Where The Heck Is The Duct Tape?

 Let me tell you how I ended up bound and gagged and in the trunk of my Aunt Ebbie's 2002 Ford Taurus one recent Monday. I will be posting photos momentarily.

I had been moping about the house in that peculiar purgatory - the week between Christmas (Thank God it's over!) and New Years (yeah, yeah, yeah, let's be done with it) and working on my new blog.
Let me say this about social media. The reason I have been embracing it in the last month - Facebook! Twitter! A Blog! - is because I've come to realize that you can participate and  never have to actually interact with a fellow human being. It's true! You can tweet in your panties and bra and nobody knows the difference. You can blog while sitting on your comfy couch with a glass of Merlot. Social media is not social at all! Who knew?

This works well for me. As a journalist at the Detroit Free Press, I am forced to go out in the world every day and interview people, often about painful events. And since I cover mostly crime, much of my time is in courtrooms.  Courtrooms are some of the saddest places on the planet because there never really is any good news. Sure, bad people get convicted, but then it's over and the bad guy is carted off, and then everybody - the bad guy's family and the victim's  family, the jurors and the judge - goes home with empty hearts.

So, as you might imagine, by the end of the day, I'm not sociable at all. Think the Unabomber. Only without the explosives.

So this whole blog thing was looking good to me. On the Monday after Christmas, as I contemplated my first posting, I thought I'd put up something nice and cozy, a picture of me with my dog Eddie, a puggle, sitting next to a fireplace, as if to say to people who might want to stop by to visit me on my blog, "Here, come sit with me, and I'll tell you an interesting story." Eddie has a nice smile, if you don't mind the overbite. This is the photo I wanted to post as my profile picture:

So there I was, going about my business, a song in my heart, a doggie in my lap, when C and Lil, the gun moll arrived. C is my daughter. I'm not using her full name because she asked me nicely not to. Well, maybe not so nicely. She said, and I quote, "I'm bloody well sick and tired of being nothing more than fodder for your amusing little ditties."

This is in apparent reference to a thirty-year family tradition of me mentioning my assorted children in columns, essays, emails, and novels. C informed me this was "bad form." (This is what happens when you send a kid to grad school. They use terms like "bad form.")

Lil, the gun moll, is a pretty little Italian woman with a mouth like a sailor at sea, and my friend for more than twenty years. She will tell you she works in marketing and publishing in metro Detroit. That may or may not be true. Even though she is a gun moll, she doesn't actually pack heat. She doesn't need to. Not with that attitude.

 I showed them my blog-under-construction.

"Holy Christ," Lil shouted. "This picture of you and the dog! You've got to be kidding! Nobody is going to read a blog with a picture of a woman in a flowery blouse holding a puggle. You look like the spokesperson for the League of Decency, or the Daughters of the American Revolution."

I was hurt.

Eddie was really hurt.

"Really, Mom," C chimed in. "You need something edgy, something different. You're a crime reporter. We need some crime."

"And flashy shoes," Lil was still shouting. She does that when excited. "And maybe some murder weapons. A knife? An axe? And duct tape. You got any duct tape?"

"There's a chain saw in the garage," C offered up.

I could tell they were confused. "I write about crime," I said. "I don't commit it."

"Not true," Lil said, "That picture of you and the dog is a felony, or at least a high misdemeanor."

C said, "If you want this blog to fly, Mother, you've got to think Huffington Post. A bit outlandish, sometimes a little over the top. You can do outlandish. Like the time you painted the dining room red. That was out there."

For the record, it was "Rich Mocha", not red, a minor point, but still.

"Oh yeah," Lil recalled. She had been the most vocal critic of the paint job. She'd arrived, surveyed the dining room and said, "Jesus, it's like standing in the middle of a large vagina."

Eddie was looking worried. I was too.

Lil said, "We're going on a photo shoot. Grab your stuff. And don't forget the duct tape."

We were driving through Pontiac, one of Michigan's most dangerous cities looking for "grit." as C was putting it, some backdrop for my blog to give it some authenticity.  Just the month before, I'd done a midnight "ride along," in Pontiac,  a journalist's term for hitching a ride with a police patrol to better report what was actually happening on the streets. The ride had been courtesy of the Oakland County Sheriff's Office, the agency that had taken over in May when Pontiac went belly up and the police department was disbanded. Like many small and medium rustbelt cities, Pontiac had once been glorious, with lovely neighborhoods of stately tudors and craftsman homes, robust libraries and a thriving school district, built when the auto factories breathed life and energy into the community and everybody had a job.

Now the  factories, on the outskirts of the city, lay like the carcasses of dinosaurs, their enormous buildings empty,  the vacant parking lots overtaken by thistle and bindweed. The "ride along," had produced a story of a struggling community fighting back against crime and confronting despair.

So on this Monday, C and Lil and I were out looking for trouble in a troubled city.  Or at least something that would give me some street cred. I was in the back seat, with assorted "props," a hat, the requisite trench coat, a black leather jacket, two pairs of high heels, a large kitchen knife, a hatchet, rope and duct tape.

It occured to me that if we were to be stopped by police, it would indeed look as though we were getting ready to launch a crime spree, or had just finished one. All that was missing was a crack pipe.

C, in the driver's seat, cruised down South Boulevard. "Where the heck is all the good graffiti?" she said. "There used to be some cool graffiti around here."

"You're right," Lil said, looking peeved. "We should have brought our own paint. Is there a hardware store nearby?"

"No paint," I said.

C pulled up to an abandoned house on the east side. The windows had been broken, and the door kicked in. Lil liked it. "Wobble up there onto the porch in your red heels and pretend to be looking for clues," she ordered. I did as I was told. C got out her camera phone:

Lil and C surveyed the photo. "Hmmph," Lil said. "We need more of a sense of menace." We drove on. Three blocks over we spotted a rickety steel staircase snaking up the side of an abandoned church. A sign read "KEEP OFF." It looked, well, menacing. C said, "this is way cool."

"Here," Lil said, handing me the knife."Make it look as though you've stumbled upon a crime scene." Now I must say, wobbling up two flights of rusty stairs in stilletto heels carrying a seven inch butcher knife sounded like a really bad idea to me, but these two were not to be denied. C got out her camera phone again.

The knife, in case you missed it, is on the top step. Because oh sure, people who commit crimes always leave the murder weapon some place obvious. I was growing weary of my partners in crime.
"Let's go home," I said. "I don't want to play anymore."

Lil, not pleased with the knife shot ("Don't smile! It's a crime scene! Look perplexed and dismayed and intrigued.") was not willing to call it a day. "We need a lamp post,'' she said. "That'll do it. We'll tie you to it. It'll be perfect. There are lamp posts downtown."

Suddenly, LoriTellsAStory was turning into The Perils of Pauline. "No," I said. "No way. No lamp post. No bondage. No, no, no. I want to go home. "

Lil was squinting at me in the sun, trying to gauge my determination. She smiled. "Okay," she said, "On one condition."

My neighbor across the street was out checking his Christmas lights when C and Lil tied up my wrists and ankles, slapped tape over my mouth, and helped me into the trunk of Aunt Ebbie's Taurus, parked in my driveway. Ebbie had left my husband the Taurus when she died a couple of years ago. For the record, a Taurus has a very small trunk.  My neighbor looked mildly alarmed. C waved at him and called out a holiday greeting.

"Look afraid," Lil said. "Like you've been kidnapped by the mob to keep you from exposing high level corruption in the city of Detroit." Corruption in Detroit? Like that would ever happen. C got her camera phone out again:

I stayed in the trunk while they perused the photos. "Now that has an edge," Lil said. "Plus your manicure looks nice." They set me free.

 I didn't have the heart to tell them that when I went back to work the next day, I'd be wearing a navy blue Jones New York suit, carrying a notebook, and wearing sensible shoes.

 My job is exciting, but not that exciting .

She Just Loved That Man to Death

I've spent 25 years sitting in courtrooms, reporting on some of the most appalling of human behavior. Here's what I know. There's marriage, and there's crime. And sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart.

Sure, people kill each other in the strangest ways, and for the most peculiar of reasons. I once wrote about two drug addicts who, angry over the quality of the product, tied their dealer down and injected her with bleach. In another case, a career criminal working at a car wash kidnapped a woman as she attempted to clean her Cadillac, placed her in the trunk of her own car, and then drove around in the car for five days as the woman, still locked in the trunk, died of thirst.

But it is not these cases that tend to fascinate people. Horrify them, absolutely. But absolute evil tends to be one dimensional, a black hole with nothing to hold our attention except a passing fear.

No, what keeps people mesmerized are stories about love and betrayal, and what happens when things go seriously awry.

It's no surprise, then, that there's been a recent resurgence of interest in the Nancy Seaman murder case. Oxygen's SNAPPED is planning a segment, and Discovery's SINS AND SECRETS was in town last month, doing interviews for an episode to run in early 2012.

For those who missed the gory 2006 trial, Nancy was an elementary school teacher, living what appeared to be a near perfect life - a large home in a gated community in upscale Farmington Hills, a suburb of Detroit, a successful and handsome husband and two sons who had made her proud by graduating college with honors.

She argued with her husband one Sunday afternoon. It was Mothers' Day.

She then drove directly to the local Home Depot in the pouring rain, bought a hatchet, drove immediately home and whacked him to death in the family garage. And she then stabbed him 16 times, just for good measure.

Nancy, at 5'2'' and 120 pounds managed to get dead Bob, 5'9'' and 190 pounds, into the back of the family's SUV (She would later explain that she rigged a system of levers and pulleys, using materials she found in the garage. She was, after all, a Science teacher). She then drove around with the body for three days, running errands, teaching her fourth grade class, and shopping at Target, where she bought, among other things, Febreeze.

The body was still in the back of the SUV that Wednesday, wrapped up in a tarp, along with the hatchet, when the Farmington Hills police arrived, alerted that Bob had stopped showing up for work.

Nancy Seaman, once named Teacher of the Year by the Farmington Hills School District, suddenly found herself charged with first degree murder.

A jury eventually convicted her, and she is serving a life sentence in a Michigan prison. There is an appeal pending.

Here's what's interesting and telling, though.

During the three week trial, she took the witness stand in her own defense. The prosecutor asked why she had not disposed of the body.

"He was my husband for 30 years," she said, clearly exasperated that anyone would ask her such a question. "I couldn't just dump him anywhere."

It was one of those rare courtroom moments where truth suddenly makes an appearance.

The entire trial had been one long and ugly account of a marriage gone south, of two people not just trapped in a loveless relationship, but waging full jihad against each other. By the time she took the ax to her husband, they were communicating only by sticky notes, little yellow squares of paper posted all over the house. Bob was just days from filing for divorce.

And yet she did not want to dispose of his body in an unseemly or irresponsible way. I believed that. Her comment spoke to the intimacy of the marriage, of all marriages, really.

Sure, she had butchered him in the garage, but they had a history, had shared the same bed, once made love, conceived two children. She used to do his laundry - an intimate chore if there ever was one. He made her happy in the early years, weeding her flower beds and taking her to dinner. There were Christmas mornings, and family vacations and anniversaries.

In Nancy's mind, I am sure, the messy business with the hatchet in the garage did not in anyway diminish those earlier joys. In fact, her husband's violent death was the logical outcome for her. There had been intimacy. He had once been hers. And he had been leaving her for years.

So her fury grew. And in turn, Bob grew more distant.

Some marriages are like petri dishes, perfect environs to breed all manner of horrors. No one will walk away. Everybody wants the last word. Every perceived slight becomes a felony, every snub a near mortal wound.

A death by a thousand superficial stabwounds.

Or a few well placed whacks with a hatchet.

Loathing is a pretty safe indulgence, when done from afar. You can loathe Newt Gingrich with all your heart and no harm will come to you.

But loathe the person asleep beside you? Loathe the sound of his voice, the smell of his skin? Now, we're in the danger zone.

Most of us are healthy enough to leave such a toxic relationship. We get bruised and battered, and then say, enough. Some would say Bob Seaman had finally reached that point. That he was no longer interested in the last word, that he wanted out.

For Nancy though, the intimacy was the rub. It was clear from her testimony.  I let you into my life, created a family, planned for the future. I let you get close to me. And now you want to leave me. And I will have the final word. Even if it's as I'm being led away to serve the rest of my life in prison.

Here's the thing with me.

I love my husband. We don't have enough energy left after raising children to punish each other over perceived slights, missed birthdays, overdrawn checking accounts.

But sometimes, late at night, when I'm just a little bit peeved, and my perpective is out of whack, I think,

"Hmmm. I could drive to Home Depot..."