The Murder of Maud Edgell

I'll start this by saying that my writing talents have diminished to the point of being a moral hypocrite just to get something written down. That blog on Ron Launius is ideally how I feel about exploiting a death by murder. There is no way I can write about Ms. Edgell without exploiting her death. I acknowledge that my mother raised me with morals, and at least I can redeem myself by starting off with an apology to my mom's side of the family.

When I lived with my grand mother, who was a perfect person, I found a manila (why not settle on the word vanilla?) folder in my bedroom that contained close to two hundred poems typed on an old fashioned type writer. They were on the bottom of a bookshelf in my bedroom for who knows how long, completely tucked away. I grew up with the story of Ms. Edgell in my mind, so my thought went to depression about her life. Her life was depressing, she was violently murdered, and all her poems were on the bottom of a dusty bookshelf with a ton of Catholic propaganda that kept me away from shuffling through that mess to read what was in her mind before she became a reclusive alcoholic who lived in the woods on my family's property.

I remember thinking that I wanted my life to be more then a folder of poems found by a twenty year old woman who only knew about the worst of me.

I can wait forever to become a good writer to honor her, or I can just write about this and bring up a few issues that her murder raised and pretend that I'm not exploiting her death, I'm explaining how factors like guns and police can not help in every circumstance. Ms. Edgell's death could have been prevented by her loaded guns. Ms. Edgell's death could have been prevented by the three 911 calls and three police trips out to check on her while she was in fear the night she died. Ms. Edgell's death could have been prevented by the many guard dogs she had for protection (who instead delimed her after her murder due to hunger.) Finally if the Crownsville mental hospital kept a lock on violent patients, none of this would have happened.

Separate from the thought years after finding her poems that I wanted to celebrate her life (this is not a celebration,) I've been watching these scary Youtube videos that claim to be true stories about scary events in the woods. I'm waiting for someone to bring up my family. Superficially, they can give off a abandoned cabin in the woods-type vibe. We happen to have an abandoned cabin in our woods too.

I grew up in a loving home on a colorful organic blueberry farm. The walk to the bus stop was about a quarter of a mile, and when I was young I remember passing my grandparent's colorful garden that lined the driveway. The flowers that bloomed in the Spring attracted butterflies. I wish I had known then how lucky I was to have that view for so long. The last stretch of woods before the bus stop had honeysuckles lining the edge of the road, and the smell was intoxicating. We were taught how to pull apart a honeysuckle flower to get that little bead of dew, which, in retrospect (and a lot of therapy) was meditative. My grand mother grew peppermint and spearmint to add to her flower bouquets for the farmer's market. The grass before our granite rock driveway always had dew that made my shoes muddy by the time I got to school. I was once teased about that dirt on my shoes. Then it was embarrassing, now I know about D.H. Lawrence, class wars, and the money ladder that manners should instill in others.

The nightmare of this story should be that the woods outside our 48 acre farm were cut down by yuppies lacking any creativity. Now instead of woods, we have cookie cutter McMansions. All our childhood trails are gone. The ponds have drained. A walk in the woods usually includes a hunter on our property now, even though its not quite fair to the deer when the trees have thinned out. I've never consciously cried about the yuppie invasion. It's a bummer though.

Before the yuppies invaded and upped the stock of The Gap and J.Crew in Annapolis (Google Epping Forest get an idea of a community next to ours), there were acres and acres of thick woods between our isolated home on the edge of our family commune (it basically is a commune) and the states biggest mental hospital. Also, the country's first nudest colony. The mental hospital, Crownsville mental hospital, closed down about ten years ago. But in the 1970's, my goodness did I hear some terrifying stories. And yes, the mental patients did get to go to the nudest colony years ago. My mother once threw a bag of clothes over the gate.

The mental patients were allowed to roam free. As a child I did not understand mental illness. Children don't need adult problems. Children have no need for religion. As an adult now I know that there was the worst type of mental illness very close to home. One of my aunts is a paranoid schizophrenic. She never asked for that illness. I am not a religious person, but do believe in a great light in the world. The idea of compassion being paramount to the designer of mankind can be severely questioned with the words: Paranoid Schizophrenic. Despite having that degenerative illness, my aunt is one of the most fascinating and loving people I have ever met. She built all the rope swings in the woods that we had so much fun on as children. She built a two story house made of the rock around her (I have a blog about The Rock House) and used it to give troubled teens an escape from their homes. She and my mother volunteered at the mental hospital (yes, my aunt eventually became a patient) and they gave out cigarettes and candy.

Some random stories from the Crownsville woods when my mom was a kid herself include:

-A mental patient who somehow found sets of women's clothing. He dug deep graves and put the woman's clothing in the graves. Then he buried the clothes. He probably got the clothing from stealing it when he was in the Crownsville hospital (or nudist colony) and his burial ritual was observed by my aunt, uncle and their friends, from a distance. No one was missing, so his ritual was allowed. Like I said, in the 1970's-early 80's patients roamed freely through the woods.

-Three patients at separate times were killed by a pack of wild dogs. My mother and her sister were expert climbers. In fact before my aunt (the paranoid schizophrenic) was beaten in her own home with a metal chair that shattered and permanently deformed her arm, she could do over 15 pull-ups. She has the body of Linda Hamilton from Terminator 2.

Side Note: That attack on my aunt, which nearly killed her, was the catalyst that caused me to try the heroin my next door neighbor in Arcata was just getting into. Her attackers were people my uncle took in from a bad neighborhood. One spent less then a year in prison, and in his trial his lawyers tried to use her paranoid schizophrenia as an excuse for violence to that extreme. What happened to her attacker when he got out of jail? He lives with my uncle still. The damage one person did was like Hiroshima to our lives. That's why I don't live there now. Ironically I wasted two years of my life addicted to heroin because my aunt was attacked by a heroin addict. Yep, that irony is not lost on me.

Anyway, the wild dogs were killed when a pack of police officers took machine guns into the woods. That ended that problem. I was told that wild pigs were in the woods, and my dad was almost attacked by one in a story that always makes my aunt laugh. She laughs because the woods are her home and she adapted extremely well to climb trees with no branches like an inch worm. She had to distract the pig because my dad could not climb trees like her or my mother.

Mr. Amous was another death, but I don't know much about him. He was an alcoholic, like Ms. Edgell, and like Ms. Edgell he lived for free on our property. He had a feud with the teens on the other side of those woods who had dirt bikes, so the only strange thing about his death was that when he was found face first in a five foot well he dug himself, there were fresh dirt bike tracks near him. Growing up I was always fearful of dirt bikes (even though I rode them often...other dirt bikers) and guns. So before I forget the subject of this blog, on how guns, dogs and police did not save Ms. Edgell from a preventable murder at the age of 92.

It's worth noting that I am extremely superstitious and have a great deal of respect for the dead.

My older brother was there when they found her body, although he was only two years old and remembers nothing. The story has been told to me many times, but as I get older I don't ask questions. Maud Edgell was a dear friend of my mother's and my aunt. She lived in a little home on our property in the woods (or off but near our property...an important issue because of an alternate theory about her murder.) She was once the head of the Annapolis Poetry Society. She was religious. She drank a lot of alcohol and she was kind enough to have a patient from the Crownsville mental hospital (who had a pass to walk around) do work on her garden for money. The patient was a man named Sunny. I know very little about him. He was in and out of the mental hospital. He was described to me as,"sex crazy" according to a relative who knew him. Also, he was an alcoholic.

The day he got his government paycheck, he bought some hard alcohol and tried to break into Ms. Edgell's house. She called the police, who came by and looked around. That was her first of three calls to the police that night. Sunny went into the house of another woman because people like us kept our doors unlocked. That woman was not home, so Sunny went back to Ms. Edgell a second time. The second time she fired a shot into the air and called the police. They came by and did nothing. They told her to keep her door locked. She had a glass sliding door. I know that the police told her to do this because the same police were annoyed that my mom and her sister reported her missing. Initially the police assumed Ms. Edgell left her home due to fear and they did not want to look for her. The third time Sunny came by, the police gave one last look and stopped believing she was in danger.

The lesson with Ms. Edgell is that she had a loaded gun, but she was so scared the bullet holes were noticeable in a circle that penetrated walls and the glass door. I've always imagined her with a gun in the dark yelling for this man to leave because she has a gun. Her own attempt at scaring him shattered the sliding glass door which allowed him inside access. She had three big dogs whose purpose was for protection because she was a 93 year old woman living alone in the woods next to the county mental hospital. I do not know how she was murdered. She was delimbed, but later the coroner said that her own dogs delimbed her out of hunger. So they did not help her. Her gun was found empty on the floor. My mother and her sister were worried when a routine trip to bring her food reviled the shattered glass and empty gun, but no Ms. Edgell. They refused to allow the police to leave until they found Ms. Edgell, Her arms were the first body part to be found some 200 yards away from her home. She was chewed in pieces by her own guard dogs, which were missing. This was not the same year as the wild dogs though.

Maud Edgell was a distant relative of Francis Scott Key. When I was younger I would get him confused with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her poems are in the spare bedroom of my grand mother's house in Maryland, collecting dust. I wish I knew more about her to honor her life. To me, this story cemented the futility of owning a gun, having dogs as protection (my cat would step on me to get away first!) and the police failing to protect an isolated old woman who called them three separate times. The police were also called to the house of the woman who was not home when Sunny came by. She was lucky. Ms. Edgell knew very well who her murderer was, and she told the police she was terrified. This story has always made me feel vulnerable.

One (ridiculous) theory is that a real estate developer (Perry? I think that's his name) hired Sunny to kill Ms. Edgell so he could demolish her house for more McMansions. Or more homes; this was way before the age of cookie cutter brick homes. My dad buys into the theory that Perry had some involvement because he was known as a shrewd and abrasive business man who had quarreled with Ms. Edgell before. I don't believe he would hire a known violent offender to kill a 92 year old woman. She only had half a decade left at most before a natural death claimed her, if the alcohol did not get her first. However, Perry did build almost immediately after her death, and their quarrel was about land.

These horror stories did effect me growing up. I still hate guns. I had the best dog on planet Earth when I was growing up. Best dog ever. Best cat ever too. I know that my mother was scared to be in our home at night when my father went to work. The woods were scary when we went too far. Now when I go home to visit, I'm more worried of a stray bullet from a hunter then I am of something happening to me.

One more sad thing about these woods are the unmarked graves of the mental patients who died without a proper family burial. There is only one wooden cross to let anyone know that they are standing on a grave site. The mental patients kept horses in large stables next to this graveyard, and the colorful graffiti on the walls to this day interested me. I was raised to fear these woods because of what happened to Ms. Edgell, so seeing normal peace signs in bright colors in this abandoned horse stable made me wonder what these patients were thinking. The idea of them burying woman's clothing was such a contrast from engraving the word 'Love' into these stalls.

These patients were always different from anything going on in my world. We were children and did not understand why anyone would hurt anyone else. Of course not all patients are dangerous; and the stigma is heartbreaking to realize when applied to my own aunt. The notion that someone could see her as someone like Sunny breaks my heart. When I was in the 9th grade, a classmate asked me if I had heard of a crazy person in the woods that carries a shotgun and walks with a black dog. Shadow, the coolest dog on planet Earth was black. And when he said my aunt's name with the word, "crazy" in front of it, with laughter...that was the first time I realized people misunderstand mental illness.

The last thing I'll write down is a memory I have from before kindergarten. My mother would drink two cups of coffee with my aunt in the morning. My aunt would come over for this ritual. I remember spying on them while in my Rainbow Bright pajamas. I clearly remember my mother pleading with my aunt, and my aunt yelling before slamming the door. That was the onset of her schizophrenia. It is convenient for God to always have our back; my God is Creation, void of human prayers. To hear my aunt talk about a summer night with such detail, just to get my lazy butt out of bed to sit on the steps and talk, humbles me greatly. I'll never understand why she has to suffer every day, and to be misunderstood by the very people she loves.

She had long blonde hair and a sincere smile. To love someone so much, who looks like my mother, and know that her disease ruined her in every way is painful. I don't understand why she got that disease and others can go about their lives never knowing the weight of her thoughts. In my 20's, shortly after finding Ms. Edgell's poetry, my aunt picked me up from college because I was in tears over a grade in some forgettable class. She told me to let it all out and feel blessed that I can still cry, because she had no more tears left.