I was surprised, and deeply saddened, to learn, just recently, that Mary died of cancer on July 6, 2020. She was only 58. In death as in life for over 20-years since 1997, she was defined and vilified as a “rapist” and “pedophile” in myriads of articles and stories and headlines in sundry organs of a mass media that cast and turned her into the most infamous and despised woman sex criminal in US and world history.:

Media coverage was a fusillade of half-truths, lies, canards, and distortions and inversions of reality both in regard to the perversion of language -for obvious anatomical reasons, women can’t commit rape in the pure and literal sense of the word and a pedophile is a man (or male adolescent) with an sexual fixation on and obsession with prepubescent children- and the actions and motives of the “rapist” and her “victim” in that she was not even the aggressor and initiator and seductress. But, with some rare exceptions, she was accused of seducing and “raping” a 12-year-old “child” and student who was actually 13 and the aggressor and initiator of their illicit relationship. He also had more sexual partners, at age 13, than did Mary at age 33. I discuss all of this in more detail in the preceding articles.

Thus, on the left, right, and center, a general consensus was that she was a “rapists” and “pedophile” guilty of a heinous crime who deserved to be jailed and imprisoned for 8-years if not longer -during a decade, the 1990s, in which the average-time served for murder was less than 6-years and the average time-served for all violent crimes, including rape and homicide, was 4-years, also the decade of the Wichita massacre and the Knoxville horror, “unspeakable” atrocities that received little or no national media coverage- and forced to register for life as a uniquely deviant and dangerous criminal.

All this for a gentle, loving, sensitive, intelligent women, a first-offender guilty of a nonviolent and objectively victimless crime, a women who never committed a violent crime in her life and was not a “threat to society” or to anyone nor even a danger to re-offend by having sex with another young man under statutory age.

For those who don’t believe in miracles and the supernatural, mind/body dualism, the soul and afterlife, death is oblivion, nothingness, the cessation of consciousness, the end of pain and suffering, liberation and surcease from the hell that is other people, the annihilation of a lifetime of memories in which for most people the bad and worse far exceed the good and better.

For Mary, the memories that died when she died include being arrested, her wrists in handcuffs with her arms behind her back, stuffed into the back of a police car and driven to jail where she was “booked” and strip-searched, her vagina and rectum violated with fingers in rubber gloves in the search for “contraband” and enslaved in a cage, probably with one or two other women, or perhaps a large holding cell, until she was released on bail; then indicted for “child rape,” prosecuted, convicted, and enslaved for 6-months in jail and then 7 1/2 years in prison violating a “no-contact order” by seeing her “victim” and having sex with him again and becoming pregnant a second time (she gave birth to both infants while incarcerated), separated for almost a decade of her life from her 6-children and the “victim” with whom she was “madly in love,” literally, exactly why I don’t. With whom and why a woman “falls in love” is one of the eternal mysteries of life -but I fear and suspect that her madness was induced at least in part if not largely by white guilt and the race of her “victim” and paramour.

And after her release from prison, she endured who knows how many years of quasi-totalitarian post-incarceration surveillance, including electronic parole-monitoring with an ankle-tether/ “bracelet” that she could never remove,
and a lifetime of public sex-offender registration -and, just as bad or even worse, demonization and vilification for well over 20-years as a “rapist,” “child rapist,” “child molester,” “child sex abuser,” “predator,” “pedophile..” and worse.

If there is a soul and afterlife, and she’s in heaven, as a Christian who believes that Jesus was/is the “son of God” who was born of a virgin and was resurrected after his death by crucifixion, she’ll be tormented by all these and other memories forever, for millions and billions and trillions of years and for all eternity. But death is like falling asleep, with no dreams, and not waking -and thus, blessedly, her torment is over, memories of her “hell on earth” are gone forever.