When Hell is Anywhere

Thoughts on the Albemarle Courtroom Motions Hearing, in the Hannah Graham Murder Case
January 21, 2016

Right now, there is lead in Flint, Michigan's water supply, a fact which city officials denied for four months. Medical assessors now conclude that tragic sequela likely include permanently lowered IQs in all of the city's children who have used the poisoned water.

Jesus.

Do you want to know about that contamination, or not?

Right now, there is a Zika outbreak in Brazil, spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and the horrific sequela for pregnant women being infected includes microcephalic births.

Inconsolable Brazilian babies born with tiny, deformed heads, 4,000 of them since October, scream and scream.
Jesus Christ.

Do you want to know about this medical disaster, or not?

We must know this, that all around us, people are suffering physical and emotional hells, and we know that there are outbreaks and contaminations, which mean that sometimes, hells are epidemic.

Some hells seem nearer to us, and some, farther, or so we may perceive, at first.

Do you disregard the ones you have perceived as farther hells?

To me, the core insight of Gil Harrington's Help Save the Next Girl is that sexual predatory violence is an epidemic, and that the suffering of all the families of the murdered and the missing children has hurt and diminished not just those particular families, but their communities, our communities, even our entire society.

What could happen to any of our children, which we know could happen because it has happened to so many other children, and continues to happen--abduction, rape, murder--hurts and diminishes all of us, all of our families.

So which social problems are actually far enough from us that we can safely count them as not our own problems?

Suffering even marks our genes. We are beginning to learn that we inherit specific fears, not just of snakes and spiders and roaring charging fanged animals, but of our genetic predecessors' particular memories.

We all do lose parts of our hearts, and even the innocence of future generations, when we are tortured by horrors such as those committed by the sexual predators we have caught, because we know they are just a sample of the perverted monsters who could strike.

What can we do?

Not think about them? Fill our heads with pretty thoughts, instead? Be "positive"?

I'm a mother, an artist, an animal lover, a teacher, and I hope a good friend. I am a positive person.

But you can't not know the dangers around you.

When hell is anywhere, the power of our fabric is diminished.

You can't not know about impending storms, dangerous road conditions, poisoned water, epidemics, and Jesse Matthew.

In the Albemarle County Courthouse today, Jesse wore his dreads down, not tied back. We last saw him sporting this Hungarian-Komondor beaded-curtain look when he was taken into custody in Galveston, Texas, where he was arrested on September 24, 2015, as he camped on that secluded little pinch of Bolivar Peninsula beach, with his sister's car and his map of nearby Mexico, having floored and screeched his way out of Charlottesville. His fat prison stripes today were putty green, and his chains were unremarkable, nothing special, just standard chains meant to keep a man already bound by three life sentences from erupting and hurting someone else in the courtroom. Really, that's all the fashion news from today.

On the scale of dull to animated, you could say Jesse was quite alert today. Through his free-swinging dread-mop, he observed the courtroom proceedings, rather as if he were an unperforming, hulked-out Sia, watching a tennis match.

Jesse's defense attorney kept putting a spin on his serves, which unfortunately for Jesse landed all those misdelivered defense attempts out of bounds. Such as? Jesse's attorney was upset over the use of the word "suspect." The Judge overruled the complaint. Jesse is charged with capital murder. I think it's fair to call him a suspect, don't you?

In fact, Judge Higgins ruled that law enforcement's warrants were all reasonable, and that the evidence collected during their searches of Jesse's apartment were reasonable to have collected, and that law enforcement's assumptions and procedures as they searched and collected were reasonable and correct. Thus, the evidence they obtained will be used during trials, later this year.

The defense attempted to argue that law enforcement had proceeded in a sort of crazed "general rummaging" rather than following a defined list of items that they could search for, and nothing else.

Listen.

It was probably hard to do any searching, let alone "general rummaging." Jesse's apartment was a mess. The floor was unclean, there were massive piles of clothing on the floor, and you had to use flashlights in his bedroom, even during the day.

Although defense bellowed that "a home is sacred" and that "general rummaging" is unconstitutional, the Judge ruled that law enforcement proceeded correctly in attempting to collect "trace evidence and biologics" pertinent to a possible abduction. Specifically, the Judge declared that investigators were not legally obligated to interpret the warrant more narrowly.

Narrow might be the defense's tizzy over the investigators collecting several pairs of Jesse's shorts, arguing that which pairs of shorts got collected might not be considered long if in fact law enforcement were looking for long shorts like the ones we've all seen on Jesse in the security camera footage from the downtown pedestrian mall that night he linked up with Hannah. What's long? Jesse might've worn his shorts prison-style, making them look longer than they were. And didn't you collect khaki shorts too? Is khaki a color or a fabric? Defense was hopping monkey-style all over willowy semantic branches to try to get evidence excluded.

But all the search warrant evidence was ruled reasonably collected.

Like what?

Like the black camisole found in Jesse's apartment, which was wet, and which had nasty "cut marks." Like all the different hairs on his mattress and pillows and stuck in his headbands, including a long blonde hair stuck in one headband. And the brownish-red bed-cover stain, and the similar stain on a pillowcase. And the stain on his memory foam.

Like the semen-stained shorts, and like his Samsung cell phone with its battery and sim card removed, reminiscent for me of convicted murderer Randy Taylor and his revolving phones and batteries, a naughty little habit of his meant to elude cell phone tower pings.

And like the chemical re-agent which showed probable trace blood in the drain of Jesse's bathroom sink. We, the Commonwealth, swabbed that sink.

We aren't sure yet, whose is what.

But what are sure of after today is that we are all going to learn everything this summer, during the trials.
We haven't even started talking about the scene of where the body was discovered.

And although Jesse might not be choosing it for his reading material tonight, I was just re-reading Canto III of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. I was perusing that scene where Dante looks up and sees the great inscription over the gate at the entrance of Hell.

Jesse had two box springs and two mattresses on the bed in his lair. But I didn't hear anything about other stacks, like maybe of books, or magazines, or laundry he had actually gotten around to taking care of.

Anyway, though Jesse might not be reading Dante, or thinking about the inscription over the gate at the entrance of Hell, I am. The most quoted part of that inscription is, in Italian, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

But I really like another part of the big inscription on Hell's gate. It's a less quoted line, but elegant: "Justice the power of my fabric moved."

I conferred with a Dante scholar today about that particular line. He agreed with me that Justice moving the fabric of the universe is in a way Dante's explanation that Hell is, somewhat uncomfortably, part of God's creation, but only in extreme circumstances.

If some being falls so drastically from the light of kindness and empathy, from the Godliness of service, mercy, and basic humanity, then the justice and power of God move a terrible loom, and the fabric of Hell results.

You see, Hell doesn't just turn on like a predestined machine. Hell begins with a man's choice.

The man sets the loom in motion, and murder is enough, more than enough, to set the Loom of Justice whirring.

The fabric of Hell is possible to manufacture, but a man has to excite the most unthinkable mechanisms before Hell is anywhere.

But when Hell is anywhere, someone is going through its gate, and he won't return.

In court today, Morgan's mama Gil drew this remarkable portrait of Jesse.

She had driven two hours to see him, then had to drive two hours home.

When she first woke, in the wee, dark hours, this morning, Gil told me that she sat with her hot tea and her note pad, reflecting on why she was drawn to drive all that way, on the edge of a looming snow storm, to sit in the Courtroom with Jesse.

Gil wrote:

-------
It's cold and icy--
But no matter the difficulties, we all do things to give our children sound footing.
You do things, as a parent, that contribute to your children.
You teach your children their ABCs. You take them to church, and teach them to drive.
Then you build for your grandchildren.
But our grandchildren can't be.
After six years and three months, mine is still to find Justice.
I will find it.
-------

Gil is mining a vein of Justice so rich that we all partake.

I thank her.

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