Sara (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} azbukivedi_engl) wrote,@ 2007-11-09 18:58:00 |
|
Bostonian Rhapsody
In a moment everything changed.
“This is Britt! My God, it’s Britt!” My husband jumped off the sofa and pointed his finger at the woman on the TV screen.
A minute ago we were watching another copycat edition of the evening news – local criminal chronicles interspersed with sports and weather. A well-known doctor was on trial for allegedly murdering his wife. She was the third woman killed in that rich suburban Boston neighborhood while walking around the local pond. Apparently, the doctor tried to mislead the investigators by making the crime look like the other two. However, things didn’t add up. While the police were investigating the other two crimes, they pinned the third one on the husband.
“Our special correspondent” droned on and on for almost ten minutes. Reporters can never get enough of the crimes committed by affluent, white people, and the doctor in question was a pillar of the community and a renowned specialist in his field. The prosecutor claimed that this man’s reputation was a fake, that he spent most of his free time soliciting sex on the Internet and used a stolen identity to pay for prostitutes. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” said the reporter.
My husband switched the channel.
“Mamaaaaaa, just killed the man,” bellowed Freddy Mercury from the screen. We laughed. No escaping murder on our television.
“Oh, for God’s sake, we’ll miss the weather report, go back,” I said.
We didn’t get the weather report. Instead, the correspondent started talking about the doctor’s children. All three had grown into fine upstanding citizens, and were 100% behind their father. They declared that he was a great man and loved their mother very much. Few things in life are scarier than watching your father stand trial for your mother’s murder. They seemed to handle it well though, especially the younger two.
We had been hearing about this case for weeks, and this soap opera was beginning to grate on my nerves. Would they just tell us tomorrow’s weather prognosis, for crying out loud? I barely paid attention at that point.
Meanwhile, they showed us the middle daughter who was trying to comfort her sobbing sister. The camera focused on her face, and ….
“Britt? The one who taught spinning in your class?”
“Yes, that’s her! I can’t believe it….”
“Oh my God…”
Suddenly, we cared. We dropped everything we were doing and concentrated all our attention on the screen. Too late, now they were talking about a car accident in West Roxbury.
*****
My husband has an iron will and judges everyone by his standards. For him to praise a woman’s physique and willpower, she’d have to be a superwoman. Usually, he reserves this degree of admiration for the sports heroes, people like Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong. The real-life folks don’t stand a chance. So, when he came home one day and said that his new spinning instructor was an incredible woman with a willpower that surpassed his own, I thought that some Olympic champion decided to join his gym.
Britt had her own successful business and worked very long days. That didn’t stop her from competing in multiple duathlons, triathlons and running marathons on a regular basis. She trained herself to the point of physical and mental collapse, then came to the spinning class the next morning and made mincemeat out of all the tough guys there. She never got off the seat to “check the form” of the other riders - she pushed as hard as they did, even harder. My husband, who openly laughed at other instructors and usually increased the resistance they prescribed by at least 30%, could barely keep up with her. Only serious athletes dared to come to Britt’s classes -- to turn into quivering puddles of sweat afterwards.
“You don’t understand,” my husband said to me, “such a woman could only by raised in a great, tightly-knit family. She has the foundation, the inner stability. You can’t fake that.”
“And that tells you her father is innocent?”
“I know Britt. And she knows her father. If she says he is incapable of it, then he is not. I trust her.”
“Why didn’t you notice anything? Her mother was murdered several months ago. All this time she was teaching the classes, and you saw no trace of distress on her face?”
“Now that you’ve brought it up, I think I remember that she’s been paler than usual and looked kind of off kilter, but I thought she'd just overtrained.”
“And what about now?”
“She left a month ago. We tried to bring her back, even wrote a letter to the management, but they couldn’t do anything. Now I know why.”
*****
Is this the real life,
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality
Dirk Greineder came here from Germany to study medicine and became a US citizen several years later. This tall, striking man had a charming wife, a gorgeous house in one of the most exclusive suburbs of Boston, and three children. Britt was the middle child. The oldest daughter was a happily married graduate of Harvard Medical School. The youngest boy was finishing Yale Medical School. By all accounts, this brilliant allergist's life was exemplary.
On October 31, 1999, Mabel and Dirk Greineder went for a walk in the nearby park. According to the doctor, they were playing fetch with their dog when Mabel complained of a backache and decided to go back to the car. Dirk wanted to walk for a little while longer and suggested that he meet his wife in the parking lot a bit later. Then came that infamous 911 call we heard so many times on Court TV, followed by Dirk’s unsuccessful attempts to revive his wife. “Another victim of the Welleseley maniac!” screamed the newspapers.
The children hung on. They still had their father, their pillar of strength. He held the family together during those terrible first weeks; he didn’t let them fall apart or get entangled in their own private grief. His authority was unquestionable – Greineders were a family as long as Dirk was at the helm.
When the police arrested their father, the Greineder children were beside themselves. They knew this man better than anyone else. He would not hurt a fly. He never raised his voice at any member of his family. In fact, their parents loved and cared for each other deeply. All Dirk’s patients had only the best things to say about him. Here was a caring, kind man who never uttered a mean thing about their mother, even behind her back. The idea that he could have murdered Mabel was inconceivable.
The police couldn’t solve a murder, so they blamed the husband. It was the easy way out. Two women died in the same park recently in exactly the same way. Why wasn’t anyone looking for the maniac, for the actual killer? The Greineder children felt the system failed them, and tramped over their lives.
***
So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye…
Meanwhile, the myth of Dirk Greineder, the ideal husband, was showing the first cracks. He had spent an exorbitant amount of money on prostitutes and phone sex, searched the Internet all night long for women willing to engage in casual sex with him, prescribed himself Viagra, and obtained a credit card in the name of a college friend, Tom Young.
In medical school, Tom was everything Dirk wasn’t; next to the perfect and pedantic-to-a-fault German, Tom was a carefree gigolo. He knew how to have a good time, preferably with some girls around. And he didn’t hesitate to make fun of his pure and reserved classmate. The fact that Dirk chose Tom’s name for his fake identity spoke volumes for his long-dormant complexes. However, this was fodder for shrinks, not police officers.
The victim, known to her friends as May, had lost interest in sex after menopause and after encountering some medical problems. She complained of pain and discomfort and refused her husband’s advances more and more often. Over time, their intimate relationship dwindled to nothing.
Dirk was less than happy with this turn of events--he was still in perfect physical form. He started looking for women and even couples for casual, often group, sex. If the net he cast came up empty, he could always hire a prostitute as a last resort. As it turned out, Dirk went to a prostitute on the day his wife was murdered – afterward.
Still, none of it meant he killed Mabel Greineder.
*****
We didn’t usually care about TV court dramas, but this time we argued until we were hoarse. In the very first row of the courtroom, never taking her eyes off Dr. Greineder, sat Britt, the iron lady who tried very hard to appear composed, but was periodically reduced to tears. Something about the case made us uneasy.
My husband maintained the doctor’s guilt was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It was his official way of saying, “Dirk’s innocent.” He trusted Britt; if she said that her father could not do it, then he couldn’t. End of story. Prostitutes and pornography proved nothing. He raged against the “tight-assed puritans” who considered watching pornography and engaging in casual sex to be one step removed from committing a violent crime.
“We are not like these people,” he said repeatedly. “Why would you believe them, but not the doctor? The man is fifty-seven years old, and he is in great shape. He is still in the prime of his life. He needs sex. Girls don’t run after fifty-something-year-old men, so he looked for casual sex through the Internet and hired prostitutes. What's so difficult to understand? The guy watched some porn. Big deal.”
I thought that Dr. Greineder was guilty. Obviously, I was making judgments based on what the TV and newspapers were feeding me. I did not know the truth, but something in me wanted that man to be guilty. The media wrote many nice things about the late May Greineder. Apparently, she was deeply unhappy about the chill in their relationship. May kept in shape and even had plastic surgery to keep herself attractive for her husband. She loved him.
I felt sorry for her, disgusted with him, and scared of growing old. The attempts to understand his motives terrified me, and I was looking for the easy way out, even if subconsciously. If he killed Mabel, it explained everything. Yet, it explained nothing…. Would it be easier to believe in his innocence like my husband? For some reason, I couldn’t.
Soon, our conversations turned from the court case to the intimate details of the lives of the Greineder family, which were generously supplied by the media. No, we did not enjoy scouring somebody’s dirty laundry. Rather, we realized that these people were only thirty to thirty-five years our senior and were similar to us in many ways, including the education levels, lifestyle choices and value systems. Worst of all, their problems were very real and quite common.
One spouse lost interest in sex due to some health issues while the other was not ready to write off his or her sexuality. They both had a long life ahead of them. What was the next step?
Did he have a right to live the way he did? Was he supposed to bury himself alive, to sacrifice himself on the altar of family and morality while living out his days next to a frigid wife? Maybe not, but he could find himself a steady lover and see her quietly on a regular basis – there was no need for orgies and prostitutes. What if he couldn’t find a steady lover?
Still, what was his motive to kill May? He could continue enjoying his wild lifestyle behind her back. Maybe she found out everything and asked for a divorce. Mabel would probably forgive him a discreet affair, but could not live with a man who was slowly descending into hell. She couldn’t and she didn’t want to. A divorce, in their case, would mean losing an enormous amount of money and moving from a Welleseley mansion into a townhouse in a more humble neighborhood. It would also damage their social status. That was a plausible murder motive.
However, this was not the image of the man Britt worshipped. To kill a loving and caring wife and the mother of his children for the opportunity to go wild with prostitutes was not something Britt’s father was capable of doing.
Or was he? How did she know who her father truly was? He led a double life for several years, and nobody had a clue. He was a very good actor. The Greineders were famous for hiding their emotions, after all.
If someone had told the children their exemplary father, the luminary of the local medical community, ran around with prostitutes and spent hours on the Internet looking for group sex opportunities, they probably would've laughed in their face. Nobody knew the true character of the doctor, and the children’s claims to the contrary seemed unfounded.
We ran around in circles. We searched for answers. We didn’t find any. As was always the case, everyone believed what he or she wanted to believe. My husband wanted to believe in Dirk’s innocence because he personally knew his daughter and wished her only the best. He could not imagine what the knowledge of her father killing her mother would do to her psyche. He sincerely hoped it would all turn out to be a bad dream, that Britt would come back and teach spinning, and that everything would return to its original–and proper--place.
Moreover, he longed for the police to stumble in this case. He wanted everyone to see there was no direct causation between a porn hobby and a willingness to murder somebody. The police needed to learn a lesson and stop immediately suspecting the murdered women’s husbands, regardless of the circumstances.
I, too, wished all the best for Britt. I respected her tremendously and wanted her to be happy. At the same time, I had to admit to myself that I did not want Dr. Greineder to be acquitted. It was so much easier to see this man as a devil. The proof of his guilt would dot every “i”, cross every “t”, and make everything simple and one-dimensional.
****
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go let me go
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
The press reported that a portrait of Dirk’s father, who was a doctor in Hitler’s army, hung prominently in the Greineder’s living room. The painting showed the elder Greineder in full Nazi uniform. The investigators also found “Mein Kempf” in Dirk’s library.
Aha! He WAS a devil, after all.
“Nonsense,” said my husband. “What does that have to do with anything? He is not accused of killing a Jew, but of his own Aryan wife. The judge should toss it.”
The judge apparently felt the same way and strictly forbade the jurors to pay any attention to the whole Nazi memorabilia issue.
It didn’t help Dirk. The police found a towel with traces of both his and his wife’s blood in his car. His windbreaker and sneakers were also splattered with blood, and the forensic experts claimed the blood patterns did not match those they would expect to see after a resuscitation attempt. Then the investigators found Dirk’s glove, along with a knife and a hammer, on the other side of the park. The glove had blood on it, yet the doctor’s hands were clean, despite assertions that he tried to resuscitate his wife for a long time.
But it was the timeline that worked against him in the end. For his story to make sense, he had to cover a certain distance in the allotted time, and he was five minutes off according to even the most generous and forgiving calculations. Considering Dirk was no speed walker, the difference was closer to ten minutes. The jury members cited this fact as the most damning evidence against Dr. Greineder. Dirk’s bizarre accounts of the events did not help. For example, he explained the blood on the towel by the fact that both (!) he and his wife had had nosebleeds that day.
Dirk Greineder was found guilty of first-degree murder. His children stood by him until the end, firmly believing in his innocence. They did not waver after hearing the verdict and insisted it had all been a terrible mistake.
For weeks after learning the verdict, my husband looked gloomy. He felt sorry for Britt and was incensed over the media circus around her family’s private life. In the eyes of an average citizen, the whole story validated the logical construct pornography-->prostitutes-->complete moral degradation-->murder. “Marvelous logic, isn’t it?” he fumed.
I wasn’t upset about the ruling, but wasn’t relieved either. I kept thinking about the button controversy.
It happened when I was studying at Simmons College. After a lecture, I approached the professor to ask him a question. He was talking to another student, so I stood behind her and waited for my turn. The woman’s backpack was completely covered by buttons such as “We asked God and SHE is pro-choice,” or “Radical Feminist Lesbian and Proud of It” - one more extremist than another. Right in the middle of all this splendor, she pinned a huge round button that said, “SIMMONS COLLEGE” in huge bold letters.
When the woman finished talking to the professor and turned around, I politely told her that one of the buttons on her backpack really bothered me.
“And which one would that be?” she asked, eager to defend her point of view on any of the hot-button (pun intended) issues.
“The one that says ‘Simmons College,’” I answered and walked away, having completely forgotten about the question I was about to ask our professor.
Throughout the entire Greineder trial, sex played the role of the Simmons College button on that backpack. Not only my husband, but also most of our male acquaintances cheered for Dr. Greineder, hoping that he turned out to be not guilty, not the monster he proved to be in the end. After all, the logical construct cited by my husband was not in the least logical - one didn’t follow from the other. But it only took one student with a button-covered backpack to convince everyone that “they were all the same”.
Britt never came back. I still wonder what became of her.
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality…
In a moment everything changed.
“This is Britt! My God, it’s Britt!” My husband jumped off the sofa and pointed his finger at the woman on the TV screen.
A minute ago we were watching another copycat edition of the evening news – local criminal chronicles interspersed with sports and weather. A well-known doctor was on trial for allegedly murdering his wife. She was the third woman killed in that rich suburban Boston neighborhood while walking around the local pond. Apparently, the doctor tried to mislead the investigators by making the crime look like the other two. However, things didn’t add up. While the police were investigating the other two crimes, they pinned the third one on the husband.
“Our special correspondent” droned on and on for almost ten minutes. Reporters can never get enough of the crimes committed by affluent, white people, and the doctor in question was a pillar of the community and a renowned specialist in his field. The prosecutor claimed that this man’s reputation was a fake, that he spent most of his free time soliciting sex on the Internet and used a stolen identity to pay for prostitutes. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” said the reporter.
My husband switched the channel.
“Mamaaaaaa, just killed the man,” bellowed Freddy Mercury from the screen. We laughed. No escaping murder on our television.
“Oh, for God’s sake, we’ll miss the weather report, go back,” I said.
We didn’t get the weather report. Instead, the correspondent started talking about the doctor’s children. All three had grown into fine upstanding citizens, and were 100% behind their father. They declared that he was a great man and loved their mother very much. Few things in life are scarier than watching your father stand trial for your mother’s murder. They seemed to handle it well though, especially the younger two.
We had been hearing about this case for weeks, and this soap opera was beginning to grate on my nerves. Would they just tell us tomorrow’s weather prognosis, for crying out loud? I barely paid attention at that point.
Meanwhile, they showed us the middle daughter who was trying to comfort her sobbing sister. The camera focused on her face, and ….
“Britt? The one who taught spinning in your class?”
“Yes, that’s her! I can’t believe it….”
“Oh my God…”
Suddenly, we cared. We dropped everything we were doing and concentrated all our attention on the screen. Too late, now they were talking about a car accident in West Roxbury.
*****
My husband has an iron will and judges everyone by his standards. For him to praise a woman’s physique and willpower, she’d have to be a superwoman. Usually, he reserves this degree of admiration for the sports heroes, people like Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong. The real-life folks don’t stand a chance. So, when he came home one day and said that his new spinning instructor was an incredible woman with a willpower that surpassed his own, I thought that some Olympic champion decided to join his gym.
Britt had her own successful business and worked very long days. That didn’t stop her from competing in multiple duathlons, triathlons and running marathons on a regular basis. She trained herself to the point of physical and mental collapse, then came to the spinning class the next morning and made mincemeat out of all the tough guys there. She never got off the seat to “check the form” of the other riders - she pushed as hard as they did, even harder. My husband, who openly laughed at other instructors and usually increased the resistance they prescribed by at least 30%, could barely keep up with her. Only serious athletes dared to come to Britt’s classes -- to turn into quivering puddles of sweat afterwards.
“You don’t understand,” my husband said to me, “such a woman could only by raised in a great, tightly-knit family. She has the foundation, the inner stability. You can’t fake that.”
“And that tells you her father is innocent?”
“I know Britt. And she knows her father. If she says he is incapable of it, then he is not. I trust her.”
“Why didn’t you notice anything? Her mother was murdered several months ago. All this time she was teaching the classes, and you saw no trace of distress on her face?”
“Now that you’ve brought it up, I think I remember that she’s been paler than usual and looked kind of off kilter, but I thought she'd just overtrained.”
“And what about now?”
“She left a month ago. We tried to bring her back, even wrote a letter to the management, but they couldn’t do anything. Now I know why.”
*****
Is this the real life,
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality
Dirk Greineder came here from Germany to study medicine and became a US citizen several years later. This tall, striking man had a charming wife, a gorgeous house in one of the most exclusive suburbs of Boston, and three children. Britt was the middle child. The oldest daughter was a happily married graduate of Harvard Medical School. The youngest boy was finishing Yale Medical School. By all accounts, this brilliant allergist's life was exemplary.
On October 31, 1999, Mabel and Dirk Greineder went for a walk in the nearby park. According to the doctor, they were playing fetch with their dog when Mabel complained of a backache and decided to go back to the car. Dirk wanted to walk for a little while longer and suggested that he meet his wife in the parking lot a bit later. Then came that infamous 911 call we heard so many times on Court TV, followed by Dirk’s unsuccessful attempts to revive his wife. “Another victim of the Welleseley maniac!” screamed the newspapers.
The children hung on. They still had their father, their pillar of strength. He held the family together during those terrible first weeks; he didn’t let them fall apart or get entangled in their own private grief. His authority was unquestionable – Greineders were a family as long as Dirk was at the helm.
When the police arrested their father, the Greineder children were beside themselves. They knew this man better than anyone else. He would not hurt a fly. He never raised his voice at any member of his family. In fact, their parents loved and cared for each other deeply. All Dirk’s patients had only the best things to say about him. Here was a caring, kind man who never uttered a mean thing about their mother, even behind her back. The idea that he could have murdered Mabel was inconceivable.
The police couldn’t solve a murder, so they blamed the husband. It was the easy way out. Two women died in the same park recently in exactly the same way. Why wasn’t anyone looking for the maniac, for the actual killer? The Greineder children felt the system failed them, and tramped over their lives.
***
So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye…
Meanwhile, the myth of Dirk Greineder, the ideal husband, was showing the first cracks. He had spent an exorbitant amount of money on prostitutes and phone sex, searched the Internet all night long for women willing to engage in casual sex with him, prescribed himself Viagra, and obtained a credit card in the name of a college friend, Tom Young.
In medical school, Tom was everything Dirk wasn’t; next to the perfect and pedantic-to-a-fault German, Tom was a carefree gigolo. He knew how to have a good time, preferably with some girls around. And he didn’t hesitate to make fun of his pure and reserved classmate. The fact that Dirk chose Tom’s name for his fake identity spoke volumes for his long-dormant complexes. However, this was fodder for shrinks, not police officers.
The victim, known to her friends as May, had lost interest in sex after menopause and after encountering some medical problems. She complained of pain and discomfort and refused her husband’s advances more and more often. Over time, their intimate relationship dwindled to nothing.
Dirk was less than happy with this turn of events--he was still in perfect physical form. He started looking for women and even couples for casual, often group, sex. If the net he cast came up empty, he could always hire a prostitute as a last resort. As it turned out, Dirk went to a prostitute on the day his wife was murdered – afterward.
Still, none of it meant he killed Mabel Greineder.
*****
We didn’t usually care about TV court dramas, but this time we argued until we were hoarse. In the very first row of the courtroom, never taking her eyes off Dr. Greineder, sat Britt, the iron lady who tried very hard to appear composed, but was periodically reduced to tears. Something about the case made us uneasy.
My husband maintained the doctor’s guilt was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It was his official way of saying, “Dirk’s innocent.” He trusted Britt; if she said that her father could not do it, then he couldn’t. End of story. Prostitutes and pornography proved nothing. He raged against the “tight-assed puritans” who considered watching pornography and engaging in casual sex to be one step removed from committing a violent crime.
“We are not like these people,” he said repeatedly. “Why would you believe them, but not the doctor? The man is fifty-seven years old, and he is in great shape. He is still in the prime of his life. He needs sex. Girls don’t run after fifty-something-year-old men, so he looked for casual sex through the Internet and hired prostitutes. What's so difficult to understand? The guy watched some porn. Big deal.”
I thought that Dr. Greineder was guilty. Obviously, I was making judgments based on what the TV and newspapers were feeding me. I did not know the truth, but something in me wanted that man to be guilty. The media wrote many nice things about the late May Greineder. Apparently, she was deeply unhappy about the chill in their relationship. May kept in shape and even had plastic surgery to keep herself attractive for her husband. She loved him.
I felt sorry for her, disgusted with him, and scared of growing old. The attempts to understand his motives terrified me, and I was looking for the easy way out, even if subconsciously. If he killed Mabel, it explained everything. Yet, it explained nothing…. Would it be easier to believe in his innocence like my husband? For some reason, I couldn’t.
Soon, our conversations turned from the court case to the intimate details of the lives of the Greineder family, which were generously supplied by the media. No, we did not enjoy scouring somebody’s dirty laundry. Rather, we realized that these people were only thirty to thirty-five years our senior and were similar to us in many ways, including the education levels, lifestyle choices and value systems. Worst of all, their problems were very real and quite common.
One spouse lost interest in sex due to some health issues while the other was not ready to write off his or her sexuality. They both had a long life ahead of them. What was the next step?
Did he have a right to live the way he did? Was he supposed to bury himself alive, to sacrifice himself on the altar of family and morality while living out his days next to a frigid wife? Maybe not, but he could find himself a steady lover and see her quietly on a regular basis – there was no need for orgies and prostitutes. What if he couldn’t find a steady lover?
Still, what was his motive to kill May? He could continue enjoying his wild lifestyle behind her back. Maybe she found out everything and asked for a divorce. Mabel would probably forgive him a discreet affair, but could not live with a man who was slowly descending into hell. She couldn’t and she didn’t want to. A divorce, in their case, would mean losing an enormous amount of money and moving from a Welleseley mansion into a townhouse in a more humble neighborhood. It would also damage their social status. That was a plausible murder motive.
However, this was not the image of the man Britt worshipped. To kill a loving and caring wife and the mother of his children for the opportunity to go wild with prostitutes was not something Britt’s father was capable of doing.
Or was he? How did she know who her father truly was? He led a double life for several years, and nobody had a clue. He was a very good actor. The Greineders were famous for hiding their emotions, after all.
If someone had told the children their exemplary father, the luminary of the local medical community, ran around with prostitutes and spent hours on the Internet looking for group sex opportunities, they probably would've laughed in their face. Nobody knew the true character of the doctor, and the children’s claims to the contrary seemed unfounded.
We ran around in circles. We searched for answers. We didn’t find any. As was always the case, everyone believed what he or she wanted to believe. My husband wanted to believe in Dirk’s innocence because he personally knew his daughter and wished her only the best. He could not imagine what the knowledge of her father killing her mother would do to her psyche. He sincerely hoped it would all turn out to be a bad dream, that Britt would come back and teach spinning, and that everything would return to its original–and proper--place.
Moreover, he longed for the police to stumble in this case. He wanted everyone to see there was no direct causation between a porn hobby and a willingness to murder somebody. The police needed to learn a lesson and stop immediately suspecting the murdered women’s husbands, regardless of the circumstances.
I, too, wished all the best for Britt. I respected her tremendously and wanted her to be happy. At the same time, I had to admit to myself that I did not want Dr. Greineder to be acquitted. It was so much easier to see this man as a devil. The proof of his guilt would dot every “i”, cross every “t”, and make everything simple and one-dimensional.
****
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go let me go
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
The press reported that a portrait of Dirk’s father, who was a doctor in Hitler’s army, hung prominently in the Greineder’s living room. The painting showed the elder Greineder in full Nazi uniform. The investigators also found “Mein Kempf” in Dirk’s library.
Aha! He WAS a devil, after all.
“Nonsense,” said my husband. “What does that have to do with anything? He is not accused of killing a Jew, but of his own Aryan wife. The judge should toss it.”
The judge apparently felt the same way and strictly forbade the jurors to pay any attention to the whole Nazi memorabilia issue.
It didn’t help Dirk. The police found a towel with traces of both his and his wife’s blood in his car. His windbreaker and sneakers were also splattered with blood, and the forensic experts claimed the blood patterns did not match those they would expect to see after a resuscitation attempt. Then the investigators found Dirk’s glove, along with a knife and a hammer, on the other side of the park. The glove had blood on it, yet the doctor’s hands were clean, despite assertions that he tried to resuscitate his wife for a long time.
But it was the timeline that worked against him in the end. For his story to make sense, he had to cover a certain distance in the allotted time, and he was five minutes off according to even the most generous and forgiving calculations. Considering Dirk was no speed walker, the difference was closer to ten minutes. The jury members cited this fact as the most damning evidence against Dr. Greineder. Dirk’s bizarre accounts of the events did not help. For example, he explained the blood on the towel by the fact that both (!) he and his wife had had nosebleeds that day.
Dirk Greineder was found guilty of first-degree murder. His children stood by him until the end, firmly believing in his innocence. They did not waver after hearing the verdict and insisted it had all been a terrible mistake.
For weeks after learning the verdict, my husband looked gloomy. He felt sorry for Britt and was incensed over the media circus around her family’s private life. In the eyes of an average citizen, the whole story validated the logical construct pornography-->prostitutes-->complete moral degradation-->murder. “Marvelous logic, isn’t it?” he fumed.
I wasn’t upset about the ruling, but wasn’t relieved either. I kept thinking about the button controversy.
It happened when I was studying at Simmons College. After a lecture, I approached the professor to ask him a question. He was talking to another student, so I stood behind her and waited for my turn. The woman’s backpack was completely covered by buttons such as “We asked God and SHE is pro-choice,” or “Radical Feminist Lesbian and Proud of It” - one more extremist than another. Right in the middle of all this splendor, she pinned a huge round button that said, “SIMMONS COLLEGE” in huge bold letters.
When the woman finished talking to the professor and turned around, I politely told her that one of the buttons on her backpack really bothered me.
“And which one would that be?” she asked, eager to defend her point of view on any of the hot-button (pun intended) issues.
“The one that says ‘Simmons College,’” I answered and walked away, having completely forgotten about the question I was about to ask our professor.
Throughout the entire Greineder trial, sex played the role of the Simmons College button on that backpack. Not only my husband, but also most of our male acquaintances cheered for Dr. Greineder, hoping that he turned out to be not guilty, not the monster he proved to be in the end. After all, the logical construct cited by my husband was not in the least logical - one didn’t follow from the other. But it only took one student with a button-covered backpack to convince everyone that “they were all the same”.
Britt never came back. I still wonder what became of her.
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality…
