Leslie Rule - When the Ghost Screams: True Stories of Victims Who Haunt

one
The Ice Files

two
Within the Shadows

three
The Third Eye

four
Witch Hunt

five
The Enemy Within

six
Victims of War

seven
Afraid of the Light

eight
Stranger Than Fiction

nine
Accidents Happen

ten
Overnight with Ghosts

Although my daughter Leslie is the ghost researcher in our family, the genres in which we write often overlap. She has helped people grieving over family members lost to murder, and I sometimes run into emissaries from that other world, or talk to homicide detectives who use more than solid physical evidence to catch a killer.

As I write this, Leslie and I both had book deadlines that caught up with us on the same weekend. Mother and daughter, we are alike in our work habits in many ways. Although she writes at night and in the wee hours of the morning and I write during the daytime, we both tend to work slowly until we get close to the end of a book, and then we rev up our engines and sometimes it does seem as if an offscreen voice is dictating to us. But I dont think thats a ghost; at the most, its our writing muse.

Even so, I often find connections or synchronicities. As it happens, the book I finished earlier today was about a sea captain who vanished inexplicably from his home on a foggy island in the San Juans off the coast of Washington State. Whether he was murdered or simply walked away from a life and a wife he could no longer bear is the mystery in my book. But there is little doubt that, ultimately, he did not survive. In the course of his sixty years at sea all over the world, he was a ships pilot as well as a captain. These highly skilled men (and, today, women) guide mammoth ships safely into port through the narrowest of waterways. And he was the oldest pilot of them all: seventy-nine. Although his physical body was never found, his spirit survived. And on the very day that the person convicted of killing him died, another younger pilot stood exactly where the old pilot had once guided a ship. Indeed, it was the very same ship, with a different name.

I felt his hand on my shoulder, the young pilot said, as surely as if he really stood there. Hes long dead wherever he is, but his spirit was on that ship.

But back to homicide detectives. In my early years as the Northwest reporter for True Detective and five other fact detective magazines, I realized I needed to go back to college and get a second major, this time in Crime Scene Investigation. I was also lucky enough to be invited to attend the King County, Washington, sheriffs two-week homicide investigation course that every rookie deputy had to attend.

One of the rules of thumb is that at least two detectives are required to work a murder scene; one picks up evidence and seals and labels it in plastic baggies, and the other makes notes. When they measure distances so that they can re-create the scene absolutely by triangulation to fixed points, there has to be an investigator on each end of the tape. Or one detective takes photographs or videotapes the scene, while the other keeps track of who arrives and who leaves.

I think most of us in the rookie class were surprised, then, when the detective sergeant who was our instructor told us, I work homicide scenes alone. At least I start out that way. I want to listen to the victim...

In the class, we darted our eyes at each other, wondering if he was kidding. But he was serious as he clicked the slide projector to bring up the image of a beautiful corpse, saying, I talked to her for awhile, getting a fix on who was the last person she saw, trying to understand what had happened to her and why. However the other guys work murders, this is the way I begin. And it works for me.

As it turned out, the womans husband had killed her in a jealous rage, and then arranged her body tenderly so that she would look nice, as he said later.

I dont know if she really talked to the detective who taught our class, but he solved the case and he said that he had the sense of who her killer was from the very beginning.

There are many people who believe that inanimate objects can somehow retain dark and wicked acts that occurred around or because of them. Maybe I believe this too. I am not sure. When I attended the trial of Diane Downs in Eugene, Oregon, in 1984, for the book that became Small Sacrifices, one piece of physical evidence played a powerful if silent part in the prosecutions case. Diane, who was in love with a married man who didnt want children, stood accused of shooting her three children during a drive in the lonely countryside one May night. She apparently believed that if she didnt have a family, her lover would leave his wife and come to her.

Diane testified that a bushy-haired stranger had flagged her down, demanded her keys, and then shot her small children, killing one and critically injuring the other two. She had escaped with a gunshot wound to her lower arm.

Lane County detectives searched her town house and found a bronze unicorn statuette in a prominent place on her television set. A plate on the front was engraved with a date, the names, Christie, Cheryl, and Danny, and the words I love you, Mom. The date was five days earlier than the night of the shooting.

The investigators learned that Diane had taken her children to the Pacific Ocean and the Willamette River on the engraved date. She had driven around aimlessly, returning home close to midnight when her children were crying with exhaustion. The sheriffs men deduced that she had meant to kill them then but she had lost her nerve.

The prosecutor suggested that the unicorn was fungible, a legal term that means one thing can be exchanged for another of like value. To Diane Downs, it seemed meant to take the place of three dead children. She would have their names and her memories, but not the burden or the responsibility of being a single mother, frustrated because she could not be with her lover.