No Regrets

the girls in the window remained a regular sight along Pike Street for a while.
    Even though homicide detectives wondered whether it was really necessary for Cheri Schak to stab a man sixteen times in self-defense, and to stab his teenage wife thesame number of times during the escape, her jury looked at tiny Cheri Schak and found her innocent of the charges: innocent by reason of self-defense.
    With that trial over, the last sidelight on the story of Ayala’s beating of Arden Lee was over. The Exotica “dance school” lasted a few years, and then quietly shut down.
    There is no shortage of gullible teenagers who fall under the spell of pimps, but as high-priced condo buildings proliferated in the downtown sections of the Emerald City, Pike Street gradually ceased to be the hot spot for prostitution in Seattle. It didn’t go away, however. It never goes away. In the Seattle area, sex for money moved to Aurora Avenue North and south to the highway that runs by the Seattle-Tacoma Airport—where both became a prime hunting ground for the perversely sadistic murderer known in infamy as the Green River Killer.
    And with that, a whole new chapter of horror began.

The Runaway and the Soldier
    Not all murders are plotted and designed in a sociopath’s mind. Some killers could never have imagined that they were capable of killing another human being. And yet their victims are just as dead as those bodies left behind in the wake of a serial killer. I like to think that the vast majority of people would kill only only in self-defense. Almost any mother—animal or human—will defend her young unto death. Self-defense and the horror of war can change the conscience and sensibilities of us all.
    There are other “triggers” that can evoke blind rage, and sometimes we are unaware of what they are, those secret buttons deep inside that can be pushed without warning. Fear and frustration and jealousy may be deadly triggers. Flashbacks of episodes buried in the psyche can play across the unconscious mind. A lot of murder defendants blame “blackouts,” insisting that they cannot recall the moment they snapped, and are, therefore, not responsible for what they have done. In most cases, I don’t buy that and neither do the vast majority of juries.
    In the following case, a number of unfortunate circumstances had to have occurred in a deadly chain to set the scene for murder. Without them, it’s unlikely the killerwould ever have erupted into a homicidal rage. But, with the dark arrangement of circumstance, heedlessness, and the deserted crime scene, the victim’s sudden death seems absolutely predestined. Indeed, the victim herself contributed to the tumbling down of safeguards that would have saved her life.
    She was headstrong, and falsely confident in her own ability to make decisions. No matter how many people loved her and wanted to help her, she chose to walk away from their concern and live her own life exactly as she wanted to.
    It was to be the death of her.

 
    It is a lovely patch of woods, where the warmth of bright sunlight just above its treetops grows cooler as the protective branches of Douglas firs in the winter and peach trees in the spring and summer close in. It isn’t that far from a well-populated area, but sound is hushed here, absorbed by a carpet of native vegetation: salal, Oregon grape, kinnikinnik, and feathery sword ferns. Woods like this are one of the inducements for home buyers to accept long commutes into Seattle, crossing over one of the two floating bridges to leave the Emerald City and move to the burgeoning suburb of Bellevue, Washington. The houses that abut these woods are mostly ramblers, huddled close to the ground, landscaped with rhododendrons and dogwoods. They are not plush, but they have grown tremendously in value over the years as suburbs to the east of Lake Washington creep steadily up into the very foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. Families who live there often walk along the meandering paths among the trees. They walk their pets there and ride horses along bridle trails, and young lovers hold hands, enjoying the hushed ambience and the feeling of privacy.
    It is a peaceful sanctuary without any sense of foreboding. It is no place for violent death.
    It was Friday, December 7, the anniversary of the 1941attack on Pearl Harbor, but the young people who entered the dark woods didn’t remember the event that sparked the United States to enter World War II; they hadn’t even