3 Stars

3 Stars

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

I was being sworn in. All I could think about was how surreal of a moment and how absurd all of this was. I shouldn’t have felt that way at all; this was the logical conclusion to the whole ordeal. I, and I presume most everyone in the court and anyone following the national media attention this case had warranted, already knew what was going to happen in the upcoming days/weeks/months. The real question here is a question that no one would ask. A question posed only by myself to myself, which is whether or not what happened to me was luck.

Was my abduction in fact the stroke of luck that would change my life? Was my life going to end up better than it was before I found that little black book that led to my being taken? Was my rescue a stroke of luck or the cause of my current undoing and eventual crisis?

The examination started. As I don’t have the court transcript in front of me, I’ll paraphrase my testimony and detail the events around the kidnapping:

A number of months ago I was walking home from my job. I work fast food part-time in the evenings after school lets out to help my mother afford rent. It was raining and I walked closely to the buildings downtown, trying to stay under awnings and following any remaining patches of visibly dry concrete in the hopes of not getting wet enough to require me to wash and/or dry my clothes. I wouldn’t have time to make it to the laundromat for a few more days.

For as long as I remember, my life has been stressful. My father died when I was six and my mother, for as many good things as she is, was never by virtue of her own nature, the most nurturing person. She worked hard but largely to indulge her own vices and proclivities. Between struggling to stay average at school and making my shifts at work, cleaning up after and tending to Mom, 16–18-hour days were the norm. I was tired and hadn’t much faith that mine would ever turn out to be an existence of any consequence.

So, I was walking. Twenty feet ahead of me or so was a large man lumbering down the street in a rain-soaked trench coat. His hand reached toward his back pocket, my assumption was that he was feeling for or replacing his wallet. As his hand returned to his side, I had noticed something had dropped out from under his coat. There was a moment’s hesitation from the man as, I thought, he acknowledged the item drop from his person. He then turned left down an alley way. I jogged toward the dropped item, picking it up and inspecting it once I caught up. It was a little black book filled with names and what appeared to be phone numbers, email addresses and dollar amounts, large dollar amounts.

I followed the man down the alleyway, hoping that if he dealt with figures this big maybe there would be a financial reward for the safe return of this little black book. I hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of the names/email addresses/amounts listed therein. Amounts that high registered almost as a foreign language, and while I could recognize the number of zeros or the commas in between them, it never occurred to me that such indicators would relate to nefarious or dubious business. I made it 20 feet into the alleyway before the blow struck me and all went black.

When I woke up, I was dizzy and in a warm, black room. My clothes had been removed and I was covered in a robe and slippers. I panicked, I screamed, and I yelled, and I cried, hoping for any sort of response. I do not know exactly how long I had continued to cry out for someone, but I do remember what got me to stop; there was a quiet whirring that I could feel approaching me. I had been loud enough to drown out the actual noise, but the feel of something approaching was unmissable. I did my best to stifle any sounds my body wanted to make and I cowered in the corner waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen.

There was a sliding sound, I now know it was a small opening at the base of the metal door to the room I had been-

“Cell. The cell you were kept in.”

“Objection!”

The judge held up her hand to either acknowledge or silence the objection, I’m not sure which. Her raised hand gestured to me to continue.

Cell…there was a small sliding door built into the middle of the metal door that kept me…there. The room had filled with smells that I didn’t know how to identify. There was a warmth to it. It was food. It was delicious food and it calmed me. I had at some point soon after finishing the small tray speculated that I had been drugged or sedated. The testimonies provided by the scientific minds examining the situation informed me that I had not been drugged at any point during my captivity, save for the actual act of being captured.

After eating, after calming down, my eyes were adjusted to the room. It was a rather large room as I would now describe it. At the time I estimated it to be larger than the room I had at home by 9 or 10 feet. There was a red hue to things, no direct light but what I assume to be a red light bulb lit down the corridor leading from my room-

“Cell.”

…but maybe like, around a corner.

Again, time is a little fuzzy for me as I had no idea while staying there-

“Being held captive.”

“Objection.”

The judge again raised her hand, seemingly the same as last time, but the reaction from the legal teams was the opposite as it was before.

-but the little food cart came multiple times a day, like…9-10 times, I guess. After several carts of food, I had felt exhausted enough to sleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep. I woke up naturally. I had regained enough peace of mind over the course of maybe a week to realize that the cart never came while I was sleeping, which I figured meant I was being watched. I tried to demand some sort of answers as to where I was or what was going on. I never received any sort of direct answer. What I had noticed was that after trying to communicate with whomever was watching, there would be a change in smells. If I screamed until I began to cough or hack, the room would fill with an air of peppermint; sometimes a different smell I couldn’t identify at the time but had later been told was eucalyptus, if I began to cry and shake; lavender.

Things continued this way until the day I was rescued: quiet, incredible food I never could have dreamed existed and lovely aromatic mood treatments.

The trial was being held to try my captor; a cold-hearted monster that detained people in the same fashion I had been detained; fattened them up over the course of about 8 weeks (this was an average) before slaughtering them and selling their meat around the world on the black market.

During their captivity The Black Market Butcher (as the media had taken to calling him) provided the closest thing to a stress-free environment one could experience while being held against their will. As with veal, the practice of attempting to keep livestock stress-free is thought to help with the taste and consistency of the meat. The Butcher also provided cuisine so incredibly refined that his recipes occasionally enter into bidding wars for highly rated 3-star restaurants, substituting the type and source of meat, of course.

This was the point of contention regarding my testimony: over the course of the ten weeks I had been held captive, I had eaten better and slept more peacefully than I ever had. So peacefully, in fact that I had once awoken to fresh sheets and comforters for my bed, which was more comfortable than my bed at home. The implications of my captor delivering new bedding gives me a shutter even to this day.

The defense team had tried to paint me in a light that was grateful to my captor for the reprieve from my daily life. I could understand their strategy, but it was incorrect. I had given an honest account of my time in that room and yes it was comfortable on a level I had never experienced, but it was horrific and at no point did I ‘enjoy’ being held captive.

People died because of that man. People were eaten because of that man (and no, I had never been fed any human meat). I was scheduled to be killed by that man and sold to be eaten. I lose sleep over it still and I don’t imagine that will ever change.

The Butcher was found guilty, he was sentenced and will die for the crimes he committed. At no point in the trial did he show remorse or guilt and in the following years he provided many interviews and discussed his journey into the life he had settled into. He had confided during one such interview that all of his victims had been carefully researched and plucked, the exception being me. Had his little black book not fallen out of his coat and had I not noticed and had I not decided to try and return it to him, I would never have been abducted. My life, in retrospect to him would have already been stressful enough to ‘taint the meat.’

The Butcher had been caught because he researched my life after taking me instead of before. He followed my mother and watched my place of work (having looted my purse and found my identification and noticing my work clothes). I had been reported missing after 4 days (yes it took my mother 4 days to notice my absence) and The Butcher made the mistake of looking into my life.

His plan was to let me de-stress and fatten up for 12 weeks, the longest amount of time he had ever allotted. How sad is it that a serial killer surmised my body would take 150% as long to destress as the average person? Trust me, pity from a serial killer feels oddly worse than pity from anyone else.

In a similar fashion, the weeks after the trial had been a whirlwind of interviews, gross speculation and reporting on my life and the time I spent in that room. I was able to make just under $600,000 from the first three months of appearances and interviews.

I bought a nice house on a bit of land and now spend my time mattress hunting. The toughest part of all of this has been trying to adjust to life again, especially with my diet. Fast food is a thing of the past, I can’t stomach it now and I haven’t been able to find anyone or any place that can live up to what I now know is possible in regard to the world of taste.

As things calm down, I often think of how to use my experiences to help other people. I have gone through something traumatic and bizarre and I feel it is my duty to help others with my story, and to honor those killed by The Butcher. Sure, I’ve had some ideas, but what I really want to do is start taking cooking classes.