Returning to the Scene of the Crime (100 Years Earlier)

"The tribulations of the past few weeks have left me a truly broken man. Attending the funerals of my two most cherished friends was a heart-rending experience."
                        --Byron Case, from a fictionalized letter of   "27th December" to his friend "White", web-published fall 2000⁽¹⁾

"It sickens me that there are so many people desperate for recognition as a 'harrowed soul', that would take something as heartbreaking as death and transform it into a sick mockery, polluting names and legacies. . . I am proud to have no part of that."
                        --Byron Case, from a real email message, 2nd of May to Anastasia's family, sent in 1998⁽²⁾

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The following are a series of "letters" Byron Case created about three years after he murdered Anastasia, at a time when he apparently believed he would escape justice for his acts. There is a well-worn saying that "The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime"; in this case, Byron Case did so, not by physically making a pilgrimage to that infamous spot where he took Anastasia's life from her, but instead by creating a virtual (and fictional) history of the crime as a web story, setting it 100 years into the past, and (of course) changing key details to protect the guilty, placing with them photoshopped pictures of his principal victims.

In this factual homicide as fictional lierary experiment, Case writes in his first "letter" (to a correspondent known only as "White"; this was during his first web stylings as "Monochromatic", when he described everything in shades of black, gray, and of course, white) of his release from prison (his crime unspoken), mirroring somewhat his real-life release following his burglary arrest and arraignment; he writes of how he is is no longer the "reprehensible soul most remember" following his release.

In other letters, he talks about having been invited to live at Justin's home (something he tried to downplay during his trial), misstates both the time frame of Anastasia's and Justin's breakup (setting it as occuring in late September, when in reality their problems had begun over three months earlier) as well as his and Kelly's own difficulties (setting that as also starting in late September, when it in reality they began having problems a couple of months after the murder, and only became severe several months after that), and continues with his own personal fiction of the night of Amastasia's murder, all toward the end of buiding the final fiction of his own innocence. He represents himself here as an observer and reporter rather than as a participant.

In one of his letters, dated "21st of September", he mentions that he has become "quite adept at excuses", and that "This shall no doubt be my undoing some day", probably having no idea how prophetic those words would be in the real world.

When going to trial, Byron Case moved to have all his web page writings suppressed as evidence; there were many accounts and musings that he would have not wanted the jury to see besides this one, and one wonders how he would have tried to explain this one away, had the jury been able to see it.

Here is Byron Case's return to the (revised, edited, and virtualized) scene of his crime.