Living in a small town, you get used to having a garbage day, and to putting your stuff out on the curb damn early. I paid for a refuse company to get my garbage and recyclables, so you can imagine that I was not happy when my neighbor started to sneak a bag or two into my pile every week, for me to pay for. He was quick, so I think it took me a few weeks to even notice. I didn’t say anything right away, as I felt sorry for the old guy. His wife had left him, just up and disappeared, so that was the talk of the neighborhood. He was a topic of pity and a much-covered Sunday coffee shop gossip subject. I let it slide thinking it would stop. Maybe he was cleaning out some of his wife’s old stuff. I didn’t want to embarrass him or make him feel bad.
After 8 weeks or so of this, I decided I had put up with it long enough and that I needed to go talk to him. As I started across my lawn to his door, three police cars screeched into his driveway, cutting me off. Several officers approached the house, and another came to talk with me, walking me back to my door. I’m glad I never checked those bags when I saw them, because he was cleaning out, but not in the way I had imagined. When the officer first told me that they had found body parts in the bags, my mind went quickly to thoughts of the missing wife. It wasn’t his wife in the bags, however, it was something worse.
His wife really had disappeared, into police custody. It seems that the old guy had a dark secret, and she had discovered it. She found a key to the huge old freezer that they kept in the basement. In it, she found the bodies of several children. As soon as she saw this, she took off. After hiding for a few days at a motel, she got up the nerve to go to the police. They had begun to watch his house, hoping for enough evidence for a search warrant. Then they gathered a few of the bags. Once his wife left, he must have decided to quietly get rid of the evidence. Some of the children had been missing for as long as 15 years, and one was as recent as two months. He kept the bodies to look at later. His trophies. I will never ever look at a bag of garbage the same way again.