Don't Say It

Near the beginning of my career as a headhunter, I worked for Cybersearch, a division of a Control Data Corporation. CDC was the mother ship of the computer industry in the 70's and early 80's. Our division was an in house search firm, supplying IT and engineering talent for the various divisions of the corporation. The head count was between 75 and 100,000 employees world wide.

I came on board in the summer of 1982 when internal hiring was pretty vigorous, but things began to decline in 1983. Fortunately, I was geared to going outside and finding new business and never had the chance to rely on the internal flow of job openings to meet my sales quota.

One observation about internal communication and politics of a huge organization is that they are cloudy and fear driven.

Because we were a sales organization with quotas, we needed to make placements in order to get paid and to justify our existence, so we needed to be very careful with our questions.

One question we were told never ask was "Is there a hiring freeze?" If you asked this question, the divisional recruiter would suspend his hiring as if he got a direct order from above. Sometimes this question would spread like wildfire across the divisions and create a corporate wide hiring slow down for a few weeks. That gets problematic when you have hiring managers who have project deadlines that they can't meet because they can't get an offer out the door. For us, all of our search efforts would be lost if we had candidates with multiple offers in hand. After one or two weeks, we would loose out to our competition, all this because a naive recruiter would ask the question to one of the division recruiters 'Are you having a hiring freeze?"

Facts?

I found a link to some information related to my previous entry.

http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/16414

I wrote from a recollection of conversations and news paper articles published near the time of the incident so I realize there may be some errors, but I think that this story is incorrect.

A key element that I never forgot is that he lined up the boys in the back of a truck (or trailer), and tried to kill them execution style. Looks like he succeeded with one by shooting him in the forehead ("accidentally"). The other that he shot three times was probably one who failed to escape while there were three others who got away.

The convict is photographed holding crucifix embroidered on a shirt. I suppose the editor wanted us to feel some compassion towards him. Poor old guy.

He was convicted for the Piper kidnapping, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.

Buying Cleaning Supplies

One late night a few summers ago, I was buying some cleaning supplies at a Wall Mart where I met a woman working there who helped me find what I needed to clean my house to get ready to sell. She told me about her family’s house up north that was for sale. They had problems selling it over the years because whenever they were about to close, a neighbor lady would show up and tell the wife the story and the couple would back out of the deal.

I could tell that she was on some sort of medication that caused her to slur her speech and from time to time she would begin to fall asleep on her feet. She said that ever since the tragedy she has been taking medication to help her cope with the pain.

As I asked her about the story, she gave me bits and pieces of information, almost like she was recalling it from a dream. She was a teenager. She said that her dad killed her mom, her boyfriend, the baby and the boys. Her little brother got away. Then she spoke in a childlike voice: “Then the men came … in suites. They put on boots and took shovels and were digging holes everywhere.”

She was in the metro area, staying with her aunt on the cold March night, when her father drove up to their home town and found his wife with her boyfriend. He became livid with anger and rage and went out to the car and got his revolver and came back and killed them, along with the baby. He then brought his son and a couple of his friends outside and made them stand on the back of a truck and tried to shoot them, but his gun jammed, so he told them to wait. He went to get another gun and came back, but they ran. He killed two of them, but his son got away as he was chased by his dad through the night along the thick row of pines and over across the cold muddy field of ice and melting snow to the neighbor’s farm, where he found refuge until the police came and arrested his dad.

I asked her about the men with the shovels. This traumatized her as much as the first incident. Here she stood, a young trembling teenager, at the house, on a cold rainy day, with her aunt and her little brother. She lost her mom and the baby she loved so much. The boys were dead, and her brother was curled up in a blanket on the floor, staring at the wall in a state of shock. Life had stopped for her and her family. Suddenly, with no explanation, a group of government agents showed up and put on their rubber boots and took their shovels out of their car trunks and began to dig holes all over the property. They asked her all sorts of questions -- questions for which she had no answers. They kept asking and repeating themselves as if she knew something. They did the same with her aunt and her little brother, but to no avail. She had no idea what was going on and they wouldn't tell her.

I did a bit of research. They were looking for the ransom money from an infamous kidnapping case. Not long before, they found the wife of a famous financier tied up to a tree in the nearby forest, in the late stages of hypothermia, barely alive. They never caught the kidnappers nor found the money, but there were a number of clues that led them to this property.

I went to look at the place. It had been sold, but the new owners were out of town. I walked around, up along the row of pines and imagined the father calling out to his son, telling him that everything would be ok. I thought of the terror and confusion that raced through the boys mind as he frantically tried to escape, knowing that his father was close behind, trying to kill him.

There is more to the story. Sometime later, a police officer quit his job and bought the place. He spent all of his time for a couple of years digging holes all over the property, looking for the lost ransom. He eventually went bankrupt and abandoned the site.

In recent years, I heard that a high ranking official in law enforcement bought a run-down shack on a patch along a creek lined with other old shacks, within eyesight of the property. He was seen visiting from time to time. I was never able to, nor interested, in verifying this part of the story.

The person who informed me of this also said that around the time of the kidnapping, the man, who had murdered his family and the other children, made some alterations to the property -- unusual and costly alterations for a man who had no money, nor any concern for the upkeep of his place. For some reason, this information was never revealed in the investigation.

I looked up the man and found the prison where he was incarcerated. I wanted to know because his daughter believed that he would soon be out and would come for her and make her life better, for she missed her dad. I even thought of visiting him as a chaplain, but I passed as I realized that I would have been crossing her boundaries without her permission.

He was an inmate with a number, in for a life sentence with no chance for parole. They couldn’t disclose if he had any contact with his daughter, but I got the impression that he never had a visitor.

I came back to the store a month later or so, in order to look for the woman who told me her tragic life story, thinking that I could help her somehow, but she was gone. She had been laid off from her job and moved on without leaving forwarding address.

Look At Yourself

I took my two boys and their friends snowboarding at Trollhaugen in Dresser Wisconsin one night a few years ago. Although I liked to ski, the area runs were unchallenging as I had gone on several ski trips in the Colorado Rockies. So, I decided that the only way to get some fun out of these little hills was to learn how to snowboard. It didn’t take long to figure out that the key was to keep your weight and balance on the uphill edge of the board, whether you were facing uphill or downhill. Turning is a transitioning between the two edges. On the hard packed runs I figured out a basic trick where I could spin like a propeller while shifting my weight from one edge to the other. That was when I fell. Up until that point, I had never bothered to wear a helmet. After all, I wasn’t doing flips on a half pipe. It was all pretty benign stuff -- except I hadn’t figured on how much impact my head would encounter from spinning around and catching the back edge of my board while I was facing up the hill.

It is difficult to describe the experience. First you are out on a slope where there are tons of people all around, riding up the chairlift, getting off, riding down the hill on all sides. The floodlights are beaming down making the white run glow under the dark, star filled sky. Top 40’s music is being played on the speakers mounted on the lift poles. The chalet is lit up and there are groups of people inside and out. In less than a second, when the back of my head struck the pavement-like snow, everything became black and silent, like I was thrown into a dark closet and had the door slammed shut behind me.

As I came to and made my way to the bottom of the hill, my sons and a couple of their friends asked me if I was ok and I said yes, so they left. It didn’t occur to me ask who they were. It all seemed pretty normal. I don’t know if the amnesia began right away, or if it slowly set in. I recall that I had a sense of urgency that I needed to get to my car and find my wallet in case I passed out or something and someone needed to identify me. It was very dreamlike as I walked through a crowd of college aged kids, not making any eye contact but looking straight ahead. I heard a couple of them laugh, but it didn’t bother me as I was focused on one thing – getting my wallet out of my car.

Once I got my wallet, I was a bit more at ease so I walked back into the chalet and sat down at a picnic table with a view of the slopes. That is when I realized things were not quite right. It was sort of a process of discovery over the next hour or two. Here I am, sitting in a chalet, in the middle of nowhere with people all around me who I didn’t know. But what am I doing here? Did I do something wrong and am I hiding? What if I get caught? But what did I do? There is horse of a lady standing next to me looking out at the slope as if she is watching for her kids. Do I know her? Am I supposed to say something to her? Is she my wife? I hope not.

I figured that I better be careful and act as normal as possible. Blend in. Act somewhat pleasant, but don’t overdo it, because that would be obvious. Look up the hill like the lady standing next to me, and maybe chuckle a little bit in a fatherly way at the kid who just wiped out, sort of like one of those “kids will be kids” light belly laughs, but not enough to risk striking up a conversation with her. Look pre occupied with something. So I pulled out my wallet and acted like I had to find something that is pretty important. I took out my driver’s license and looked at the picture.

I knew that the picture on the license was me and the name seemed to be right. Beyond that, I had no clue. The license doesn’t tell you that you’re married and you have two children. It doesn’t give your occupation, hobbies or even a telephone number to call in case you forget.

It was a strange experience, because I was trying to learn something about this stranger. Everything became silent. I no longer cared about getting caught, or who was around me. It was almost an out of body experience as I looked down upon myself through this photograph. I could almost feel myself back away up and above the table and look down upon myself as I was staring at my driver’s license. It’s not the same as meeting a stranger for the very first time where a whole range of sensory stimuli goes into play as you are filtering through first impressions, facial expressions, vocabulary, speech tone and style. Your unconsciously categorizing this person as to someone you like or don’t like, trust or not, whatever. No, this was entirely different, because I could hear an echo of feelings of a lifetime of knowing this person, though I had no clue as to who he was or what he did.

You might be thinking that you could have resolved the issue by asking yourself some simple questions and taking some basic steps to figure things out. For instance asking yourself what you are doing sitting in a chalet in the middle of the night with snowboarding boots? How about going to a telephone and calling information for your home telephone number and calling home? You could go to the gift shop and look at post cards to find out where you are. On the other hand, when this happened, everything was very dream like. Fortunately, unlike some of my dreams, I did have my pants on, but for the most part, I was functioning like in a dream – in a reactive, survival mode. Everything kept going in and out of focus. People say things that make no sense. Who knows, I could have been partially dreaming.

I was starting to get some knowledge of this person, as if bits and pieces started to appear out of the fog. I knew that he was totally involved in a church that was going nowhere and was making him sick.

The thought occurred to me that I could get in my car and drive away. I had the perfect excuse to get out of anything I ever wanted to get out of, but never would do because of my sense of obligation. On the other hand, it occurred to me that I may be leaving something or somebody that I may miss.

I can’t recall how I came back to my senses. It may have been when the kids showed up and were ready to go home. It all seemed very natural and uneventful. We got our boards, strapped them to the car and drove off.

I didn’t easily loose the feeling of confusion that I experienced when I met myself in the chalet – how ridiculous my life looked. It didn’t take long for me to resign from the church. On the other hand, it didn’t instantly give me a sense of wisdom for the rest of my life. Recently, my teenage son said to me “If you could only see yourself you’d realize how screwed up you are.” Normally I would have been upset and defensive by that remark, but I remembered my “trip” to Wisconsin and realized that it could be true.