The wingnuts were raising a ruckus last week over the alleged refusal of the media to cover the Kermit Gosnell story. (There was a gag order on the case, for one thing.)
I was thinking about why I didn’t write about it, and the answer I came up with surprised me — because I do love my city, and was always very annoyed when director David Lynch said how creepy Philadelphia was.
The fact is, we do have a history of crazy, creepy, disgusting crime stories.
Also two years ago, not far from where I live, this.
In 1992, we read about Eddie Savitz: “An American businessman who was arrested for paying thousands of young men for either engaging in anal and oral sex or for giving him dirty underwear and feces, which he kept in pizza boxes in his apartment.”
In 1986, it was Gary Heidnik.
1979 brought us the tale of Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer, who cut up his missing girlfriend’s body and kept it in a trunk in his apartment. (I knew Ira; he was an asshole.)
In 1975, there was Joseph Kallinger, a schizophrenic cobbler who was a serial killer and rapist. (The thing that sticks out in my mind was his conviction that all human ills were related to poorly fitted shoes, and he tested his theory with custom-made shoes — for mice.)
So when the details of the Kermit Gosnell story came out, I pushed them out of the way. Another horror story in Philadelphia? Ick.
I read a bit and filed it under ‘conservative healthcare.’ I’m old enough to remember when stories like this were in the paper every week. Then laws against abortion were overturned and women stopped dying. Now that conservatives have brought ‘women as babymills and it’s their fault and they should be punished for it’ back into style, we’re seeing these stories back in the news with the same frightening and all too common predictability.