On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Read Free Page A

together, unable to move— starving, dehydrated, injured from their interrogations, dying.
    Ladin led me to one of the torture chambers. The floor was checkered with tile, and the walls were mottled and dirty. A battered bed frame sat in the center of the room; shackles and chains lay on the bed. Underneath the bed was a huge dried stain of blood that had pooled there from countless victims. The room was left just as it was found when S21 finally fell in 1979. The last victim, tortured to death as the Vietnamese were entering Phnom Penh, was discovered here and photographed. The gruesome photo now hangs over the bed. It shows a mangled man lying in this bed before me, his head caved in, his throat slit, blood everywhere, a rooster standing on the body picking at the corpse. I left the room quickly.
    The phenomenon of this torture prison is a testament to human depravity, because the vast majority of the men, women, and children who were brought here had done absolutely nothing wrong and were as mystified by their imprisonment as you or I would be if someone dragged us out of bed tonight and charged us with bogus crimes. Hearsay, suspicion, and paranoia led the Khmer Rouge’s Security Office, Central Committee, and Ministry of Defense to descend violently upon innocent farmers, teachers, engineers, students, workers, and whole families, accusing them of being enemies of the revolution. 16
    My guide, Ladin, explained to me that she was ten years old when the Khmer Rouge came to her home, forcibly removed her father and brother, and sent her to work in the fields from sunrise to sunset until she almost starved to death. She never saw her father and brother again and still has no knowledge of their fate. I wondered how she could come to this wretched place day after day and offer tours of events that had shred her own life. Perhaps walking these terrible hallways had some paradoxical therapeutic effect on her. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand any of it.
UNTHINKABLE
     
    One aspect of the monster concept seems to be the breakdown of intelligibility. An action or a person or a thing is monstrous when it can’t be processed by our rationality, and also when we cannot readily relate to the emotional range involved. We know what it’s like to hate, for example, but when we designate a monstrous hate, we are acknowledging that it is off our chart. We don’t have to go all the way to Pol Pot’s Cambodia to find modern monsters. Many more are very close to home.
    On May 11, 2005, thirty-four-year-old Jerry Hobbs was charged in Lake County, Illinois, with the brutal murder of his eight-year-old daughter, Laura, and her best friend, Krystal Tobias. In a videotaped confession, Hobbs described killing the girls after he argued with his daughter in Beulah Park in Zion, Illinois. Hobbs, who had only recently been released from a Texas jail for an unrelated 2001 aggravated assault (chasing a guy with a chainsaw), believed that his daughter had stolen money from her mother. According to him, Laura was supposed to be grounded, but she had gone to the park to play and Hobbs followed her there. When his daughter argued with him and refused to come home, he said, he attacked her. According to his confession, Laura’s friend produced a small “potato knife” to defend herself, but Hobbs wrestled it away from her and used it to stab the children repeatedly until they were dead.
    This story achieved national attention in the spring of 2005, and Hobbs is currently awaiting trial in Lake County. He now claims that his confession was coerced by police and that he is innocent. In addition, many of the facts of his story don’t add up. There doesn’t appear to be physical evidence linking him to the crime, and the defense claims there is some physical evidence linking a different, unnamed person to the crime scene.
    The principal investigator for Hobbs’s defense team is my brother, David Asma, one of the investigators for the Lake