Funny how your past intrudes into your present in the most awkward ways. This post might seem morbid but it's not meant to be; in my heart is something redemptive but I can't fully articulate it.
Recently I was with some friends from college and we started talking about the Yale grad student who was found murdered in a campus lab. The murder at a sister Ivy League school left us speculating on a motive and whether the attack was premeditated.
"The killer would have come up with a better plan to get rid of the body if he had planned it," I spoke up. "He would have known blood stains are hard to clean."
Awkward silence. You could tell everyone was trying to figure out why I knew so much about hiding dead bodies.
As a crime reporter, I had spent hundreds of hours at murder scenes, talked to countless homicide detectives, interviewed dozens of victims' families. I was the first journalist invited into a Parents of Murdered Children meeting after covering a story about a girl whose body was found ditched along a California highway. She'd met the wrong person...
Back to the conversation about the Yale victim. She had been working on cutting edge medical research; she was getting married in a few days.
As our group sat 3,000 miles away discussing her fate, it struck me that maybe there's a reason I've spent so much time covering horrific crimes. I don't know what it is yet but maybe there's something redemptive in those places of darkness.
Concealed evidence.
Maybe our pasts hold clues about our destiny until we're ready to step into something greater.
www.facebook.com/shayholland
Recently I was with some friends from college and we started talking about the Yale grad student who was found murdered in a campus lab. The murder at a sister Ivy League school left us speculating on a motive and whether the attack was premeditated.
"The killer would have come up with a better plan to get rid of the body if he had planned it," I spoke up. "He would have known blood stains are hard to clean."
Awkward silence. You could tell everyone was trying to figure out why I knew so much about hiding dead bodies.
As a crime reporter, I had spent hundreds of hours at murder scenes, talked to countless homicide detectives, interviewed dozens of victims' families. I was the first journalist invited into a Parents of Murdered Children meeting after covering a story about a girl whose body was found ditched along a California highway. She'd met the wrong person...
Back to the conversation about the Yale victim. She had been working on cutting edge medical research; she was getting married in a few days.
As our group sat 3,000 miles away discussing her fate, it struck me that maybe there's a reason I've spent so much time covering horrific crimes. I don't know what it is yet but maybe there's something redemptive in those places of darkness.
Concealed evidence.
Maybe our pasts hold clues about our destiny until we're ready to step into something greater.
www.facebook.com/shayholland
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