SOME THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND

I’m not going to turn this into a “what I did on my vacation” slideshow, where I stand in front of a lectern and give play-by-play accounts of the indoor garden and museums my wife and I visited. I’m sure you’re not interested in that anyway, and even if you were, without getting downright mean, let me just say, “None of it should matter.”

Instead, I’m going to swallow two teaspoons of codeine-laced cough syrup (yes, a double dose) and engage in a little bit of writing before checking in for the night.

It’s back to my daily routine: teaching Michigan prisoners in an environment I’ve tried my damnedest to forget about while visiting friends in Houston. True to my word, I stayed away from blogging for fear of writing about my job, yet, when my wife saw the true-crime novel I pulled out of my carry-on luggage, I might as well have confessed for having brought Michigan’s cold miserable weather all the way to Texas.

During our flight, I managed to read a considerable amount of “The Blooding” by Joseph Wambaugh, a former Los Angeles policeman; The book covered the first murder case to use genetic fingerprinting. Interestingly enough, the police had decided to get blood samples from as many men in town as possible. Is there a better way to weed out the innocent? Of course, the guilty party, a sicko, conniving-rapist-killer by the name of Colin Pitchfork, persuaded an acquaintance to give blood in his name after switching the picture on his passport.

By now you’re probably wondering why I’m steering you away from what happened on my vacation. Believe me, there’s an eerie tie-in here; It has to do with a sketch of Baby Grace I witnessed on my friend’s television for the very first time. They informed me about numerous parents and grandparents calling from all over the United States willing to give DNA samples to see if Baby Grace belonged to them. For those of you who may not know, Baby Grace’s badly decomposed body turned up in the Galveston Bay stuffed in a utility box. One grandmother, like many more before and after her, thought the sketch looked similar to her granddaughter, who she hadn’t seen since her ex-daughter-in-law left Ohio. To make matters worse, once located, the ex-daughter-in-law refused to give a DNA sample—a sure sign of guilt.

I swear to God, as my wife and I and our friends traveled to Moody Gardens in Galveston, I tried to find comfort in the cold drizzling rain of Texas. What bothered me, really really bothered me, had been the unraveling of the Baby Grace case.

When I finished my book, I learned that it wasn’t genetic fingerprinting that led to Colin Pitchfork’s arrest for murder, it was a conversation amongst coworkers in a pub a few years after the killings, an off-hand remark of “filling-in” for Colin on a simple blood test. As for the little girl discovered in Galveston Bay, the well-publicized sketch not only led to her killers, but also heightened awareness about many other missing children.

There’s not much I can say. In fact I’m speechless; it has nothing to do with a very sore throat. As for those friendly Texans that welcomed us into their home, they mentioned the death penalty in their state, and in the case of two-year old Riley Ann Sawyers, I’m beginning to think it’s not such a bad idea for the perpetrators. If it weren’t for the codeine, I’d probably go into a tirade over what the mother and her boyfriend did to an innocent child. As for me, it’s back to work dealing with Michigan criminals who must serve their times for a variety of offenses, including child abuse.