No Regrets

including the wheelbarrow used to carry Captain Rolf’s remains to the burn barrel. There were still faint bloodstains on the rim, as there were on the bathroom carpet.
    For those attending and for most jurors, it seemed as if Nettie Ruth Neslund’s trial had ended only a year or two before. “It will stay with us forever,” Lisa Boyd commented.
    Lisa had been called again for jury duty in 2001. Charlie Silverman was, once more, the prosecutor—this time in a child molestation case. Lisa became the jury foreman, the others deferring to her experience gleaned from Ruth Neslund’s trial.
    And, as he has done so many times since then, Silver-man elicited a guilty verdict from the 2001 jury.

It (Ain’t) Hard Out There for the Pimps
    When I watched the Oscar awards in the spring of 2006, the “best song award” went to a group of rappers whose sentiments I found totally wrong. The winning song? “It’s Hard Out There for the Pimps.” The audience of stars and Hollywood A-List people clapped and cheered when the winners were announced, but I wondered what we had all come to. While I admired the group’s enthusiasm and joy at receiving an Oscar, I wondered if they had any idea what they were really extolling.
    A day or two before the Oscar ceremony, I watched an Oprah show in which she featured the star of a nominated movie—
Hustle and Flow
—in which the “pimp song” was featured. He told Oprah that he had done extensive research for his role by interviewing a number of pimps. “I found them rather sweet,” he said. And Oprah, despite being a long-time supporter of underdogs and hapless women, nodded approvingly.
    I could not believe my ears! The song’s lyrics say that pimps have no other choice but to practice their trade, but I don’t buy it. After writing about naive teenagers and desperate grown women whose safety, dignity, and hope have been sacrificed to men who treat them badly, I readilyadmit that I’m prejudiced against pimps. When I talk to working girls—a euphemism for prostitutes—they confide that they never set out to walk the streets. They listened to heady promises from seductive men about how great their lives would be, and most of them have been reduced to taking terrible chances night after night just to make enough money to pay for a cheap motel, a “Cup-of-Soup,” or a McDonald’s hamburger for supper. That is about the only thing they do for themselves. Almost everything they earn by having sex for money goes to support the men who once claimed to love them.
    I won’t equivocate: I don’t like pimps. They sit in cocktail lounges, wearing expensive leather jackets, big-brimmed hats, flashy clothes, and “bling,” while their stables of young women stand out in the rain trying to make enough money to please them, or at least to avoid making them angry.
    Most pimps attract women by picking vulnerable victims and, initially, making them feel important and cherished. Sadly, by the time the women realize that the pimps don’t love at all, it’s often too late for them to escape. They have become mere chattel and they have no money of their own. They are trapped in a nightmare existence.
    After writing
Green River, Running Red,
my opinion of the men who put their women out on the infinitely dangerous highways around Seattle dropped even lower. Many of them faked grief and remorse for the dozens of young women lost to a vicious serial killer, but I didn’t believe them. Too often, they seemed to revel in the media spotlight, basking in the attention shown them by reporters as they mimicked concern. Soon, they all had fresh recruits working for them.
    I happened to be writing the case that follows at thetime I watched the 2006 Oscars. It seemed fitting that I should speak up for the girls of the street that I’ve met, and the hundreds I’ve never known beyond seeing their sad photographs in the newspaper or on television beneath captions that read “Prostitute Murder Goes Unsolved,” or something bleakly similar.
    So, I say, “No, it’s not hard out there for the pimps. It’s hard out there on the girls who work for them.” In the following cases, the tables were sometimes turned, with the weak striking back at those in power. I don’t believe that murder is ever justified—except in cases of self-defense or in the defense of others who are unable to protect themselves. But this next case may well have been terrifying enough to make the desperate women in