Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

I spent a few weeks on my couch, mourning what felt like the end of my career and binge-listening to every true crime podcast I could find. Finally, late one night, drunk on sleep deprivation and half a bottle of Shiraz, I decided I could do one myself. Despite my failure with Maddie’s case, I hadn’t lost my passion for helping children who were victims of crime. Maybe I just needed to go about it a different way.

The thought of a predator going after my neighbor’s daughter—this perfect, tiny, bright-eyed girl with the stubborn chin and unfair dimple in her cheek—made me queasy with rage. But I knew it was a reality. There were men who preyed on girls like her. I had known too many of them in my life, seen too many get away with their crimes, and I knew I could do something to stop it. That night, I recorded the first episode of what would become Justice Delayed. A few months later, I released season one.

As it is with so many things in life, it wasn’t one event that led me to this work—it was a confluence of them coming together at the right time. We are a product of not just the experiences we have, but our reactions to them. If I had to point to one thing, though—one thing that started it all—it was Maddie Black’s case. Everyone has a catalyst, a person or event or message that sets them on their path. Something that when you look back at their history, you can see how everything that happened later all flowed out from this one thing.

Their origin story.

Part III

The Fuse

23

DJ

1971 to 1978

The first woman DJ killed was his mother. She died in childbirth, screaming as she expelled his writhing body along with too much of her own blood.

It was God’s will that she died; that was what his father reminded him whenever one of his schoolmates teased him for not having a mother. The Lord had made DJ for a purpose, and it was the last act of God’s plan for his mother to bring him into this world. Once he was born, her purpose was fulfilled and the Lord called her home. There was some comfort in that, knowing he must be special since God was willing to sacrifice his mother to put him on this earth.

DJ never felt like he lacked anything by not having a mom. The men in his family were strong stock. His father, Josiah, was a plumber who worked six days a week and never went to a doctor as far back as DJ could remember. His brothers were football players and part-time farmhands once they entered their teenage years. They had dinner together every night that Charles and Thomas didn’t have practice. They went to Mass every Sunday, and Josiah read to DJ from the Bible each night before bed. It wasn’t a remarkable life, but the familiarity of each day wrapped around him like a warm blanket.

Everything changed on a Tuesday in the middle of summer when DJ was seven years old. Charles and Thomas were off at Bible camp for a week, and DJ was alone with his father. They were playing chess on their front porch, listening to the cicadas scream. As the muggy afternoon slowly melted into cool evening, the phone rang and Josiah went to answer it. DJ was planning his next move when a loud, violent sound came from inside the house.

He ran to the kitchen, where his father was on the floor, holding the phone to his ear with the cord wrapped around his forearm. There were tears on his face. DJ had never seen him cry before. It took him several tries to get the news out of Josiah.

Charles and Thomas had sneaked a boat out onto Lake Superior the night before, and they had never come back. Josiah packed him up in the truck and they drove to the summer camp in Duluth, five hours in the car with DJ sitting quiet and numb. His father alternated between shouting denials and whispering prayers.

Nothing had changed when they arrived. The boat was still missing, lost on the great lake that stretched farther than any body of water DJ had ever seen. He wondered if this was what the ocean looked like. Surely, it couldn’t be any bigger than this. He scanned the horizon, as if somehow everyone had just missed it, and there his brothers would be, waving for help or laughing in their natural carefree way, surprised that everyone was so worried while they were just out for an adventure.

The hours dragged by, and more search parties were dispatched. A helicopter beat the air over DJ’s head.

“Charles and Thomas will be back soon,” he told his father. His brothers were just making trouble. It was summer. They probably found some girls and went out with them for what Charles called a “night squeeze.”

As they waited, DJ noted down the number of police officers, vehicles, camp counselors, and other searchers that crawled the shore. He couldn’t believe the quantity of them. He liked numbers. He was no good at writing, and he was never an athlete like his older brothers, but when he was given his first math worksheet at six years old, it was like seeing a language he’d always spoken written down for the first time. Numbers formed the foundation of the world. Every angle, every atom, every cell could be defined by an equation. Learning this had allowed him to grip on to a world that usually slipped through his fingers. He tried to calculate the odds of the boys returning safely as the hours went by, but there were too many variables—too many unknowns.

Twenty-one hours. That was how long it took the police to find his brothers’ bodies. They washed up on the shore of Manitou Island, one of the Apostle Islands off the