Victim of a Crime

Annamaria on Monday

Years ago, MWA-NY had regularly scheduled, monthly dinner meetings.  They felt to me like a gathering of my tribe.  After cocktails, munchies, and lots of conversation, we all sat down to dinner.  The night's planned program began just as desert was served.

On one memorable occasion...

Pardon me while I interrupt myself.  At this point, while drafting this blog, I stopped to look something up, because I wanted to write this:

On one memorable occasion eating dessert while listening to the speaker was a bit strange.  The dessert our venue served was vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce.  The speaker was...

At the time, he was the Chief Forensic Pathologist for the State of Connecticut, but I could not remember his name. However, I knew how to find it.  All I had to do was google "Dick the Chipper, what the headlines called the infamous case he spoke about - of a man who killed his wife and destroyed the evidence by putting her corpse through a wood chipper.  There was bound to be an article, probably on Wikipedia. It would mention the name of the man I was looking for.  Look what came up at the top of my search:

Wow!  The number one writer on that subject is me???  If you want, you can see that blog from May of 2015 here.

I apologize for the diversion.  Let's get back on track.

The speaker was Dr. Henry Chung-yu Lee, the pathologist, who showed us slides of the chipped remains and explained how he and his staff proved their case.  While we looked up at the slides and, from time to time, down at our plates where our ice cream swam in pools of blood red liquid.  We crime writers, with Dr. Lee's full participation, reacted by peppering the discussion with a lot of increasingly hilarious blood and gore jokes.  I guess, for a forensic pathologist, dark humor is the best way to retain sanity.

Another such MWA-NY speaker was a Forensic Psychologist from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who spoke about his research into how perpetrators of street crime choose their victims.  The participants in his study were men jailed for committing such acts.  In his study, he showed them films of people going about their business and asked them to pick out, from the people in the films, the potential targets.  He said that the convicts chose people who looked distracted, tentative, or confused.  The crimes in question range from pickpocketing to assault. Persons who were decisive in their actions and walked with a strong gait were unlikely to be chosen victims.

After hearing his lecture many years ago, I sometimes have thought about how I myself walked when making my way in the world. I have always been quick paced and intent on where I was going. However, this past Saturday I myself became the victim of a crime.  My wallet was lifted from my backpack, probably while I was walking through a crowded piazza.

Since I arrived in late December, I have not carried a backpack. Yesterday was the first day, since I arrived here, that I carried one. Typically, instead, I jammed the few things I might need into a small purse that hangs in front of me.

But yesterday, since I wanted to do a bunch of errands - one of which would involve a wait - I wanted to take a book along.  So I opted for this purse, one I thought was well designed to keep my stuff safe.

But somehow one of Fagin's modern-day trainees was able to open the right one of the three compartments and snatch out my little red wallet and make off with it, completely unbeknown to me.

Once I got over the shock, and through three hours of struggling through the machinations of totally unhelpful AI to find actual people to cancel my debit and credit cards, I began to wonder how, on the ONLY day I carried the backpack, the thief chose to target me.

Then I realized. After a knee injury in September and a fall at the end of October, I have been teaching myself to walk slower and more carefully.  I am, to be frank, afraid of falling again.  And here, where the sidewalks and the streets are paved with stones, my feet are in greater danger of finding somethings to trip over.  When walking, I am paying more attention to what is under my feet than to what is happening around me.  I have no doubt that this is why that modern-day Artful Dodger noticed me.

I haven't been feeling all that good about myself after being robbed.  When I first thought about writing a blog about it, I didn't much like portraying myself as a victim.  Until I remembered that professor's research on how criminals choose their victims. Once I learned that, according to Google anyway, I am the world's foremost reporter on the conviction of Dick the Chipper, my ego got a much needed boost.

Viva MIE!