It Happened To Me: I Sat Next To A Murderer In Tenth Grade English Class And Started An Unhealthy Obsession With True Crime

All the crime media I consumed was making me jumpy and paranoid. My 7-year-old even started having panic attacks. So I went cold turkey —and I think you should, too.

Hello hello hello!

It's Monday afternoon, and all I've accomplished thus far today is:

• Catching up with Master Quartiler Michael Stipe by completing the July 28 NYT puzzle. (He just started doing these and is a true phenom with them. He also kindly helps me out by showing me four-tile words in about two seconds that would take me hours to find - all of this making his growing multi-hyphenate description longer than my memoir).

• Writing two paragraphs of the treatment for said upcoming memoir. (Is it just because I'm doing one that I notice this or does every single person under the sun have a memoir out right now? Not that I'm complaining. I will read the memoir of the keyboradist in a band I've never heard of and be riveted by every word of it.)

• Editing two AJPT stories for ya.

That actually doesn't sound as lazy as I felt about my day now that I write it down. Maybe I'll try that exercise more often.

And now on to this It Happened To Me piece that Dana sent in for your reading pleasure. Along with my prompt for any of you who would like to submit either an It Happened To Me or an Unpopular Opinion. (I am always looking for more of those Unpopular Opinion pieces in particular. And boy was this last one from Hebra such a winner! Making me greedily want even more!) Do send your submissions for publication (and payment!) to Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com. I check there multiple times a day looking for them, especially when I'm procrastinating.

So let's all make each other feel better about our accomplishments today – including bonus points for multitasking, such as filing nails WHILE talking on the phone, eating WHILE reading and all those other miracles of productivity we don't give ourselves enough credit for. What have you done today??

Major love,

Jane

Me today, living a relatively True Crime-free existence.

By Dana Inskeep

There was this super-shy, nerdy kid in my tenth-grade honors English class named Eric Motis. We had assigned seats (as was the custom), and I was seated next to him. Throughout the school year, I’d often find myself chatting with him about how much high school sucked and how not being popular really sucked.

While there was nothing to indicate that he was a monster, Eric went on to murder his next-door neighbor, Louise Hoopes, and her two sons in October of 1990.

My sleepy little hometown in rural Pennsylvania was in shock. Things like that only happened in *other* places. For me, though, having something so terrible happen so close to home — And by someone I actually knew? – ramped up my already growing obsession with true crime.

I was born with a mind for terrifying things.

I was constantly in a state of being on edge, which was odd because I had a completely uninteresting childhood. Where we lived, about 45 minutes northeast of Philadelphia, the highest form of criminal activity was getting caught by the cops running from a keg party in a corn field.

Age 13, I think. In between when Adam Walsh was murdered and when I sat next to Eric Morris in Honors English.

Maybe my fascination was because I thought my life was incredibly boring growing up and sought out drama at every turn, so I ended up romanticizing violence, which was in the early stages of becoming a highly influential part of pop culture. Or perhaps it was because of the ADHD I didn’t know I had until a few years ago.

More likely, it’s because my mom’s fear of having one of her three kids snatched away by a child molester and having God Knows What done to us permeated my existence. My mom was hyper-vigilant about keeping the house, cars, and garage locked up like fortresses throughout my childhood.

We lived out in the sticks, and according to her, you never knew who might be lurking around. And no one was around to help if Something Bad Happened. But my flat out obsession with serial killers and violent crimes took root around age 11 after reading about Adam Walsh in a bathroom copy — were there any other kind?— of Reader’s Digest. Everyone who was alive at that time knows this, but Adam was the son of John Walsh, who went on to spearhead the capture of several criminals through the TV show America’s Most Wanted.

I was both horrified and morbidly captivated by how gruesome Adam’s murder was. The only remain of his body they found was his head. He was identified through dental records.

Sweet baby angel Adam Walsh, age 6. This is the photo of him that anyone interested in true crime has seen hundreds of times.

Despite my mom’s fear of this same type of thing happening to me, there was little-to-no adult supervision when I was growing up. And anytime my friends and/or cousins all gathered, we focused on one-upping (and terrifying) each other in any way we could.

Hunting for the Jersey Devil behind my uncle’s house. Playing ghosts in the graveyard in the woods at dusk on my parents’ property. Conducting makeshift seances at sleepovers, murmurs of “light as a feather, stiff as a board” floating into the hallway. Whispering scary stories we’d heard after we were all lined up in our sleeping bags on the living room floor.

I read every article I could find about tragedies, murders, and domestic violence. I watched all of those after-school specials and mini-series (like I Know My First Name Is Steven) of re-enactments of unspeakable crimes. My favorite author in high school was V.C. Andrews, who didn’t write about murder per se but conjured some seriously twisted shit.

I wrote my it’s worth-half-of-your-grade high school essay on suicide because my teacher said absolutely not to my request to write a research paper on serial killers. (What a buzzkill.)

Who would've thought that newly-confirmed Catholic girl was also fascinated by sickos? (That's my dad looking thrilled to be in this photo)

So isn’t it odd that I sat next to a super-shy, nerdy kid in my tenth-grade honors English class who went on to drop out of high school a few weeks before graduation and slaughter his neighbors two years later?