Summersville Slasher

October 23rd 2009 started out as any other regular fall morning; it was a beautiful crisp day with just the right number of leaves blowing in the wind. We were setting the table getting ready for breakfast and just before 10 a.m. there was a loud knock on the door, but before we could answer three policemen came barging in with a warrant to search our home. They had accusations that none of us could believe. They were accusing my father of being the deranged serial killer who had been petrifying our small town of Summersville, West Virginia since the summer of 1983. It was just ridiculous enough to be true. Then again, they could be making the whole thing up. It was just so hard to imagine my father, the respectable banker who never left the house without a suit and tie, could be the Summersville Slasher. There was no way. But all the signs were there, he had been easily agitated since the last body had been discovered in the lake behind our house, I mean how irresponsible and senseless.

A little back story on my father, he was born Leonard Allen Baushwich Junior, a small baby with curly blonde hair and an upturned nose born in Mulberry, New Jersey in 1960 to Marie and Leonard Baushwich. He was an only child and his parents both died in a horrific car accident when he was around 7 years old which he barely survived himself, as soon as he recovered, he was placed into the foster care system, and everything was downhill from there. In the eleven years he was in foster care he had a total of 15 foster families, most of which abused him and treated him like he was just a paycheck to them. He was bullied, locked in a dark basement as punishment and wasn’t properly taken care of so he stayed sick a lot of the time. He was forced to defend for himself once he aged out, but he made the best of it and got a job saved up and rented a small apartment. From there he put himself through school and has been working for the bank ever since. He’d always been a generous and tender man, never raised his voice, always made it home for dinner and made time for family vacations. Nobody saw this coming. But all the evidence found in the search verified that we were all deeply wrong about the man my father was, and as much as none of us wanted to acknowledge it, all the evidence pointed back to him. All those late nights at work and all the secretive walks in the middle of the night started to make sense. As sorry as I felt for my own family, I started to feel even more deeply agonizing sorrow for the families of the so many victims. There were so many victims. So many women who had families and children of their own, ripped from this world and he seemed to show no remorse.