzsche and Rand, pornography, drugs, and the wet smell of mold and human waste. As I left the apartment, I marked down that she was going to vote for O’Neill because if anything else were on the sheet another canvasser would make a followup visit.
Back in the yard and the fall air, I paused to let my mind clear. My eyes wandered over to the stump stained with the blood of a hundred chickens. Despite her perversions, she was right. Freedom was about choices but it was also about responsibilities. Taxes and jury duty, traffic laws and building codes were all as much a part of freedom as voting and the right to flip off your neighbor and bitch about your congressman.
Her freedom was a disease. But a tempting one. I picked up the hatchet and plucked a single bloodied feather from the handle. There was something visceral about the power she possessed. Sick as it was. My hand felt the temptation of killing and raping without regard to all of the sticky glue that kept society together. I leered at the woman across the street as she bent over to rake the leaves and I coveted the BMW in her drive. My eyes hungered and I felt the weight of the hatchet in my hands and thought of the malady plucking the chicken upstairs. I contemplated liberty and hatchets.
I contemplated liberty and hatchets for a long time.
I believe in retribution. Not in God.
Two weeks later, I pleaded guilty to hitting the county assessor and the judge sentenced me to two weeks in jail, eighty hours of community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine.
