No Regrets

“CIA,” who were “trying to assassinate me,” hid in his mother’s home, terrified of “them.” Voices told him to kill his mother, the mother who had tried vainly to have him admitted to a mental institution. He did kill her, and then returned to the blood-washed home where the crime occurred. He cleaned up all signs of her murder and gave detectives a strange alibi. He, too, was convicted under the M’Naughton Rule.
    None of these frankly psychotic defendants had anything at all to gain from their crimes. They were caught inthe grip of tortured, fragmented minds, and although they had cried out for help, no help came. Each made vague efforts to cover up their crimes, and these efforts made them guilty under the M’Naughton Rule. They should not have been loose in society, yet one wonders what possible good came from throwing them into a prison where there was only token treatment for mental illness.
    Those who kill for lust, financial gain, jealousy, pure meanness, or in the commission of another felony deserve what they get—every bit of it. But what of the truly lost souls?
    Christine Jonsen was lost. She was a delicately pretty and very shy young woman with haunted dark eyes. She was born in Yugoslavia, but her father left soon after her birth and her mother died when she was only five. Apparently there was no one in Yugoslavia who was able to take the little girl in. She was shipped off, alone, to America, where a cousin who lived in southwest Washington had agreed to adopt her. And so, she grew up in that rainy, often economically depressed corner of the state where most people make their living catering to tourists, or from logging and commercial fishing.
    Christine tried very hard to be perfect, perhaps because she was an orphan, taken in by kind relatives. She wanted them to be proud of her, and she never wanted to be a burden. She won citizenship awards in high school, made the honor roll, and was named a princess in a local logging festival. Yet she always needed to belong, to have someone to call her own.
    After graduation from high school, Christine went to Grays Harbor Community College. During her collegeyears, she and her roommate became involved in the Mormon Church and transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The Church would become a powerful influence in Christine’s life, and she lived, always, by its tenets. Or, rather, by the way she interpreted them.
    A few years later, Christine met the man who would become her husband when they both worked for a company selling campground sites. He was thirteen years older than she was, but that seemed a good thing to her; he made her feel safe and protected. They dated for two years before they married. When Christine’s husband got a job as a salesman in eastern Washington, they moved far away from Grays Harbor County and her relatives.
    Richland-Pasco-Kennewick, Washington, called the “Tri-Cities,” are relatively new cities that sprouted up from the brown earth along the Columbia River in the forties and fifties with the advent of atomic power. It was as different from the Pacific Coast towns that Christine had grown up in as if she had moved to the middle of the desert in Arizona. But she was happy; she had what she’d always wanted and needed: a man she loved to whom she would devote her entire life. She had no ambitions for herself beyond being a good wife, and a mother.
    Christine was thrilled when her first son, Ryan, was born eighteen months later. He was a lovely baby, husky, smiling, cheerful. Her friends recall her as a most devoted mother. A year and a half later, she gave birth to a second son, Christopher. He, too, was a handsome little boy, and their mother loved both sons fiercely. She hoped to give them all the things she never had and vowed to keep them safe always.
    She took the toddlers to church every Sunday, and the only time she ever left them was when she went to work asa waitress at a restaurant to help the family finances. Often her husband didn’t make the sales commissions he expected. The restaurant was one of a chain that paid barely minimum wage. Waitresses there had to depend on tips to make a living wage. A company rule decreed that, even with burning hot plates of food to carry, waitresses could not use oven mitts. It was a stupid rule, and many nights, Christine went home with blisters up and down her arms. But she never complained. She considered herself lucky to have her husband, her