Conviction

   I just had to do it. That’s what I talk the officer when they came to my home one sunny Saturday afternoon. The day had started so bright and beautiful, but my body somehow knew something else was going to happen. I had been living in that cottage for more than a year, never really feeling safe. And my past, my actions, had finally caught up to me. It was very scary but, at the same time, a relief. I didn’t have to keep running from everyone and I could finally breathe in relative peace, even if it was inside a cell.

 They came in and talked to me. We didn’t even tried bullshit, as we all knew what we were doing there. I wasn’t a danger to anyone, so they avoided using harsh language or force. They didn’t even use handcuffs. I asked why because, as you always see in TV shows, handcuffs are supposed to be mandatory. They said they would make an exception for me, because they didn’t really wanted to upset the villagers, they didn’t want them to know what was happening. The less they knew was best for everyone.

 It was clear they also wanted to avoid been noticed because they weren’t dressed like officers. They looked like a nice couple, touring the beautiful towns of the English countryside. But they weren’t a couple and I never knew if they were really nice or not. They just wanted to do it all without a fuss, avoiding any kind of commotion and, especially, any possibilities of the news leaking to the press. I guess they wanted to be the ones revealing to the world that I had been captured, without any resistance.

 They let me call a fellow villager, a friend I had made with time. I told her I would be leaving because of an emergency and that I would need her to take care of the plants and animals in the house for a while. I had two cats and a dog, as well as a very well cared garden with all kinds of flowers and herbs. It had been my everything for this time. She asked why I was leaving but I just insisted on the reason being an emergency. She didn’t say anything else, maybe understanding that I was, somehow, under pressure.

 We then walked out of the house, letting me close with the key and leaving it beneath the welcome mat. I didn’t grab a coat or a sweater, because what good would it be for me to do that if I was going to spend a long time in a cell. I hopped into the officers’ car and we rapidly drove off. I couldn’t get myself to turn around to look at my house for one last time. I broke right then and there, my eyes swelling up with tears that rolled down my cheeks. I didn’t clean my face until much later, preferring to taste the saltiness of the tears, to realize what was happening, to make it real.

 I fell asleep on the ride to the city. The officers told me they had to take me there first, to be processed and for a judge to see me. They would even give me a lawyer, but it was clear I wasn’t going to use one. The only thing I was clear about was that I was going to plead guilty and I would pay my sentence, no matter how long it was. I didn’t want to defend myself in front of anyone; I didn’t want a jury to get their nose into what had happened. The fastest way to put everything behind was just to accept my fate.

 The moment I woke up, I realized how life would change for me. As the car crossed the gates of the main police station, I started missing everything from my life before. I missed Paws the cat and the way he like to play on the window when it rained, thinking the water drops were small fish. I thought of Captain, my dog, and Cinderella, my other cat. The three of them had been my companions for a while, at nights and in moments I thought the only exit was killing myself, running directly into a truck passing by on the road.

 I would also miss my times in the garden, caring for the plants and the flowers and cutting and putting things on pots. It had been a lot of work but it was always fun and exciting. I learned a lot about life from those plants, a lot about myself and how I can be a better person. I thought of mentioning that to the judge but then I realized they wouldn’t care about what I had done while on the run. For them I was just another murderer that had to pay the price for what he had done, no matter how many plants or animals I loved.

 The officers finally put me on handcuffs and helped me down the car. We walked through various corridors and climbed up stairs. I thought the place was like a labyrinth and that it was an intentional thing on the part of the creator of that place in order to confuse anyone and make them feel anxious and insecure. It was kind of working, right to the point where they sat me down on a bench and asked me to stay put. Of course, I complied. There was no place I could be and running away made no sense at all.

 I waited for an hour or so before one of the officers came back and told me I had to stay overnight in a cell beneath the station. Apparently, not all papers had gone through and some others were needed for me to be properly sentenced. They guaranteed me it wouldn’t take more than a few hours but the judge was only available until the next day. So we took the elevator, he filled some more papers and I eventually got to a cell, alone in the dark. I couldn’t sleep at all, so I just waited, trying to avoid becoming insane. I realized how hard it was going to be for me, even doubting if I could endure through it.

 Thankfully, everything happened early in the day. I declared myself guilty in front of the judge and he revised the case carefully before stating his sentence: I was going to be in jail for ten years. My so-called lawyer was ecstatic, as she thought it was going to be way more than that. Apparently, I could have been sentenced to life in prison, but as I only killed one person and never really shown tendencies to indicate I would kill again or that I had killed before, they decided to be a little nicer to me.

 Yet, a ten-year sentence was still a lot. I was going to come out in my forties, without any real chance of getting a proper job. I would be more of an outcast that I had ever been, and that didn’t bother me at all. I knew it was not the norm but I thanked the judge before he left, before I was taken down to a van were they would carry me to prison. It took a while, more paper work, but we were on the road about two hours after my hearing. The trip was going to be pretty short, as the prison was not to far from the city.

 When I got there, I have to say every single detail seemed extremely important. I had my eyes wide open, as well as my ears. Apparently, it was a medium security prison. They gave me a uniform at the entrance and I had to strip down in order for some guard to do a cavity search and then watch me dress up. It was the most humiliating part of the whole process and I have to confess I wasn’t expecting something like that to happen. I just thought about the ocean, my flowers and my animals.

 More paperwork. Then, a big muscular guard took me through several corridors until we had reached the third yard. Some more paperwork and then another short walk, this time to my final destination. The cell was a little big larger than the one in a police station. I had a small window, a toilet, a sink and a bunk bed. I was kind of surprised to see someone lying down on the top, staring at me as I entered. The guard took off my handcuffs, closed the door and left me there with my cellmate.

 I didn’t want to speak first. Apparently he understood that, because he waited for a while, as I looked at my surroundings and then sat down on the lower bed, feeling the fabric of the blanket with my hands, its roughness and brutality. He then asked what I had had done to end up there with him.

 I told him, in a very clear voice, that I had assassinated my best friend’s father.  He asked why. So I told him, staring at the pearl white wall in front of me, that he had raped me repeatedly for years, so I decided to stab him in his sleep one night, when he least expected it. My cellmate felt silent. So did I.

Strong woman

   By then, she had become a professional. She knew every single trick to travel, no matter if it had to do with packing her suitcase or buying the best hygiene products for herself. She knew which airlines offered what, the amount of room she had on any plane and the time she had in every single flight to work, sleep and relax. You could say she was a little bit to rigid with her life but Christine would have answered that she was just very well prepared. And that’s why her bosses loved her.

 Not only she was very practical in her travelling life, she was also like that with work. She travelled around the country and to other parts of the world, helping companies with their problems with technology and innovation. Christine went everywhere to hold meetings and conferences to anyone interested about how a company could survive in the new digital era. She knew about every single new development and was very well versed in the finance world too.

 Some people saw her as a danger to their way of doing things, specifically those people that were just corrupt and had arranged the system to work for them instead of working for everyone. During her fifteen-year experience, she had been responsible for unmasking a very high number of corruption scandals on many different companies. No matter if they produced video games or handled supermarkets, there was always someone trying to make more than the rest.

 That possibly was why so many people hated her too. In her world, in her order of things, there was no such thing as personal interests. She couldn’t understand how someone could put themselves in front and leave everyone else behind. Granted, she was not the best to speak about group efforts as she never did them herself, but she knew the value of having a good team to make a company go to directions no one else had ever gone. She tried not only to make them all win money and be successful, but Christine also wanted them to have a heart.

 That made her enemies very angry and that’s why many companies that had once asked for her help, suddenly rejected her and even campaigned against her actively in order for her bosses to be tempted to fire her or something but that never happened. Not only because she was really good at her job, but also because they feared her. They knew that if she was so good, she must have had something on the company she worked. It was only natural that she did, to protect her own interests.

 But that was where they didn’t understand her. She didn’t have anything on anyone in the company. She had even checked on that. And it was because she believed a relationship based on trust was much better than one based in fear. So from her side, everything was just fine. From their side not so much, but she had decided long ago that she couldn’t be worried about things she had no real control over. There was no way she could convince them that she wasn’t going to turn on them one day.

 Real problems came the day her enemies, people that had robbed millions, sued her in court with allegations of her work being unethical and, also, for receiving money in order to help improve conditions in some companies and not in other. They said that she refused to help their companies because she was under orders not to let them have any part in the business. They were very specific in their statements and even presented evidence of every single thing they were claiming.

 Christine would have wanted to laugh and she did when she got home but certainly not in the courthouse, where everyone’s eyes were fixed on her. She tried not to make any telling expressions and only limited her words to denying what those men in suits were saying. She was very calm and one could even say she didn’t care much for having to loose time there when she could be doing something much more interesting. Her rivals even pointed that out but the judge seemed not to mind much.

The actual trial was set to begin two months later. She would have to keep working until then because she had many prior commitments. But her company had asked her to please hold any engagements until after the trial was done because they didn’t want any of their clients to feel they could lose not only money but also their prestige in the business world. Of course, she understood perfectly what they were asking of her. So the day before she went to trial, was the same day she finally stopped at home and realized how her life would change now.

 The trial was very well publicized because many people in the media had been bought by the owners of the companies that were suing her. So it was obvious what their position was. They wanted her to be turn to shreds by people too, which was very hypocritical as those same companies were the ones that robbed everyone of their savings and their hard won money.  She had some big lawyers on her side too but the ones in the other side were particularly vicious. So much so that, on the second day, they even dared to attack her personal life, which was preposterous.

 Her lawyer told her not to say anything about that and she didn’t but it was the first time she seemed out of control. She wasn’t happy, at all, that her enemy was so visibly desperate that they wanted to find a weak spot wherever they could see it. Their questions and allegations hovered around the fact that she was an unmarried adult woman that lived her life travelling around. They called her irresponsible and immoral, which was perfect for the always religious people in juries. There’s always a couple.

 The trial went on for weeks. Whenever she thought they had been discredited by her very well built case, they came again with claims of bribery and corruption. It was then when she really got tired and decided not only to do her own defense but also using their own tricks. She would go personal and to the facts they were attacking on her. She was very tired and she had never felt that way. Christine was a very strong person but know, for some reason, she was beginning to feel the weight of years of work.

 The first day, in which she defended herself, she attacked them head on with proof of their own corruption. She had the papers and the data, which she always kept on her records to bring them down. One by one, one by day, she destroyed their credibility in front of the judge. Of course, they came against her hard with more personal questions and other attacks but Christine was ready, she had prepared herself thoroughly for that occasion, so she had brought the big guns.

 Did they want to talk about hidden children, lovers, weird fetishes and many other things? Fine, she went there with proof. During her years as a woman in business she had also made a lot of good friends, friends with enough talents to actually uncover things about people that they would have never thought no one would ever know about. But those good friends, many of those owed a lot to Christine, came to help in her hour of need. They really did the best they could to help her win that damn case.

 The day she actually won, the papers suddenly went silent and she went back to work. She decided to work now for smaller companies in order to help them be bigger and better. Christine wanted no more juggernauts in the game. Instead, she wanted to help where she was really needed. And she knew that they would let her do that because now she was a big name. Now they knew who she was and what she could do: bring empires up or down to the ground. There was clearly no one better in the game and Christine knew it very, very well.

The Beast

   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.