You Can Never Ever BE Too Cautious!
Whether You Meet Someone in a Bar, or on the Internet
You Can Never Ever Be Too Cautious!
By: Jeaneane Walrath
I have always been one of the lucky ones; lucky in the respect that I am capable of learning from other people’s mistakes, or misfortune. I say that because people often hear, or know the right thing to do in any given situation, but sadly delude themselves into thinking “that it will never happen to me.” It is true; bad things do happen to good people, and for some inexplicable reason bad things happen to good people when they least expect them.
I learned about how to be cautious when I was in Southern California visiting my Aunt and Uncle for the summer of my senior high school year. In my real life I lived in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, where I was to return to school in the fall. I had been enjoying my Californian vacation for a month. My Uncle was gone that evening; he was a fireman and worked twenty-four, forty-eight; which meant twenty-four hours at the station and forty-eight hours off. My Aunt and I were on our own, except for my little cousins, and they were already in bed for the night. My aunt and I were close in age, and were more friends, than aunt and niece. We were getting ready to settle in with an authentic Mexican Dinner, and an evening of chick-flicks, when I heard it.
It was a news break about a body of a girl my age that they had found at the public garbage dump; she had been found naked, badly mutilated, she had been raped and stabbed thirteen times. The reporter stated that it was suspected that she had fallen victim to a serial killer that had been terrorizing Coeds across the United Sates. “Oh my God, Patty” I said, “That can’t be! What was the name they said?” “I think they said Roxanne Phillips.” “I know a Roxanne Phillips. She goes to school with me. Where did they say they found her?” “It can’t be your friend; it would be too much of a coincidence. The girl they found was found close to Los Angeles.” “I know” I said. “The Roxie Phillips that I know is up in Milwaukie, Oregon, it can’t be her, she would have told me if she was coming to California.” The news break was over, I hadn’t seen the picture of the girl, and I was dying to hear the story again. I made it through the movie, with my mind drifting in horror to the news bulletin, and the possibility of a friend of mine being brutally murdered.
Eleven o’clock finally came around; there it was again, headline news; it was true. It was my friend Roxanne who had been murdered. She too, had come to Southern California, her parents had split up right after I had left for California, and Roxie had come to Salinas to stay with her mother for the summer, after which she was going to go back to Milwaukie and live with her father in until graduation.
This is the part of the story that I can not stress enough. This is the part that has to do with being cautious about dating. Don’t ever assume that just because you have gone out with someone, one, two, even three times that the person you are dating is safe, and who they say they are. Roxanne made that fatal mistake. She and a girlfriend had met two young men at a popular dance club; one of them was John Norman Collins. They danced and partied all night, the men were both complete gentlemen, both nice looking, athletic clean cut men that told them that they were on break from college. The girls went out with them the next night, too. They all seemed to hit it off. Roxanne never told her mother about the boy she was dating, she figured it was too, soon, besides he would be going back east, back to Michigan to school after the summer was over, and she was going back home to Oregon, the relationship wasn’t going to go anywhere; what was the point of telling her mother?
Roxie Phillips disappeared on June 30th; a week and a half after she had arrived in Salinas California, it was the last time anyone had seen her alive. She had gone out to mail a letter for her mother. She only had to walk a block away to the mailbox on the corner. John Norman Collins had been seen cruising the neighborhood that day, looking for her. He had stopped and talked briefly to her friend that lived down the street. He had coerced Roxie into getting into his car. She had told her mother earlier that day that she might go visit with her girlfriend for a while. Collins must have offered her a ride. Her body was found on July 13th in a pile of poison oak, in a garbage Dump; her red belt wrapped tight around her neck. Roxanne had been brutally murdered by John Norman Collins, known as the Coed Killer. John Norman Collins raped and mutilated no less than fifteen women in a two year period. He was apprehended in August that year, two weeks after Roxie’s body had been found.
THIS STORY IS ENTIRELY TRUE.
Mistakes that Roxanne made:
- She was not familiar with the area – she had just recently moved there
- She met someone in a bar who was not from the area but from 3200 miles away
- No one knew anything about him – other than what he told them
- She did not tell anyone about him – especially her mother
- She left with him without letting anyone know where she was going
- She did not investigate this person
- She was not up to date with the current crimes, the rash of coed serial murders – her guard was down
Look for the upcoming article on what to do when you start dating someone new.
