That’s a lot of dicks, or how to get 53 criminal charges in one day as a coroner

In what must have sounded like the opening scene from Reservoir Dogs, detectives in Bloomington, Illinois did not answer the question of how many severed dicks would be necessary to be charged with serious crimes - though I would posit the number is one, unless it's your own - but they did answer the question of whether this many pickled dicks in glass jars was sufficient to be arrested and charged. They answered it with 53 criminal charges against this guy, a man heading straight to the Funeral Parlor and Coroner Hall of Shame.   

 

This guy, not surprisingly, is the one with all the dicks

Now, it seems to me that there are certain jobs that are less likely than most to lead to criminal trouble and civil lawsuits.  The funeral/coroner trade seems to be one such trade.  I have no actual statistics for that.  I just made that up, but it would seem to be so.  You don’t have too much opportunity to commit murder, at least at work.  But even in the world of funeral homes and coroners, there are some things that society draws a line at:  It is generally frowned upon to use aggressive land conservation/reclamation strategies by re-selling grave plots and stacking bodies without disclosure to the old or new owners of said plot like occurred in Chicago. 

It is also generally frowned upon to neglect your work in what I am guessing was marijuana-induced problem solving strategy for too many inputs for a certain factory in Georgia where crematorium workers were discovered with hundreds of bodies, some dating back ten years, that had yet to be cremated.  I'm guessing that had to do with the problem with only so many hours in a day and too many bodies and taking a break to smoke some weed to calm down the nerves, and then the next day there are more bodies stacked up, requiring more weed smoking until you've got a serious problem.

It is certainly frowned upon to make overly aggressive attempts to teach lessons about fiscal responsibility.by dumping the body back on the surviving relatives porch when they don't pay the funeral bill.  

Necrophilia is obviously very frowned upon.  And then there's this: It is 53-charge arrest territory when the police, while investigating a human body part trafficking ring show up at the county coroner’s home and find jars of hundreds of pickled dicks.  Fox News Bloomington, Illinois, reports on Paul Houston whose job was to examine the dead who were involved in potential criminality.    He has been charged with 53 criminal counts. He was probably charged with at least 40 based on his mugshot, and the other 13 for all the dicks. I'm assuming he didn't wear the eye-liner to work, but who knows.  Maybe Bloomington is that kind of town.

  

Because even without the eyeliner, that whole situation is jacked up.  He is likely going to the coroner hall of shame.  This is seriously jacked up. It is so jacked up that no fiction writer could put it in a crime novel and get away with it.  Probably the best novel about a bent undertaker was William Gay’s novel Twilight.  Gay’s novel is awesome.  Read it.  But even William Gay, that master of Southern Gothic prose, wouldn’t have made up something like all those dicks. 

The previously-mentioned shenanigans got funeral homes sued, they probably had to hand out a lot of discounts to keep up business, and in the land conservation scheme, $10 million was paid out in settlements and fines, and some workers went to jail for fraud.  But no amount of discounts would have saved Paul Houston and his jars of dicks, not to mention the body-part trafficking ring.  That’s just messed up.  It begs the question of how the bodies were being disposed of after the coroner made his reports. Presumably some local funeral home or crematorium employees were part of the body-part trafficking ring.  Surely they noticed the lack of genitalia.  Surely they thought that this guy was a new kind of freak when they went to harvest the other organs to traffic them and saw junk missing hundreds of times.  It's probably pretty hard to turn in a guy for keeping cadaver junk when you are trafficking the non-junk related parts.  

The Bloomington police seemed justifiably appalled.  Fifty-three criminal counts seems like a lot. It seems like enough to keep this guy away for a long while.

                                                                                             

Ammonia and scenes that require action to follow – starting my third book

Loyal and faithful readers of this blog - which is irregular at best depending on the news cycle and whether the feral hogs have decided to go on the offensive, and whether the creepy clowns rear their stupid heads again – we have two events on the horizon.  Two book readings/signings in the near future.  September 22 from 4-6 pm at Murder by the Book in Houston, and October 20 at the Fort Worth Book Fest.  

One question I get a lot when I talk about writing is how I start a book. I have a full time legal practice, so I don’t think about writing fiction all day, nor can I write fiction all day.  I write crime novels, so I begin with a crime.  I have characters that I want to introduce.  I don’t have a vision of what characters look like, even in my own head, and don’t describe the physical features of the characters unless it matters to the story, and only then to the extent it matters to the story development.  I have characteristics and personalities, some minor details, and most importantly the language they use.  I have the characters explain themselves to the reader through their action, their words and word choice.  By the time I write the first chapter, I have a list of the main characters with their necessary traits, the overall arc of the story, and all of the chapters of the first third of the book listed out with three or four sentence (max) descriptions of what will happen in the chapter.

And then I have to actually begin the story.  How do you start a crime novel? I set the characters into a situation that requires some sort of action and contains important ambiguities, some that the reader will recognize while reading it, and some that the reader may only discover later when the characters themselves discover it.  The opening scene may have action or may just require action to take place after it.  The opening scene doesn’t have to introduce the main characters of the story, though it can simply set up a scene that they will come into soon. What the opening scene has to do is launch the action.  I set a scene, put in characters, then I see what they will do, discovering what the characters will do as I write each scene.

My second book, Ghosts of the Mid-Country, is done and published.  It is a continuation of the first murder mystery/legal thriller, Devils Walk Through Galveston.  The third book, now tentatively called The Hydra and the False Prophet’s Creed (though that will probably change) again follows the book that preceded it, bringing back some of the main characters, with a new crime. It has to stand on its own for people who haven’t read the prior books, and also has to allow loyal readers to pick it up and be met with familiar characters at a point they remember from the end of the prior story.  It has to give enough information that the new readers aren’t lost and the loyal readers are not bored.

Here’s the first chapter of the latest book, The Hydra and the False Prophet’s Creed. Tell me if you like it. And come see us on September 22 in Houston at Murder by the Book, or October 22 at the Ft. Worth Book Fest. http://fortworthbookfest.com/

1. Ammonia

            The Deputy Sheriff smelled cat piss on the plume of white smoke rising over the trees behind crop fields.  A hell of a lot of cat piss.  It meant one of two things.  It meant that there was gonna be a hell of an explosion right quick or it meant meth.  He listened to the police band radio and heard nothing.  He called into the fire department in De Valls Bluff and got no report of any farmer’s anhydrous ammonia tank leaking or on fire.  He called he VFD in Watensaw Township and got nothing there, either.  He called back to De Valls Bluff and said get the meth crew.  He called the High Sheriff and told him to bring backup.  He wasn’t going in alone to a booby-trapped meth lab that could have some lit-up motherfuckers wanting to shoot while they were trying to salvage the operation or get out to the backup lab.  Fucking meth labs.  He had about ten minutes or more before the other deputies would get out there with a constable.  He drove around the area until he was sure it was in the woods and not in back of some industrial barn with industrial sized tanks of fertilizer that would blow up everything in a half-mile area.

            The Constable met him at the cross-roads where 217 met a dirt road down into the forest bordering the White River.  Near to the pretty birds that the Yankees came down to see.  Not near enough to the river that some ornithologist would stumble onto them.  He had an idea where to look.  The Constable didn’t show surprise.  He didn’t show knowing, either.  He showed up in some rinkny-dink Pontiac Sunbird ragtop that he’d owned before getting elected and was using the county money to pay off, hoping that a criminal didn’t have a knife to cut out the roof again and run away with his hands cuffed.  That shit was hilarious.  It got him a new roof on the county dime and the Commissioners laughed because the dude was caught not far away.  But the Commissioners said they weren’t paying for another one so he’d better be damn sure that anyone he arrested was free of sharp objects or he was paying for his own roof the second time.  He was still butt-hurt over that.  He was untrained, but elected and got along with the black folks which was enough to get him re-elected.  He was brave and reasonably smart, so he hadn’t gotten killed. 

            The Constable got out of his Sunbird and walked to the driver’s window of the Tahoe and asked the Deputy if he knew anyone cooking back there.  The Deputy took offense and said so.  He told the Constable to get back in his convertible and wait five minutes.  They weren’t going in until they were damn sure there wasn’t a fertilizer tank that was gonna explode.