“What did you see?” I asked, my voice a quiet rasp.

“You believe in ghosts?”

No. But that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. “Sure, I guess,” I said. “Why?”

“Because I saw one.” He leaned over to peek through his telescope. “Late one night, couple weeks ago.”

“What did you see?”

He looked back at me and nodded gravely. “It looked like a girl,” he said meaningfully. “Crawling out of the creek. She was covered in something, too, like war paint. Dark, you know, like that camouflage.”

“Camouflage?” Curious, not skeptical. Inquire, don’t challenge.

“Yeah, all over her face.” He demonstrated how she might have applied it.

“And you saw her climb out of the creek?”

“I saw her twice. This time she came out of the creek and threw up. And she had the war paint. Last time, no paint. And she was running, in a red dress.”

“This time?” And I’d been so hoping he’d say something that would prove him less delusional than he seemed.

“Yep, this time she climbed out and threw up.” He shrugged. “Bent over the yard down there. Drunk, maybe. Then she took off, ran that way along the trees. With the paint on her face.”

“When was the other time?”

“Oh, long time ago—fifteen, twenty years. Long, long time. It was the night that kid fell down and hit his head at that party.”

“But it was the same girl?”

“Yep.”

Great.

“I went outside with my camera, so I could get proof this time. You know, send it into one of those ghost-hunter shows. But by the time I got out there, she was gone. Disappeared.” He clapped his hands together. “Just like that.”

“So you don’t have any pictures?”

“Nah, but I do got one thing. If I can find it.” He started yanking open the drawers in the laundry room, which hadn’t been used to launder anything in God knew how long. “It’s in here somewhere. Hold on. Ah, wait. Here it is.” He had something hidden in his fingers. I opened my palm, bracing for something damp and disgusting to be placed there. “It was hers. I found it in the street after I seen her here the first time.”

Luckily, it was just cool and heavy. When I looked down, it was a small silver bracelet with words engraved on the inside: To J.M. Always, Tex.

“I’m telling you. It was the same girl. A goddamn ghost.”

RIDGEDALE READER

ONLINE EDITION

March 18, 2015, 10:26 a.m.

The Legal Insufficiency of the Infanticide and Neonaticide Paradigm

AN ESSAY BY MOLLY SANDERSON

The body of a newborn female infant was discovered in Ridgedale less than thirty-six hours ago, near the Essex Bridge. The medical examiner has not yet released an official cause of death, and the baby remains unidentified.

Many have concluded that the infant’s parents are responsible. Indeed, national statistics may support such assumptions. Children under the age of two are twice as likely to be murdered as they are to die in a car accident. According to recent Bureau of Justice statistics, in murders of children under the age of twelve, 57 percent of the perpetrators are the victim’s parents. Further, in those cases, women account for 55 percent of the defendants. Meanwhile, women account for only 10.5 percent of all murder defendants.

At the same time, our understanding of maternal psychological disorders is continuing to evolve. Once thought of as a disorder that struck women only immediately after birth, postpartum depression is now known to be far more disparate. Women can suffer from birth-related mood disorders as early as their first trimester of pregnancy; likewise, symptoms can first surface long after labor and delivery. Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders.

In the tragic event that a mother does take her newborn’s life—neonaticide—maternal depression, whether pre- or postnatal, often fails to meet the strict definition of insanity required by a court of law. Thus, expert testimony regarding the mother’s mental state will often be barred. However, even if insanity is not an appropriate defense, juries and judges could still be allowed to consider evidence of a mother’s mental state as one issue of fact to be weighed. This compromise alternative remains largely unexamined by our justice system. There are few areas of criminal law as unsettled as neonaticide. Often the severity of the crime is determined purely according to prosecutorial discretion; charges ranging from murder to illegal disposal of a corpse are common. Such inconsistency only serves to further complicate already volatile legal and emotional terrain.

There may be no crime more tragic than a mother taking her child’s life. But we cannot allow our fear about what the murder of a baby says about us as human beings to relegate it to the unexamined provenance of monsters. Because those monsters are somebody’s daughter or sister. They were once somebody’s mother.

COMMENTS:

JoshuaSki2

57 min ago

Speak for yourself, Molly Sanderson. No woman I know would ever kill her own baby. No way, no how. You know who does that? Animals. That’s who.

SaraBethK

55 min ago

Why are you trying to make this kind of behavior okay? “Anyone” could kill a baby?? Really? Lots of people have unexpected pregnancies and go on to raise happy babies or they give them up for adoption or they raise them to be unhappy—but they don’t KILL THEM!!! Why are you defending this mother when you don’t even know what happened?

MommaX

52 min ago

Lack of money=lack of education=fewer options and higher stress. 22% of American children live in poverty in the U.S., with the rates among minority children much higher. Maybe there are people who really are just evil. Or maybe there are people who are forced by circumstance to make awful choices.

WyomingGirl

50 min ago

Did any of you hear about that case in Newark where they found a dead baby and then a long time later they found out the mother was dead? She was murdered also. For all we know they just haven’t found the mother’s body yet.

Anniemay

45 min ago

Personally, I prefer to stay sold on the idea that it was some scared kids. But it would certainly be helpful if the police told us something more . . .

Gracie55

37 min ago

This whole thing sounds like a witch hunt to me. Why don’t we just round up everyone in Ridgedale who makes less than a certain dollar amount because unwanted pregnancies are more common in that group. Just because something is effective doesn’t make it right.

ariel.c

28 min ago

I’ve been biting my tongue here, but if no one else is going to say it I will. Absentee parenting. None of this ever would have happened if teenagers weren’t left unsupervised. I’m not saying it needs to be the mom. But it needs to be SOMEONE for God’s sake.

tds@kidsrus

25 min ago

Ariel, are you seriously blaming this baby’s death on working parents? We don’t even know who the baby belongs to! Grr.

HeatherSAHM

21 min ago

Okay, maybe Ariel could have said it better, but I get her point. The parents who abandon babies are usually young. And only a parent who is really out of touch—or simply out of the house—would not notice that their own child was pregnant.

246Barry

11 min ago

HE IS STILL OUT THERE. FIND HIM.