Last week, I got cozy with a film crew from the television series “48 Hours” to cover a three-day hearing about a small-town murder that may or may not have happened.
The attention-grabbing case involves a woman who disappeared from her rural south Michigan home in April 2021. The courts ruled the woman legally dead a few months ago, and the husband now faces a murder charge, even though police have never found the woman’s body.
I was in court, squeezed into a jury box with the rest of the media, to cover the husband’s preliminary examination (at which a judge hears testimony and decides if the prosecution has enough evidence to proceed toward trial), for The Brooklyn Exponent, a weekly newspaper near my home in Jackson, Michigan.
At one point, I had to nudge the “48 Hours” sound operator in the chair to my left when he started snoring. A Toledo radio reporter juggling two laptops elbowed into my space from the other side while a guy with a camera on a tripod blocked my view of witnesses. A local newspaper reporter who hadn’t made it into the jury box eyed me irritably from the back of the courtroom. (On the second day, he hustled to the courtroom and slid into “my” chair before I could get there, which I thought was pretty funny. Someone made room for me at the other end of the jury box.)
We all stepped politely over each other’s cords and put up with a little squishiness in the jury box because what was most important was what was happening on the witness stand.
What I saw there was a lot of hurt. The missing woman’s adult children talked about the last time they saw their mother and of their dwindling hope as they searched for her. They talked about the couple’s financial stresses and the mounting tension of running struggling businesses together.
They also talked matter-of-factly about the fights they often witnessed between their mother and their stepfather, verbal wars laced with screaming and swearing and threats to leave.
I don’t know if Dee Warner is dead, or if her husband killed her. We may never know for sure.
I do know that it’s incredibly sad to picture two people who once promised to love and support each other both hurting so badly that they tear each other into pieces.
You don’t get the whole story in a court case. Witnesses don’t get to talk about the inner demons that make one person lash out or the decades of trauma that make another person’s scars flare up in seething rage. Police reports and court records don’t tell you about the desperation behind the curses, the longing and self-loathing that makes someone push hardest against the person they most need to not leave them.
You don’t get the whole story looking at your neighbors, either. Or the couple sitting in front of you at church, or the young lovebirds who seem so compatible when you meet them for dinner.
You can’t know how many of them go home to sniping words or stony silence. Or who bury their unhappiness in busyness or work so hard hiding it from the kids that they hide it from themselves.
Most couples’ fights don’t turn into missing persons reports or murder charges. In a way, that makes me even sadder.
When something goes really wrong, we pay attention, even put it on the nightly news. But people all around us are taking their hurts out on the people they love, and we don’t see it, and we don’t do anything about it.
But, we say, as long as nobody’s killing anyone, isn’t other people’s pain their own business?
That depends on whether we’re OK with living in a world where hurt people hurt each other while we watch “48 Hours” and shake our heads and click our tongues.
I don’t know which of the people around me are struggling in their relationships, and I can’t step in and counsel each of them through their crises. But maybe I can look for actions I can take that strengthen families and ease stresses.
Maybe, at the next school function, I can sit next to the parents of the screaming kids and lend them a hand and an accepting smile.
Maybe I can take my coworker for coffee and ask her how she’s doing and let her see that I really want to know.
When I see anger brewing, instead of looking away, maybe I can step closer, gently and genuinely asking if there’s anything I can do to help.
If I’m lucky enough to have a local newspaper, I can buy a subscription to learn about and support efforts to increase the availability of mental health workers so that people in pain have somewhere to turn for help.
I can pray ― pray with closed eyes and a clenched heart and arm outstretched in the darkness toward loved ones I know need peace and grace. And I can let that prayer lead me to fight for them, for their marriage, for the healing of their wounded hearts.
We can’t look at violence on the evening news and grumble that somebody should have done something sooner and then not do something ourselves. We just can't. The world needs us to have eyes that see hurt and hands willing to reach toward it.
Somebody has to do something.
And we’re the somebody.
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I’ll share my news story about the missing woman case on my Facebook page (I’m pretty sure you can find me at julie.riddle.77770 – don’t ask me where all those sevens came from, because I don’t know), or you can find it on the website where some of The Brooklyn Exponent’s stories are posted, theexponentlive.com. If it’s not there yet, it will be soon.
You can also google Dee Warner and learn more from other media outlets. But my story is better. : )
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On my author website, you can read about the book I’m writing about another murder case and what we can learn from it about ourselves, our communities, and what we can do better to stop the next one.
Publishers only accept book proposals if the author can prove people want to read his or her work. If this blog provides something you want or need to hear, it would help me in my book-publishing mission if you would subscribe to be notified via email when I post something new. Sharing my blog with others and suggesting they subscribe helps me, too. You should find a signup box on this page. If not, email me at julie.j.riddle@gmail.com and I'll get you added. (One of these days I'll become an internet expert and make these things happen more smoothly.)
Thanks. And thanks for reading this. Writing with nobody on the other end is lonely, but writing knowing someone cares about what you have to say is glorious.
