A monster murdered these three girl scouts.
Lori Farmer, Michelle Guse and Doris Milner. The girls perished in the worst way possible, all just a pebble throw away from camp councillors.[1]
The murders took place in the small tent shared by the girls. When detectives examined it with luminal, the roof lit up from blood splatter. This case still haunts the detectives who worked it.
There was no justice, either. Somewhere out there is a serial child killer.
This story has no happy ending. Detectives discovered a letter Doris penned to her mother the night she was killed. She was writing to tell her mom that she hates camp and wants to be picked up. Dorris and her mother had agreed that she could come home if she tried the first night. Oh, and the parents of the murdered girls weren’t the first people the camp contacted. It was their lawyers.
After my shock died down, the first thing I did was replace those girls’ faces with the faces of the people I love. It left me with an appreciation that I will almost certainly never experience the horror that greeted those girls’ parents. How could you?
I’m human, and part of being human is how viscerally we respond to loss. It’s programmed in our DNA. Even science proves that losing something hurts much more than the pleasure we get from gaining something.
Being happy is about taking the opportunity – no matter how grim – to remind myself of everything I have to lose.
Loss is the best reminder of what we have. All we have to do from here is appreciate it.
