"I've Been A Small Town Cop For 13 Years. One Case Still Scares Me"

Being a cop in a small town in Minnesota probably isn’t the most exciting career there is, but it’s not bad either. It’s actually a relatively peaceful and safe line of work compared to being in law enforcement in one of the big cities like New York or L.A. There’s only around 10,000 people in the town where I live. It’s way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of open farmland, and the only real crime that ever occurs is pretty minor stuff. The occasional rowdy rednecks getting into a fistfight at one of the three bars downtown, teenage vandals, petty theft, the odd drunk driver, a case of disorderly conduct here and there, the rare breaking and entering. That sort of thing.

The only real serious stuff I’ve ever had to deal with is a couple cases of domestic violence and assault and battery, but even that’s pretty typical, I guess, and it doesn’t happen very often. Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one case that still haunts me, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Like I was saying, I live in a pretty peaceful little town. Boring, some would even say. The kind of rural, out-of-the-way farming community you’ve probably driven through on the highway yourself on the way to someplace more interesting without as much as a second thought or a glance back. The kind of place where nothing out of the ordinary ever happens, you’ve probably thought. And for the most part, you’d be right. But there’s one case I can’t get out of my mind. One case that still makes my blood run cold whenever I think about it. One case I can’t explain, no matter how hard I try to rationalize it to myself.

What happened to the old Garrity woman seven years ago.

I’d been a police officer for five years when it happened, in the early spring of 2014. There were only five cops on the entire town police force: me, my partner Jerry, Pete and Vance who both worked night patrol, and the police chief. Plus Karen, an older woman who was a retired librarian and worked part-time as the dispatcher. The police department was located in the town municipal building and consisted of two offices, one for the chief and one for the rest of us to share, and three jail cells in the rear. And the three of them were never all occupied at the same time.

It was an overcast, rainy afternoon in late March or early April. Me and Jerry were in our cruiser on a routine patrol around town when Karen’s voice came over the radio telling us there was a possible 10-82 in progress at the Garrity house on Turner Road. For those of you who aren’t in the know, 10-82 is police code for a burglary. We acknowledged, then changed directions, heading for the Garrity home.

I wasn’t unduly concerned about the call. I already had a pretty good idea who had made it. Eileen Garrity was an elderly widow who lived in a run-down farmhouse on the outskirts of town. She was probably around 65 or 70 years old and had lived alone since her husband had died of a stroke three years before. They had two adult children, but they both lived out of town and never visited. Since her husband’s death, she had developed something of a reputation for being eccentric, to put it nicely, or crazy, to put it not so nicely.

She was a shut-in who rarely left her home and had her groceries delivered once a week. Basically a crazy cat lady, minus the cats. The reason she was considered crazy was because she’d become pretty flaky and paranoid since being widowed and had called the police department on multiple occasions for everything from hearing intruders moving around in her attic to seeing UFOs in her cornfield. There were probably at least a dozen others too. All her calls turned out to be false alarms, of course. The burglars she claimed were hiding in her attic turned out to be a pair of raccoons that had slipped in under the roof, and the UFOs were probably just jets flying overhead from the National Guard base 50 miles west.

Me and Jerry and Pete and Vance had all visited her home before during our respective shifts. We never got frustrated with her or gave her a hard time about it, and we usually indulged her, inspecting her house and property to calm her nerves. She’d relax, thank us, we’d leave, and the process would repeat itself in a couple weeks or a couple months. Honestly, our infrequent trips to her house were probably the only real highlight of what was a rather dull and unexciting job.

When we told the chief about Mrs. Garrity’s latest emergency — Bigfoot was sneaking around her yard or there was a giant anaconda lurking in the basement — he would just shake his head sadly. When Vance and Pete were the ones who had to deal with her, they’d tell us all about her most recent ordeal when me and Jerry saw them at the end of their shifts and the start of ours. They’d usually smirk in a mean-spirited way, and Pete would twirl his finger next to his temple before they left. Jerry and I just felt sorry for the old woman. It couldn’t have been easy for a frail, nervous, lonely woman living all alone in that old crumbling house with no friends or close family.

I suspected she might be getting senile, or maybe entering the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia. We worried about her living there by herself, almost a mile from the nearest neighbor. If her health suddenly turned bad or she had an accident and couldn’t call for help, well, there wasn’t really much we could do about it. A couple times I looked up the numbers of her daughters and son and tried calling them about possibly placing her in an assisted living home or a mental health facility, but the one time I managed to reach her son, as I was explaining his mother’s situation to him, he interrupted me by telling me he was too busy at the moment and would call me back, then abruptly ended the call. He never did call me back. From then on they always happened to be unavailable and never answered any of the voicemail messages I left them.

So Jerry and me turned onto Turner Road and drove up to Mrs. Garrity’s house on that gray, rainy late spring day, certain that the old woman was just overreacting yet again to something relatively minor and her imagination was just playing tricks on her. She was waiting for us outside on her porch when we pulled to a stop.

I’ll never forget how she looked. It shocked me. She’d already been a thin, frail woman the other times we’d been out there, but we hadn’t seen her in probably a couple months since her last false emergency, and she had changed drastically since then. Now she was gaunt, almost emaciated. Her cheeks were hollow and there were dark rings around her bloodshot, sunken eyes. Her gray hair was tangled and didn’t look like it had been washed in days, maybe weeks, and the dress she was wearing was wrinkled and dirty.

Her physical appearance was alarming enough, but there was also something about the way she was staring at both of us with those dark, doll-like eyes that seemed to look at us, through us, and past us all at once. It reminded me of old photos I’d seen of American soldiers in Vietnam. The blank, expressionless, shell-shocked look of someone who’d been through more horror than any ordinary person should have to endure.

Me and Jerry exchanged a shocked look, then got out and approached the old woman. “What, uh, seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Garrity?” Jerry asked her amiably, trying to keep his voice nonchalant.

“There’s something in my house,” she told us in a flat, toneless voice. She was shaking slightly, a woman on the verge of total physical and mental exhaustion. The way she phrased it — not someone, but something — made me raise my eyebrow.

“Well, you just wait here and we’ll go have a look and make sure it’s safe, okay?” I told her, trying not to sound too patronizing. I looked at Jerry and nodded. We drew our pistols and stepped past Mrs. Garrity, cautiously entering the house.

We did a routine sweep of the first floor, guns leveled, then headed upstairs. It only took about five minutes to check out the house. We’d done it so many times before we had the layout down pat, and there was no sign of any intruders or evidence of a breaking and entering. But I saw plenty of other things that disturbed me deeply.

For one thing, the place was a total mess. The house was already pretty decrepit, but Mrs. Garrity had still taken pride in how clean she kept it, and it always had been spick and span on our earlier visits. Now dirty dishes were stacked high in the kitchen sink, the counters were dirty, and trash and dirty laundry littered the floors. I also noticed that Mrs. Garrity’s pillow and blankets were lying rumpled on the couch in the living room. The surface of the coffee table in front of it was cluttered with half-drunk cups of coffee, open containers of food, a Bible, and a rosary. It looked like she’d been eating and sleeping in the living room for some time.

When we went upstairs, sure enough, the bed in Mrs. Garrity’s room was bare and the room itself looked like it had been vacant for quite a while. There was also something in the living room that really alarmed me. Leaning in one corner was an old double-barreled shotgun that had probably belonged to her late husband. Jerry picked it up, broke it open, and found two spent shells in the chamber. He took one out, sniffed it, then told me the gun had been fired very recently.