When the man also known as The Beast was
caught, everyone was relieved. He had escaped every single police force along
his path, as he killed innocent people, and he had finally committed was small
mistake. The police had noticed his liking for a certain candy and it was a
wrapper they found at a gas station that lead them directly to him. He was
found torturing his latest victim on marsh. Fortunately, she was still alive.
He had to be shot several times in the legs and spine in order to immobilize
him. The police remembered that they couldn’t kill him, no matter how much they
wanted revenge for what he had done before. He had killed several people, not
only women but children and men too. Besides, the way he did it earned him the
nickname Beast from every force chasing him.
Finally in a prison cell, doctor that checked
him upon arrival were surprised to see that the damage done by the bullets to
his body was minimal. He could still walk and had only a slight limp on his
left leg. He was transferred to a maximum-security prison that same day, where
he was able to wait for his trial. This offended many of the victims’ families,
because they didn’t thought such an animal had the right to a trial. But the
law was the law and he was at least entitled to tell the people how he had done
it and why. The trial, after all, was also useful as a way to explain
everything that had happened and shed a light on such a monstrous behavior. If
it ever happened again, authorities and society needed to know why.
For everyone, it was a very hard time. The
pictures, the police videos, the details by coroners… It was awful to hear how
every body was dumped, how some of them were raped and how he tortured every
single one of them. He had no real proceeding; it wasn’t like he just raped the
women or something like that. He was erratic and that was proven by the first
two weeks of the trial. People had asked for only a week to show evidence and
so on but the judge had to change that as he had to cut short every day,
because at least one person would get physically sick of all the details of the
murders. He knew it was asking too much of every single person to sit there and
stand such truths.
At least five of the jurors had to be excused.
They all decided to leave the trial as they realized they weren’t fit to stand
all those gruesome details that they knew had to come out to the light. They
were replaced as they left, and some information had to be repeated for the new
jurors in order for them to understand the whole process. That week was the
most difficult time in the lives of the family member, more than the moment
when they had been notified that their loved ones were dead. Everything hurt up
to that point and most of them just wanted it all to finish with the dead of
the Beast, they needed to see how his body stopped breathing.
The second week of the trial it was all about
the Beast. Bringing him to the courthouse proved difficult, as demonstrators
were always there throwing things at him. The authorities didn’t really mind but
they just couldn’t allow something worst to happen. It was rumored that some of
the family members were planning to kill the Beast and that had to be stopped.
The police started bringing him through the back door of the courthouse and
they also made a couple of arrests to make people understand that they needed
to trust justice and what it stood for. It was understandable that they were
angry, very angry for what happened but they had to let justice do what she
needs to do. They needed closure and that couldn’t be found by killing a human
being. They shouldn’t become him to prove their love.
The first couple of days, he was cooperating
so much. But by the third day, he started speaking, saying incoherent things.
After the opposing lawyer confronted him, the man attempted to attack him and
had to be restrained and tied to the chair he was sitting on. The lawyer asked
for the trial not be cancelled for this incident and he used this event to
demonstrate to the people why the murderer was called the Beast. He then read a
psychiatrist’s report, where he stated that the Beast suffered a very rare
syndrome were his brain thought everything and everyone was a danger to his
existence. It was the only explanation they could give to killing so many
people. But why torture them, they asked? No response.
The next day, it was a very long one. Again,
pictures and videos of crime scenes were shown but this time in order to
provoke a reaction of the Beast. His lawyer, who was trying to get him life
instead of the death penalty, had not spoken much with his own client because
he had become very quiet and still. He had to go through all the evidence to,
at least, prove the man he was defending was insane and that he belonged to an
asylum. He repeated this over and over again during the trial, without little
to no positive response from the jury. They were all disgusted by what they had
seen and had no space in their hearts or their heads to consider the Beast as
only a crazy guy that happens to kill people.
By the end of the week, they finally got some
words out of the Beast. He said that he had to kill them all because he was
afraid. But when asked if he had any reasons to torture any of them, he was
quiet for a while. By the end of the session, he stood up and said that he
fought against the forces of the devil and that it had been God himself who had
told him what to do and how to do it. This was a low blow for everyone in the
courtroom and for everyone in the city, to be honest. Blaming God was
ridiculous but it was a step towards that insanity plea and it was hard to
fight it because his time on the trials ended just after that.
The following days a couple of family members
gave their statements. It was, again, a difficult thing to see and hear. Most
of the people in the room cried at some point and how not too, when the details
of someone’s death were being given by their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers…
The jury was thankful that those statements only lasted for a couple of days.
After that, the judge gave the jury four days to decide about this man’s faith.
Of course, they didn’t need so much time. The following day every single person
had being summoned to hear the verdict: the Beast was going to die by lethal
injection. Many of the families were relieved but none of them were happy or
anything close to that. They just needed to close that door in their lives,
once and for all.
The execution was programmed a month after the
trial had ended. Some people complained that it should have been done faster,
but they couldn’t get everyone that needed to be there at an earlier date. The
governor wanted to be there, as well as at least one member from every family
that the Beast had destroyed. They even looked for his parents or relatives and
found and old woman that denied the invitation to see a family member die. She
said he had not seen him in years and that he had always been “one of those
weird kids”. Television crews stationed themselves very early the day of the
executions, as well as many people that supported the families. Strangely
enough, there were also protesters against the death penalty. Not their best
showing.
The lethal injection process was very simple
and some people complained, again, that it was too humane for such an animal.
But the state had no other way of killing inmates. Firing squads were a thing
of the past, there were no electric chairs anymore and communities had
successfully avoided the implementation of death by gas. So everyone gathered
in very small room and just watched as the man they hated so much was brought
from his cell. As they saw the people from prison tie him down, many thought
that the last ting their loved ones had seen was probably the face of that man.
And that made them so much angrier.
The liquids that went into his body were
lowered slowly, one by one. As they saw him closing his eyes and his vital
signs going away, they felt their hearts even more broke than before because it
was the end of the road and they had gone through all of it together. They
pronounced him dead and the governor started to applause but soon stopped.
Everyone else looked at him with disgust. Somehow, people were still disgusted
by the fact that people had to be killed to teach a lesson, a lesson that maybe
no one was really hearing or understanding. Somewhere in the region, another
person was being killed. Because the evil inside humans doesn’t stop and it has
many layers and faces. The only way is to keep fighting.
