Games, Ghosts, and a Dog's Nose: Friday Night Thoughts on the mid-January Jesse Matthew Hearing this week, in the Hannah Graham Murder Case

First, go with me, in your imagination, no matter your age, into a cozy winter morning, into the fuzzy electric heat (ahhh) piped from the clanking central furnace in a courteous, gleaming public school. You can relax, for now, like any young student, in the cozy indoor warmth.

Your fingertips remember this comfort, familiar from long-ago touches you gave the loyal pages of your favorite childhood books. Here, warmth is a beloved fragrance, free for all children to inhale, a perfume made of paper, calm, and light. Breathe in your share of this calm warmth.

We enter the sweetness of this especially excellent middle school in southwest Virginia, where sixth graders, in their upstairs computer lab, murmur helpful comments to one another. The rule is: once you finish your equivalent ratios and your bar graph practice, you are free to play Cool Math games, on line.

This conspiracy of twelve-year-olds is innocent. The children are happy. They are playing the clever cartoons, in a room which has three windows, and the softened grey light from snow clouds whispers natural security through the double-paned classroom windows.

In the distance, you can see Brush Mountain, sleeping in her January flannel. Her winter pajamas are patterned in subtle pastel, a grey-orange-lavender color which is easy to overlook, but nearly impossible to paint.

The world, for a time, seems made of the softness of doves. Whatever their differences, whatever their individual advantages and disadvantages, whatever problems or peculiarities of their particular families, there is harmlessness among all these children, and storybook goodness in the teachers.

One little girl under headphones has chosen to go to a site called Storyline Online, where whimsical actor and matriarch Betty White in wire-rimmed glasses is reading Gene Zion's old book, Harry the Dirty Dog.

Because he doesn't like his bath, Harry runs away, but in the end, Harry comes home. He submits to the scrubbing, and all the mud and soot and coal dust are soaped away. Harry the Dog is dry and clean, loved and sleeping peacefully. The end.

The story of Harry reminds me of a photograph on my iPhone, and most of the students guess correctly, when I then show them the Rorschach image and ask them to tell me what they think the image is, although one imaginative boy guesses a big-horned ram, and two girls guess owl. They all want to know for certain the solution of the mystery, and I tell them, yes, it is a close-up of a dog's nose. Oh! They exclaim. We knew it!

Then the students clamor to tell me about their dogs, rescues from the animal shelter, or funny labradoodles or dachshunds. I listen to every story.

The bell rings. And another hour of precious time seems to have dissolved, like a dream, like a curl of rising smoke, as if we momentarily imagined all its meanders.

But memories belie transience.

The briefest exchanges, or the barely acknowledged qualities of light and sound and temperature in a room, or the impressions which are distant but sensual through a silent window, these infinitesimals all still run, and they all will, always, continue to circulate, like the smallest glitter, round and round in our bloodstream, the miniature passengers of our toy-train existence, in the fleeting completion of our impermanent run.

And now, let us leave the nostalgic glitter, this backward glimpse of unburdened childhood time, and turn to wherever else we belong, to the particular responsibilities of our jobs, to our eyes falling to our gas gauge to be sure we can safely commute home, to our own children and the preparation of their meals, to our mortgage payment and laundry, and, in the evening, to a quiet cup of chamomile tea, or perhaps a glass of Chard or Cab, or a favorite beer, beside you.

Please don't turn the television on. Just for a time, be in the quiet ambient sound of wherever home is, so that you can help me solve a problem.

In September, 1931, seven dozen years to the month before 18-year-old Hannah Graham was murdered in Charlottesville, Virginia, non-violent freedom fighter and the father of India's Independence, Mahatma Gandhi, accepted an invitation to visit the town of Darwen, in Lancashire, England. Textile workers there wanted Gandhi to see for himself the hardships being suffered by the English factory workers because of Gandhiji's Independence Movement's boycott of their British goods.

One Darwen mill worker complained to Gandhi about not being able to save as much money, and he famously put his skinny arm around her ample back and smiled, "My dear, you have no idea what poverty is."

Still, he deeply admired the camaraderie of workers. He understood the fellowship of low-wage laborers. He was assassinated because he would not settle for less than the dignity of every dispossessed person.

Now, come with me to contemporary Charlottesville, Virginia.

Closed in 1962, the Charlottesville Woolen Mills had employed generations of another community of factory workers. A few years ago, can't you see why the ghosts of all those worn-out mill workers must no doubt have been shaking their heads and rolling their eyes, when their now defunct, empty factory grounds received the public honor of joining the Register of Virginia Landmarks and Historic Places. But history can be like that, ghosts know, honoring shells and relics and empty places, neglecting the individual workers who, in this case, spun the wool like cotton candy, and made sweet fortunes for the factory's owners.

But for over a year now, though, any Charlottesville Woolen Mill ghosts who have been continuing to linger near their old stomping grounds, as ghosts are prone to do, around the dead-brick smokestack of their old factory, like retired friends, shooting the ghostly breeze about 150 years of changing fashions and lost ideas--these mill-ghosts have been profoundly shaken and scandalized.

They all saw something happen. Something horrific.

Even from the long perspective of exhausted centenarian ghosts, who have witnessed millions of arguments and selfish pursuits, murder is rare and abominable. But in particular the murder of an innocent young girl by a violent sexual brute? It absolutely appalls.

Imagine a cadre of the old Charlottesville Woolen Mills workers, sitting rheumy-eyed and dispirited, late one night, complaining again about the unkindness and unfairness of their shift bosses, particularly back in the 1880s.
Poverty remains an issue, through the centuries, even for ghosts.

"It's still bothering me," an old ghost named Frederick moans, "that by the time I died, working this mill for 44 years, I could never once take a vacation, never really educate myself, and never become what I see these Walking Socks taking for granted today."

(The Charlottesville mill-ghosts call the living "Walking Socks," because, well, the living move, and, insult to injury, some of the living wear socks like the ones the old mill workers produced, long ago.)

But the ghosts' perennial anxiety and disappointment about their own social immobility, back when they were Walking Socks, suddenly halts.

A hulking calamity is slouching toward them.

"Jesus Christ," a ghost named Samantha suddenly exclaims. Sam, as the men-ghosts call her, has a photographic mind, and years ago, she solved the mill-ghosts' terrible frustration that, as ghosts, they can't hold real playing cards and pass the time playing poker and rummy.

Usually, Sam is directing the old dead gamblers to hold up their hands as if cards are really there, telling them what cards they've drawn and what cards they might play. Her mind holds the whole deck. She pretend-deals, and the old ghosts feel almost alive again. Sam, born in 1855, dead in 1895, is an irreplaceable help. All the mill-ghost men love and appreciate her.

"Look!" Sam points.

The mill-ghosts stop their game. Her tone is grim. They follow Sam's gaze.

Two people, real, living people, are approaching from East Market Street. Something is wrong.
"No one comes here but us," a ghost named Mitch worries. "Only we love the empty places."

The area is an abandoned and disused industrial wasteland, featureless but for gravel, dandelions, broken glass, and a moldy hillock of wood chips and mulch, the scrapple of dead neighborhood branches downed in forgotten storms.

"Jesus Christ," Sam whispers, forgetting that almost none of the living can hear ghosts at all, no matter how loudly they are talking.

"Smell him!" Sam urges, a kind of panic in her voice.

Ghosts have noses like dogs. They can smell trouble. They can scent evil.

All the Charlottesville Woolen Mills ghosts are now staring at a man who is oblivious to them.

This man stinks of evil.

He is half-dragging a beautiful young girl. She seems drugged.

It is past midnight, human time, pitch dark. It is the wee hours of September 13, 2014.

Charlottesville-town is mostly asleep. No one, except for ghosts, should be in this derelict place.

But the man has forced the slender girl here, and she is struggling to leave, to get away.

She does not get away.

The stinking man walks away, returns with his car, removes her limp body, and puts her body into his car.

In all their decades and decades since dying, the mill-ghosts have never smelled such corruption.

It happens maybe only once in a millennium, but when ghosts really suffer the helplessness of not being able to intervene as they would like, they cry. All beings except for humans hear the rare, almost mythical piteous weeping of ghosts.

In response to ghosts' wailing, sidewalks and asphalt roads develop sudden fissure-lines, as trees clench their roots into bulky fists underneath. Coyotes become hysterical, singing fearful, mad songs. Owls swoop down and capture helpless mice, but instead of eating them, illogically rush the frightened rodents back to their nests to keep them warm and safe, underwing. Turtles flip themselves onto their backs, to commit suicide. Diurnal birds turn their agony into art, careening into windows, stamping them with open-winged angel designs and a few wavering breast feathers, glued somehow to the glass. All creatures suffer deeply when ghosts cry.

The ghosts witnessed: a beautiful girl was murdered on the old grounds of Charlottesville's Woolen Mills property, just across from the Amphitheater, where the Indigo Girls have played, the Dalai Lama has prayed, and Help Save the Next Girl has worked.

Earlier this week, in another Albemarle County Courthouse hearing, in the capital murder case of Hannah Graham, we learned that a bloodhound named Shaker, keyed to a scent-object from Hannah Graham's apartment, led a former Louisa County detective and canine handler to that very mulch pile on the abandoned Charlottesville Woolen Mills site.

In court, we learned about voids of scent, scent dispersal, and paths of scent, the vocabulary of canine behavioral punctuation.

We learned that, all of a sudden, Shaker hit the mulch pile, in a way so distinct from simply following a trail that canine handler Buck Garner said, it was as if he and the dog were suddenly "in a large plexiglass box of scent."
Hannah's scent.

Mr. Garner--Member of the National Police Bloodhound Association since 1981, member of the Virginia Bloodhound Search and Rescue Association since 1992, co-founder of the Top of Virginia Search and Rescue Association since 2003, Past and Present Instructor/Officer of the National Police Bloodhound Association Instructor of the Virginia Bloodhound Search and Rescue Association, Instructor/President of the International Canine Academy for Search Training, Founder/Trainer with Top of Virginia Search and Rescue Association--Mr. Garner explained to Judge Cheryl Higgins that the metaphorical "box of scent" was "consistent with type and volume of scent emitted in high-fear, high-adrenaline situations."

Such as attack, struggle, rape, and murder.

So my problem, my question, is:

How can a man, who was once a child, a boy who sat with other children in a safe classroom led by humane and loving teachers, how can he become the thing who made the ghosts of Charlottesville Woolen Mills cry?
How on earth can it be that a man, who was once a child, not a boy stripped mercilessly of all shreds of human hope and dignity, like a South Sudanese child soldier, or a drowning refugee, or any other casualty of endemic hate or apocalyptic civil war, how can that boy eventuate into the Mr. Hyde of the abandoned Woolen Mills?

How?

Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl, and
Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her life