After a Long Day

I spent an hour or so poring over the criminal case file for People vs. McClish. Came across a bone-chilling statement: McClish told both his wife and one other person that he had killed people (this was before Asha) and that his preferred method was to break the neck, but he had also cut people's throats.  Nice. He did couch it in crazy statements that he had been a hired assassin, an "enforcer" and worked for the CIA (eg. cray-cray talk, perhaps when incredibly drunk), but still...Scott Peterson did that, too, with similar details of how he would kill people. And the web of lies McClish tried to spin with his wife and others...dear God.  The wife ended up testifying against her husband, but only after committing major perjury during McClish's rape trial.

Asha comes across as only a good person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a man she had no idea was a lunatic, a man who kept that lunacy secret, and frankly, who clearly took advantage of her...she stated multiple times that she had been intoxicated when she was with him in the Felton Cemetery during the one time she was with him (which says zero to me about her character except that she had too much to drink that night). An intoxicated state=inability to give clear consent. That is a well-established law and I am positive McClish violated that law, at the VERY least, and more.

Given the pages of testimony from women he harassed at the workplace, and off it, and the details of his violent rape fantasies and sexual assaults (many, some with underage girls), and his conviction for first-degree rape...well, yeah, I am more than willing to believe some very sad and terrible things happened to Asha that night, even more sad and terrible than what I have stated here.  The criminal case is public and you can read about all those things and more down at the County Building, if you have the stomach for it, and then understand why all my sympathies rest with Asha.  After the lone intimate encounter in the cemetery, where she thought she might have fallen pregnant, she clearly stated to multiple people (who testified to this under oath) that she was increasingly afraid of this man.

Last night, thinking of all this and unable to write, I walked out to my front yard and asked Asha for help in writing this story, as I seem to do every other day.  Immediately, a great horned owl hooted in the tree above me...so close I nearly jumped out of my skin. As much as I feel at times I don't know my way, a path always opens up.