I can’t do justice to this story, which makes the Murdaugh thing – three hours away in the same great state of South Carolina – look like small potatoes. Pretty girl done shot her ex in cold blood — and I mean like really cold like she just sat there at her trial and it took the jury less than two hours to convict her cuz in broad daylight with her coroner bf she jest drove over to the victim’s place took out her gun and blasted and blasted til he were daid daid daid. Fuck the four kids they had together.

What makes this one amazing is the killer and her bf work as coroners/body transporters! They make a living driving all over Horry County picking up people after they die. (Headline, Independent: “A coroner and his mistress met while moving corpses.”) Body calls, death calls, removal technicians, the language is rich indeed and so is the aspect of the thing where after they did the guy they just shoved his bloody bod in the same van in which they trundle all over town all day waiting for the body call. Expertly they bound him but instead of the funeral home or hospital they dumped him in the Little Pee Dee River. Could that name be any cuter?

A lot more good shit in this one. I can’t keep up with it, as I said, and W Faulkner and A Rice are dead, and J Berendt’s 85, and who else is equal to this multilayered deep south squalidity? The trial “consisted solely of witnesses called by the prosecution,” cuz why bother man. Her daughter trembled and wept through the most grotesque testimony about one’s mother – any mother – imaginable, and then wrote this eloquent victim statement.

This crime has torn apart my family, others’ families and friends beyond any measure. My siblings and I have all suffered greatly, not only from the loss of my father but the loss of a mother, too. This trial and getting up on the stand has been one of the most heartbreaking and painful things I’ve ever had to do. It has also been one of the most relieving and rewarding things. I finally got to say what has been sitting in my brain the last four and a half years.

Sitting in my brain is very good.