Ax murderers we have known and forgotten

I hate to wonder, but do; are more people getting homicidally crazy around here nowadays? Less? Is the rate stable? We might be excused for asking such questions when there's a spate of people "snapping" (we might contemplate that metaphor) and going around randomly shooting others and themselves. It's not just the spectacularly horrible and sickening rare events - dozens shot at a high school or college. Worse perhaps, because of their frequency, are the three or five obliterated at a time at teenagers' parties, or in board meetings, or at workplaces, or wherever. And we rarely come up with a better reason why it happened there, and not here, beyond "he snapped."

I am a bit of a perfectionist, so when I was putting together my profile, with a specific literary reference intrinsic to it, I wanted to get one quote just right. Along with the pseudonym, it's from Frisch's "Graf Oderland." Which is about an ax murderer. That's not all it's about - it's social allegory - but the fact remains that people do get their heads split open with an ax. I thought it was "Graf Oderland comes with an ax in his hand," that I wanted, but I wasn't sure, and I needed it exact. Since I didn't have the play itself, or the Tagebuchs 1946-1949 in which it is sketched out at hand, I had to either punt, or else see what the internet delivered.

So in the interest of precision, I put the phrase "with an ax in his hand" into Google, and unearthed this amazing archival story from the NYT - "Madman kills 3, Gashes 3 with Axe" (pdf) (by the way, lets say thanks that the Times' pay-for-archival-content notions have now mercifully died, along with TimesSelect.)

I find it just fascinating - here's why. Brooklyn, CT is a pretty tiny, pretty nice place about a half hour from my hometown. I don't say that because I've been there - I may have dashed through it once, maybe - but because all little towns in that part of the world, mine included are nice, peaceful, bucolic havens. These are all places that play on their old agricultural heritage, historic character and fine schools, while spacing out their gorgeous $500,000 homes over the hills and woods. Come to my house, and see the stone walls that cover the entire neighborhood, because (I pointed this out to my parents, who aren't quite so observant about such things) a couple decades ago it was all someone's farm. I happen to love such palimpsest-traces. Now, 80 years ago the whole area was a very different place. Then it was much more rural, probably much more earthy and far more impoverished, and apparently just as mad. Just madness of a different character, born of isolation and god knows what pathologies. We can't ask Victor Lipponenn about those.

Once upon a time - barely a blink of an eye ago, you know - that town suddenly became That Place, where such a grisly and immensely dramatic massacre took place. Cutting neighbors down with an ax. Killing an infant in the process. Burning barns full of livestock and hanging onesself. In the hands of the hackiest hack, this is at least the stuff of a gripping, bloodcurdling gothic novel. And - who knows - with all respect to the long dead - maybe in the hands of a Frisch, Victor Lipponenn is transformable into a sort of rural Connecticut Graf Oderland. But we will never know just what happened before, during and after (minus a trip to the police/newspaper archives that no one, the people living in the neighborhood included, is going to make.) Nor are there any allegories. It just evaporated, like 99.999% of human events do in mere seconds. It is (I assume) all lost to history now.

And maybe that's fine. We can't move, if constricted by all the accretions of history, can we?

I can just imagine that in the years immediately after, that area, those farms had some stigma on them. Not to mention the whispers and shadow that must have followed whoever survived or was connected to the event, especially in a small town.
And then in time most of those people died off or moved on, and the story must have retreated into the sphere of local legend. The stuff old-timers talked of now and then, maybe. Then they passed on.
And now there is a archived pdf floating in cyberspace and not much else. Like the stone walls ascending in solitude through woods that once were fields, like the stoic old metal historical markers off the area's old roads; "Lafayette camped here."