11.17.2010
Along with many others, I’ve been intrigued with the LA Times story that broke about a month ago where two women found the remains of two babies in an old trunk stored in a building in McArthur Park since the 1930s.[1]
I’ve been a fan of mystery books since a child, though I don’t read as much of them as I did back then. When I discovered Nancy Drew as a kid, I thought I’d found heaven. Then came the Hardy Boys, though, of course, they weren’t as awesome as Nancy Drew.
So this LA Times story inspired the latent sleuth in me and I began to write various stories in my head about what may have happened. I’m waiting for Hollywood to announce a movie about this and, when that happens, I will be greatly disappointed that I wasn’t hired to write the screenplay. Not that I could write a mystery-themed screenplay but, hey, I’m allowed to be disappointed, even if it’s unwarranted and has no grounding in reality. But, I digress.
In Tuesday's paper, detectives revealed that they found a cousin of the trunk’s owner, a woman named Janet Barrie, and the DNA matched to that of the babies confirming that they were, indeed, hers. Ms. Barrie’s life is a mystery particularly when she moved to LA from Canada where she trained as a nurse. She came out in the 1920s, lived with some women for a while in a building in McArthur Park and eventually became a live-in caretaker for a dying wife of a dentist living in the same building. During that time, Ms. Barrie’s sister speculated that she was having an affair with the dentist and would marry him once the wife died, which is what happened.
Although it may never be known if the dentist fathered the babies because no descendents or family members of his are on record, I think that it’s pretty easy to fill in the blanks.
Back then it was uncouth for an unmarried woman to have kids much less have them with a married man. It’s unclear if the children were aborted but it doesn’t look like they were killed once born. Whatever the case, it makes me think about how much pressure society places on people because it says how one should or shouldn’t live one’s life. This mentality has been a part of humanity’s history and it never ceases to amaze me how much of our actions and beliefs it dictates. I’m certainly guilty of this too, though I wish I could say I wasn’t. But society’s demand for women to be married in order to have kids and be accepted by it may have caused two babies their life. Makes me wonder…
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