(Originally published in Main Line Life 11/13/08)
It’s their smiles that haunt you. Smiles frozen in time, in photographs from better days. Days when what lay ahead was not yet known. Could not be known.
It is nearly the two-year anniversary of the horrifying, and as yet unsolved, story of four women found murdered and left in an Atlantic City drainage ditch. At the time, I felt safely removed from the story. That would never happen to me, or one of mine, I thought to myself. The women were described as having been previously arrested for prostitution, and they were all involved in the drug culture, so they had many opportunities to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Then their photos were published in the newspaper, and suddenly they were real. In their photos, the women are all smiling. They look like the girl who lives in our neighborhood, like someone we could know. Somehow their lives intersected and they ended up forever connected in this gruesome way. But on the day those photos were taken of them, they were smiling.
kathystevenson.com 