12 #MurderMysteryMonday

Hey y’all! So I’m back with more

Murderous tea ☕️ did you miss me? I brought the sugar, agave and whatever else you asked me to bring along tonight. I feel like since I’ve started this blog I haven’t highlighted the monstrous micro humans that the world has to offer. Quite a few times I was supposed to write on Brenda Spencer and that didn’t happen 🤔 but today won’t pass me by on this one! Meet our devil daughter, Jasmine Richardson (well at least that was her name.) Now Jasmine was only 12 years old when she fell in love with a three hundred year old werewolf…

Yes you read that correctly! The then 12 year old was in a relationship with 23 year old Jeremy Steinke. Okay so how did we get here? Don’t worry I won’t skip anything. Jasmine was a typical sweet little girl attending catholic school. She had good grades and would always follow the rules. (That was until she became 12 and puberty hit I guess.) Jasmine started to defy school rules by drawing fake satanic tattoos on her skin and not wearing uniform. Instead, she opted for more of a goth look. She went from being bright and colorful, to having to have “all black everything.” (Not that, that’s a bad thing, just trying to describe the change here.)

Her friends became afraid of her, because she started acting “weird.” Of course Jasmine liked being feared.

One of the things that also changed was her choice of music. Jasmine started listening to punk rock and in early 2006 went to a concert where she met Jeremy Steinke. Steinke claimed to be a 300 year old werewolf and wore (what he claimed) a veil of blood around his neck. Jasmine and Jeremy exchanged numbers and so their sick relationship began. Jasmine would tell her parents that she’s sleeping over at a friends house (the oldest trick in the book) but would be sneaking around with her 300 year old werewolf beau.

Her friends let it be known that they weren’t okay with the relationship, and when her parents found out about this love affair they forbade Jasmine from seeing her overaged lover again. This infuriated her of course and she emailed her beau and said she had a plan,

“It starts with us killing them and me living with you.”’

As I’m sure you’ve guessed my now… he didn’t object! So the murderous event began.

To be continued…

Thomas Benke: Looking Around In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, in the Chapter “Looking Around,” says this: Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another. Otherwise we’d all just be barking away like Pekingese: “Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it’s your fault, you did this …” Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong. She goes on to speak about empathy for other people and also, as an extension empathy for yourself. So, in a sense as you try to write believable, relatable characters, you will come to forgive people their trespasses—because no one believes they are the villain of their story, so you have to write “bad,” or “evil” characters from a point of view where they rationalize what they are doing in such a way that it is the right or only way they see is possible. By extrapolation, then, if you begin to forgive and withhold judgment from your less-than-desirable, or annoying characters, perhaps you can extend the same courtesy to yourself and forgive your own trespasses and sins. This, for me, starts to enter the realm of “writing as therapy,” and though I am a firm believer in that—I practice it to this very day—I think I would caution anyone who thinks that simply writing through things is going to lead you to a place of light and love. I am not saying it can’t by any means. What I am saying is I have wrote through my thoughts and my problems and my desperation and depression for decades and I still had enough baggage on my shoulders to supply an army platoon with rations for a year. In any case, when thinking about craft, it is very important to step into the shoes of all of your characters, especially those characters that you see as antagonists and villians. I believe there are very few universal maxims in writing but one thing is virtually certain: every character you write is your version of that human being. Confucius said “everywhere I go, there I am,” and that is never more true than when you are writing. So if you are writing a character that is distasteful to you, it might be effective for you to ask yourself why that is the case. I wrote a blog for Obscura last semester titled, “The Puppy Had It Coming.” The gist of the article was to pose a puzzle to writers. How can you write a scene where an adult human kicks a puppy across the room and the reader at least understands why. I am not saying there is any way to justify the action or for the readers to be on the human’s side unless they are sociopaths. I am saying you need let the reader know how dark the place is in the character’s mind that he is capable of doing that.