meeting Americas most wanted…

If any one has been reading any of these pages of my life from front to here you would have already come to some conclusion I must have gotten rooked out of having a regular life. I truely have experienced everything I’ve shared in all of this. The following story is no different-it happened.

Paths….how paths cross. And the way things come to be.

I can’t really figure the best way to share this-some way I can boost it right back to the time I was in boot camp in August 1969. It works as a beginning of a list of coincidental odd burps in my life….in August 1969 while I was in boot camp two murders took place. One was widely published-that of the Charles Mansons crew killing Sharon Tate and several other celebrated people; the other probrebly less significant as news(…but never any less than any other murder) a man whose name I only think I’ve heard as Marvin…but then I am not sure,was shot in cold blood on Calvert Street in Baltimore in front of the strip club where he was a bouncer-shot dead by a stripper he refused entry to the club he was hired to protect. I did’nt know any of these people-but yet the dates of thier deaths do coincide with a date I looked towards with great excitement…the date of my first week in boot camp.

This one is complicated to line up…this story , so take a moment to ride along with me for twenty some odd years in a tractor trailer going from coast to coast week after week. Thats what I did off and on most of my life asise from the days of hauling steel for red iron construction…most all of my work was in large trucks. My last days of trucking were over the road-as it it called-and my final days were spent in a hospital in Ft.Wayne Indiana where I spent two weeks recovering from a serious stroke which put me out of trucks forever. That happened Feburary 2 , 1998.

Several hundred miles south in Florida at the end of the road I live on a man and a woman moved into a mobile home situated on the hill past where you turn to reach my house…they were moveing in on Feburary 2,1998-the same day I was laying in the hospital gurgleing for life.

I was released from the hospital and the trucking company flew me home-thier last favor for a good driver sent to pasture. I was barely able to walk and my speech was screwed up and my left side was effected by blind in the eye and my left hand does’nt work-so it was easy to accept being deemed unable to drive the big trucks ever again. So I set myself to learning how to walk and talk again.

This story is complicated because I was married to my second wife-the lady I refer to as the rattlesnake wrapped in poison ivy…an explaination you have to read back to find and understand. So she had been in the piture during this time but to save my space we will go on with out her. So-I started to walk and as time went by my distance progressed and my strength was getting better and soon I was able to walk down into the state forest a short distance from my home.

You have to understand-this place is as rural as it gets. We are nearly 8 miles from the nearest pay phone-which is in front of the nearest convienience store. Until two years ago when they finally paved our road-even the sheriffs office hesitated before coming out here. So-its pretty isolated , and a good place if one wanted to say for instance-get away from folks.

One morning in the forest I met a woman who later became known to me as ‘Rose’-but who was also known as Theresa Grasso…and Bertha Keene. On one instance she also became Mary Beth-a name she used when she introduced herself to a friend of mine later down the time line.

She was nice enough-an older hippie lady,so we got along-me being from the hippie era too.And soon enough we met almost every morning and she would walk with me and we’d talk-starting these walks with a few puffs of marijuana…

As time went by things she would say did’nt quite meet up and it seemed she was’nt telling the truth-but it was’nt such a big thing at the time. After the summer…the rattle snake bride had taken off never to return-Rose became more constant in meeting me for these walks. One day she took me into her confidence and said she had something she needed to tell me-which was she had been escaped from prison for nearly twenty years for a murder which she claimed she did not commit. The murder on Calvert Street in August 1969. She was afraid I was going to see her on America’s Most Wanted-the popular television show. I don’t watch television-there is none in my house.

This story is not a easy story to tell-theres so much deatail , and my fingers on my right hand get beat after a bit. I am a one handed typest and it gets old after a bit. So I may have to set it down in words during several installements. This happened in 1998-and now even after 8 years it still is happening. Earlier this summer I was awakend from a nap by a knock on my front door. It was a young man-a film student from City College in New York City,who has heard this story from somewhere and his desire is to make a documentery about it. I could not believe a person from New York City could even locate this place-and because of his nerve to do so…I agreed.

I have to end this part of it by saying Rose is now incarcerated in the womens section at the prison in Jessup Maryland-the same prison she had escaped from four different times,her final lasting until she met me twenty years later. I also have to say-the way the events went there was no avoiding my being her ‘Judas’ and that my part in her life was a position unwanted and one I always wished had never been put my way. There was even a point when after she told me I tried to steer clear of her heading in another direction in another part of the forest-some 2000 acres-and she sought me out. Paths-how amazing it is how two peoples paths cross through one journey that is 35 odd years old and all of a sudden an event that you never knew of or had a part of with people you never knew of all of a sudden  pulls you in and you become involved. Believe me-a position no one ever wants to find themselves in.

Its like I said in the first time I wrote in the WordPress.com blog. This is the story of my life. I want to tell it to as many people as can see it to read it before I might die and tote this unreal mangled twisted mess that has been the way I’ve known life to my grave….tote it away for good-which will certainly be a relief for me. To be honest-I am thankful for this opportunity and the venue that is here to do it. Its too damned crazy a story of one guys life that should be told.