At the BBC’s Get Writing site I came across a series of questions, including Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How in relationship to Crime. So I pulled a suspicious character from my Six Degrees Stories, Jeff Harrison, by name, from the short-short Sometimes He Thinks. Since writing Jeff into existence, he’s creeped me out the way he saves all the baked goods his neighbor leaves at his door, storing them inside his cupboards, filling shelves with their plastic-wrapped staleness, buying ant traps to keep them safe from critters. He seemed a natural choice when I came across a Crime Story prompt to write a thousand words a day through the month of February, and today I used him to come up with the following responses to questions asked:
Who – Jeff Harrison
What – serial killer
Where – not in Pennsylvania but several other states
When – when he attends Public Works conventions out of state
Why – frustration, psycho, issues with women
How – by happenstance, not premeditated, not a stalker of those he kills, but is a stalker of those he admires. Those he does not admire, he barely acknowledges. Those he kills, he acknowledges even less, except by their labels which come after the fact.
Write a To The Bones Reduction of the Central Conflict: THE conflict would be Jeff’s eventual demise and what brings that about; how he is stopped from further murders. He is stopped when he brings the murders home, into Pennsylvania and his own apartment bldg.
Story encapsulation in a paragraph: Women are dying but their deaths are not connected. They are distanced by miles, by states, by sections of the nation from one another. A woman found dead in her car in New England one October, the labels cut out of her blouse and jacket, is filed and forgotten as an isolated incident. The following spring, an elderly shopper is found dead by the dumpsters at Wal-Mart in Des Moines, missing labels on her clothing are not indicated in police reports. In most reported homicides of lone females – from Arizona to Montana and Texas to Florida – no missing labels are mentioned. But when Sonnie Lindegarde becomes a roadside victim shortly before Christmas in 2007, a research student takes the time to notice those missing labels. The student is Cher Lindegarde and her sister did not cut labels from her clothing, nor did she buy from discount houses that did. Her sister is not the one meant to die, according to Cher, and the ways they had gone about life would indicate Cher is right: Sonnie, the hard worker always with more care and anxiety than seemed healthy, and Cher of wild abandon who slept with, well, with men with a pulse and a kindness somewhere inside.
