Death Scenes

Mrs Florence Honeycutt age 38. Killed by her husband John T Honeycutt age 32. He ripped her to pieces with a carving knife while she still was alive, then beat her with a meat grinder. while her elderly mother looked on horrified 11-13-45. Roscoe. Calif. Honeycutt an Ex-conviot was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to death in the S.Q. Lethal Gas Chamber. 2-14-46. EXECUTED 2-7-47. S.Q.

So the scrapbook is also Jack Huddleston’s confession, his plea bargain. The detective writes his little introductory rationale as the excuse, the socially redeeming purpose behind his obsession. If there is any truth in it, it is the stained white flag waved by the hostage taker. It is the “you-made-me-this-way,” the “I-did-it-for-you,” the “this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you” lies of the bully and abuser. The old cop, like the old con, tries to trick us into forgiveness and complicity. By witnessing he has participated, by understanding he is culpable. And his real purpose is to disguise the truth—that he started out terrified and ended up liking it, fascinated, an afficionado.

Jack Huddleston’s force was the root stock of the LAPD whose current image is of another lean, plainclothes detective, a suave perjurer on the witness stand, fueled by venomous racism to brutalize and plant false evidence against black people. This is the LAPD defined by the uniformed cops who beat an unarmed black man, and turned their backs as the riots began. This is the LAPD that presided over, and some say colluded in, the OTHER Kennedy assassination. It is the cradle of the Special Weapons Assault Tactics teams invented by Darrell Gates under the umbrella euphemism of pro-active crime fighting—a strategy which is all too often implemented by cops becoming criminal themselves. The political traditions of Jack Huddleston’s day continue, with police forces driving ethnic groups into isolated pockets, exaggerating the crime rate and inflating their own levels of risk at contract renewal time.

They are, after all, the biggest, most heavily armed and deadly gang in any town.

The angriest photos, the most brutal, are the dead children. The toughest cops, so the stories go, get bizarre when the victim is a child. In most of us instinct and emotion rebel at the very idea. Most of these infants were killed by their mothers, of course. Who else would have a motive? And after you’ve seen a few of these scenes a caustic bright side inevitably occurs to you—if your mother is that crazy she’d do a lousy job of raising you. This child’s life would have been hell. Death is easier. Less painful. And if she kills her offspring she eliminates her own defective line from the gene pool

We say these things lightly—“I shoulda stood in bed,” meaning we should have avoided trouble. We say “safe in our beds at night” or “he died at home in his bed,” meaning peacefully, quietly, without pain, as opposed to “with his boots on.” The bed is a nest, the sheltered den where we feel safest and most at ease. We relax there. We make our private and personal love. We allow ourselves that most complete vulnerability—Sleep. But Detective Jack shows us the bed as another kind of place entirely—an arena of terror. This is the place where love goes wrong and tears you to pieces. This is the place where the predator flings down his prey and rips it for pleasure. Where the stranger creeps to find you. Where your own mother pounces on your innocent sleep and punishes you for everything that ever happened to her. Where your drunken father rapes and strangles you. This is the suffocating cage where the last agony of the suicide plays itself out, where an acid drip eats at the mind until lead sucked from a steel tube is the only conceivable anaesthetic.

Real estate boosters sold Los Angeles as a crime-free glamour zone of orange groves and Hollywood glitter, while the cops were triggering and brutally suppressing the Hispanic “Zoot Suit Riots.”

leprosy (which, we suspect, may actually be tertiary syphilis)

A clear and rather sympathetic nude portrait of a man with Elephantiasis of the scrotum triggers the predictable questions and their inevitable answers in the mind of the viewer—how does the poor devil walk?

We can imagine him coming home from work with a manila envelope, tossing it on a dresser or desk. He would wait until after supper to open the envelope, to arrange and label his latest find. Did he share this hobby with his wife? Did he frighten his children with these images and the stories that went with them? Or was it his private pornography, locked away until he was alone in the house for a few hours?