It was still winter in 1998 when I was heading towards Wisconsin to load a machine to haul to the west coast. I was on main highway going through northern Indiana feeling like I had a bad chest cold-so near Kendelville I stopped in an emergency room to get some antibiotics. It was’nt a cold-they plugged some things to my chest because my blood pressure was high and low and behold I was having a heart attack.
The heart attack led to a stroke and that meant my life as a trucker was over. I could’nt talk real well-and hardly could walk. I was 46.
I had’nt been home to Florida in 121 days. The kind of hauling I did was oversize equipment and some of it took days to move. My last break home had been after 8months on the road.
I was married to the lady I fondly refer to as my ‘rattlesnake bride’. She was a beautiful woman with a creative mind who led everyone to believe she had cancer and only months to live. She does well-that was in 1993….but one eventually knew that anything Misty said was not believable.
Never the less…she was an interesting companion for the two years we spent together in the trucks-although she could be quite volatile she possessed this intelligence that was astounding. She just never used it in the right direction and eventually did some time in prison herself.
There was something suspicious about Rose from the beginning-by beginning I mean from the first time I actually talked to her,I had previously bumped into her twice before-the first time I scared the daylights out her…we were in the state forest behind our house.
She was nice middle aged hippie lady-one who smelled like Dr.Bronners soap and she wore those style paisley dresses and tie dye Tshirts,all the typical signs of hippie times. But her story was never really right-but by then I had been with Misty long enough to recognize a liar….I felt Rose was a liar-but que sara sara because she was’nt involved in my life except that she began meeting me for walks in the mornings. I really was’nt interested in her company-I more less wanted to meditate on my own,my body wrecked from the stroke. But in another turn,the company was also a threat to me because her boyfriend was not too friendly-I actually was afraid to be with her because of her boy friend and because of Misty…literally,Misty was like a bad storm.
I went another direction-we are surrounded by forest here…and damned if the woman did’nt figure me out….and could’nt figure out I was avoiding her.
To tell the truth…when she told me ‘the story’-I had by then pegged her to be as good as Misty in telling a lie. By then Misty had cleaned out the bank and took the car and left me….that was summer 1998,I have’nt seen her since-we are seperated by a vast land,and I am glad.
Things from that point got seriously bad-stupid on thier account because the story was so dumb…or,the way the months led up to it.
It was my son who notified the FBI….the FBI took two weeks to notify me-no one wwas on the hunt for her,no one had heard of her….and then all of a sudden they were there. The FBI.
There aint no question that after twenty years on the run for a murder she refused to do time for-this lady deserves to be in prison. So I’ve been told-she’s lied about her being the guilty one and has blamed her guilt on her sister. But,I have nothing to do about that.
Its kind of funny-I went to a church the next day to seek counsel…the view of the preacher was that she killed a man who was bouncer at a strip club and because she was there she was that kind of scum. She never appeared to be scum to me…she appeared to be a liar,but never was it easy to believe she was a killer-at least,up until the FBI showed me the victims photograph as the rage of bullet holes.
Theres no one but God who knows my heart about this and many other things….the woman was more of pest than anything,but there was a kindness in what she was thinking towards me-the cripple trying to learn to walk again.
No doubt in my mind-she failed to serve the time she convicted of…a murderer she is-and angry am I for being brought into her crime some 20 odd years later….and as it happened,as a paid partner since I was given 2000 dollars for my silence.
What makes me more angry is that I had been put in a position to be her judge-to point the finger….and unless you’ve lived the entire part of that time as I did you cannot understand fully the feeling of being decieved from two sides…Misty and Rose,and you certainly cannot see into the mind of a man who intentlly ‘stayed away’ from people.
Theres a Spiritual entwinement in this-how I spent so much time confined in a truck and away from others….and this. Why I stayed away is my fear of people and becoming involved….and damned if I did’nt get involved here hook line and sinker….
No one can understand the foundation of my guilt and the things I pile upon it…if it does’nt please you that I feel guilt,well-it something I cannot help.
Everybody I know has told me I did the right thing-I know I did the right thing,but dears….allow me my own privacy of how I choose to operate guilt.
a males life after rape 
January 3, 2008 at 3:31 pm |
Ah, Jay. I’ll try one more time – you keep bringing up your relationship with God, how he knows what’s in your heart, etc., etc. If you truly do have faith, did you ever think that maybe he PUT you in Rose’s path so that events would happen as they did?
January 4, 2008 at 6:16 am |
I’ve read about Misty and Rose on your Flickr before but I’m confused as to which was your wife and which is the murderer.
Austin
January 4, 2008 at 12:09 pm |
ahhh…I married Misty shortly after she told a number of us (neighbors) that she had ‘luekemia’ and a very short time to live.
Rose….aka Thersa Grasso…aka Bertha Keene….aka Mary Beth (and there may have been another alias,too many to recall….Rose was the murderer.