Monday, May 12, 2008
Remarkable Developments
There is dramatic news on several fronts related to Forgotten Ohio, though none quite as amazing as the arrest of a suspect in the murder of Jessica Lynn Keen. Jessica, you'll recall, was the teenaged girl from Columbus's west side who turned up raped and murdered in the back corner of a Madison County graveyard back in March of 1991. My page on Foster Chapel Cemetery includes links to her story's inclusion on Unsolved Mysteries. But it wasn't TV crime shows that produced a name here--it was DNA. A recent state law required samples from Ohio felons, and one of them matched semen found with Jessica's body. Back in 1991 it ruled her boyfriend out as a suspect (a lucky thing for him, because without DNA I'm sure the local cops would have been pleased as punch to "focus" on him with a nice sixteen-hour interrogation followed by a few decades in prison...not that I'm cynical or anything). Now the DNA pointed to one man: Marvin Lee Smith, Jr.
On a personal level, I realized just a couple of years ago, after being directed to Foster Chapel and seeing the memorial to her murder site, that I knew Jessica Lynn Keen. She was fifteen and I was eleven, so to me she seemed practically a grown woman. I know I had a little-boy crush on her. My mom and I used to pass her in the mornings as she waited for her ride--the boyfriend, I think. I was being driven to elementary school or maybe going to meet the bus, and she was often there, hugging her books to her knees as she waited on the breezeway steps at our apartment complex.
She always smiled at me, and I thought she was beautiful. I wasn't involved in her life at all, but it seems to me that she got a very raw deal from some parents who didn't know how to react to normal teenage rebellion. According to what they all say, she was a "cheerleader and honor student" until an eighteen-year-old boyfriend caused her to start skipping school and stop paying attention to her grades. She couldn't have had very long to rebel (and for God's sake, how many of us did so much more and just kept on going when we were fifteen-sixteen?) before her parents had her placed in a "group home for troubled teens" on March 4, 1991.
That must have been bad. The fights and recriminations were bad enough, no doubt, but being packed away by your own family like that...it's ugly. Then she kept up with the boyfriend, no doubt forced to rely on him even more. On the fifteenth she had an argument with him--not her partner of many years, not her true love, but just the high school boyfriend who must have felt to her like the only one left on her side. She must have felt very alone that day, getting on the bus to go to the mall downtown. It must have been a cold, sad day for her. And, though I didn't know her at all, really, it breaks my fucking heart to think that a monster happened along and put her through something truly unthinkable, just when she must have been feeling so lonely, so low. What a world, huh?
As I said, we'll keep track of Mr. Smith's trial and/or sentencing. In other news...
If you deal with abandoned buildings and very old graveyards, you're inevitably going to see the places you enjoy the most either demolished (which is terrible) or renovated (which is better, though it nearly always robs the place of its cool ambience). Worst of all, there seems to be no way to prevent vandals from destroying the best of the little-known historic artifacts I profile on this website--particularly the "haunted" ones. Some people (property owners in particular) have made the argument that I owe them the favor of not publicizing their supposedly-haunted houses (or roads, barns, fields, etc.) so the curious sightseeker types will leave them alone. As much as I sympathize, I can't see doing that, because the vast majority of people aren't out there destroying things, and even if they are, I'm just reporting about places and legends that are already making the rounds; if I didn't do it, someone else would, or word of mouth would do the job. Vandalism happens, though, and it's always depressing to have to report on it when it does. Which is why this update is full of news, but not much of it is good.
Well, at some point in late March of 2008, some lovely people came into the graveyard with a hacksaw and chopped the head off the stone dog. Here's a comparison, with photos taken in 2003 and 2008:
. . . . .
As if that weren't enough, after all the demolition we've seen of our fair state's hideously beautiful crumbling relics, arguably the most impressive of them all is now slated for demolition. Chippewa Lake Amusement Park is now slated for demolition in a serious way. Most likely it will commence sometime in June. So if you'd like to photograph one of Ohio's very last abandoned roller coasters and ferris wheels, you'd better get to Medina County in the next couple of weeks--no kidding.
Plenty of updates have been developed and scanned and organized into folders, but my big problem is an inability to identify the places. So I've revived...
I am listening to:
Duran Duran's one good song ("Come Undone")
