Dear Zachary

"Why should I care how many people I have to kill? I can just make more in my tummy!"

The Order of the Stick #587

 

I would encourage you to find and watch the 2008 Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (in fact, don't even read that Wikipedia page if you want to avoid spoilers) despite normally finding true crime stories at once tedious and overly-dramatic. What's more, as it started as a home movie, so much of the documentary gets tied up in rhapsodizing and eulogizing that to a random disinterested asshole on the internet like myself it might drag. Might. If not for the considerable strength of the material itself. You may remember the apparently famous case (I didn't) but if the info's fresh to you it makes for an incredible story, gripping in the sheer absurdity yet perverse coherence of every new detail.

 

If you don't mind spoilers, a quick summary:

Woman reported for attempted suicide and threats of murdering a previous boyfriend, having birthed three children from previous relationships (and caring for none of them) and subject to eight(!) restraining orders against her lures and shoots her boyfriend to death in the U.S. after he tries to break up with her and flees to Canada, there giving birth to her victim's son while delaying her extradition proceedings for months after months. Despite signs of mental instability and violence while jailed, she is released with her shrink posting the bulk of her bail and the judge going so far as to instruct her on how to dodge the system. She is awarded custody of her child. She tries to frame yet another new boyfriend for her impending suicide then jumps into the sea with her offspring, to both their deaths.

The documentary itself focuses on the failings of early-2000s Canadian law, especially when it came to child protection, so instead try to think on how such a case reflects on our social priorities, starting and ending with the F-word.

 

1) Feminism

Among the literally hundreds of phone messages left to her last intended victim (after two dates) crops up the stock phrase "grow up and be a fucking man" at which point you realize she'd been pulling the same act quite likely her entire life on countless men. So reverse the polarity. In itself, letting criminals go free is not a gendered issue. But too many of the case's details sound even more absurd with genders reversed.

A man with eight restraining orders having traveled across the country to see his recently ex girlfriend, not being placed in custody when she turns up dead, shot by a pistol with a defect like the one he owns?

Highly paid and/or respectable shrinks and judges putting their careers (and half the price of a house) on the line to secure his release?

That man being handed an infant to care for???

The film rightly lingers on the judge's wording when releasing an accused murderer without even paying her full bail: "your crime was specific in nature" and therefore not a threat to anyone else. A murderer who merely murdered her boyfriend did not worry a female judge. #KillAllMen, 2003 edition. Reverse the polarity. Take a media circus like the OJ Simpson trial ten years prior. Even in so farcical a context, stating that a man likely having murdered his ex-wife and her friend was "specific in nature" and therefore not indicative of threat would've sounded insane.

Now pile on with "grow up and be a fucking woman" and take care of me, rando' chick I went on two dates with.

You don't get to pretend that decades' worth of political lobbying to frame women as victims of men and entitled to retribution against men did not frame both this murderer's personal sense of entitlement and the knight in shining armor attitude of the professionals and officials charging to her rescue.

And we've had two more decades of intensified such lobbying since.

2) Religion

Specifically theodicy. At one point a family friend states she has not prayed since Zachary died. Well, she's hardly alone in suffering a crisis of faith when something bad happens. First off, the existence of the supernatural is not mediated by personal trauma, but a matter of rational analysis. Hopes of supernatural aid were true or false regardless of my grandparents' Alzheimer's and it will continue to be true or false when my parents or I myself begin to succumb to it.

Did you as a viewer suffer a "there is no god" twinge watching the documentary's events unfold? But remember, babies die constantly, some in far worse circumstances, starving slowly, agonizingly for months on end, or raped, skinned and disemboweled while their parents are forced to watch awaiting the same treatment. Bluntly put, tragedy-mediated crises of faith demonstrate not moral conscience but a lack of object permanence.

This is not a religious matter. Perfectly mundane evidence amenable to cold-blooded rational analysis right down here on Earth could have warned against the handling of the psychopath in question's case.

What's more, religion served both sides, providing the murderer leverage to try to wheedle her way into her victim's family's new circle of friends via their church.

3) Government

Let's face it, nobody would have given a shit if the case had not led to the death of a reproductive female and infant, had not impacted the supply of wage slaves and cannon fodder for the use of the rich. Otherwise, misery is good, misery exhausts you and keeps you servile, interpersonal conflict keeps you too busy to speak out, and lawsuits feed more of your money into the system. All good.

The case, plus the grandparents' subsequent activism, did result in a Canadian law to protect children. Fine as far as that goes but how far does that go? Zachary might've then lived to adolescence when he can be thrown in prison to be tortured to death on some sadistic bitch's rape claim. Or play Bluto to her other Popeye. Or kill himself when he makes the mistake of ejaculating into a woman who then uses the baby as pretext to enslave him for the rest of his life. "Grow up and be a fucking man" indeed.

It also bears mentioning that well-intentioned as they are, laws to protect children in custody disputes are easily abused when paired with the presumption of male guilt and female innocence which pervades our society. All a woman need do is claim her ex was violent, or less, that she felt threatened. No bullet-riddled corpse or smoking gun necessary. And that brings us back to the question of sex.

 

For one thing, it's hard not to see this prize specimen of womanhood as not just cuckoo but a cuckoo, a brood parasite embodying both the habit of leaving her young to be cared for by others and the habit of abusing their protectiveness to be cared for herself as an invasive chick would. For another, multiple witnesses reiterated the same observation in different ways: the murderer had a tendency to over-act. One name for that in biology is supernormal stimulus. If your target reacts to some sight/sound/whatever, then presenting it a flashier or louder version of the same will allow you to control its reactions. The classic example involves giving birds fake eggs painted the same as their species' own, but brighter! flashier! bigger! and watching them actually favor the fakes over the eggs they've just laid. Fascinating as the broader topic may be, let's consider one deliberately ignored aspect of it.

Babies are cute. We are preprogrammed to care for the cute thing. Otherwise we'd throttle the reeking little megaphones after the two-thousandth random fit of crying and our species would die out. But babies lack the manipulative understanding to truly weaponize their cuteness: when to coo and when to cry, when to feign interest with their adorable oversized eyes and exactly when to throw a tantrum for maximum effect. But women, who retain so many more babyish features than men, have had a bit of time to work out advantageous deployment strategies, not to mention centuries and millennia's worth of industries like fashion and cosmetics increasingly adept at maximizing subliminal manipulation. The grandparents in the documentary note at one point their son and grandson's murderer did have a knack for knowing when to play nice. Their recorded phone conversations undeniably show her playing up the wounded doe act, the quavering, choked voice, the drawling neediness, the unspoken yet evident insistence that she's just... not... getting... enough... and if you want infantile tantrums, well, try hundreds of messages on your phone after the second date.

 

Most of Dear Zachary concerns the victimized family's consternation at government's refusal to prioritize the well-being of a baby over the demands of a woman. You can certainly argue economics or the legal system's inertia, etc., but consider also those in power are susceptible to manipulation of their instincts. Femininity in our species is not merely more heavily neotenized than masculinity, but a host of supernormal stimuli demanding care, favoritism and sacrifice with every well-practiced dash of eyeshadow, with every endlessly rehearsed pout or whine and carefully timed fit of manic screeching or crying jags. Women are in many ways more adept in leveraging childlike behavior for sympathy than children themselves are.

More human than human.