Free Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham Page B

interviewed Wayne Williams, who murdered 21 boys in Atlanta. I’ve studied human vampires who drank their victims’ blood in Dixie cups. These people are monsters. Cops know monsters personally. Their job requires them to spend hours interviewing them, empathizing with them, understanding what it is to lust for death. Most killers are not insane. They enjoy the crimes they commit.
    Surgeons, priests, and executioners know some of these things. Only cops know them all. Sometimes cops are the priests and hear appalling confessions. Instead of “forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” they listen to gruesome descriptions of murders, rapes, and child molestations. Often a cop will serve as a de facto surgeon, keeping someone alive until rescue comes. Occasionally, they’re executioners. Unlike fictional spies, they are indeed licensed to kill.
    When my dad was the sheriff of Jacksonville, he used to tell me, “Being a cop brings out the very best in people.” What he meant was that cops, more than any other group in society, get called on to supersede themselves and do something truly noble. The cops who were at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, may not all have been good cops. Yet when the moment came, they stepped up and did what had to be done, every man and woman of them, knowing they might not survive. They saved a lot of people, and many of them died trying. You can’t do that if your job is processing claim forms or pounding the cash register.
    Courage is the rarest of human qualities. The sort seen on athletic fields is artificial, and the type portrayed in the movies is phony. The real thing, displayed by ordinary people, is so fine and so magnificently human that it defies description and brings tears to your eyes. Many cops have the real thing, battle tested on the meanest streets in America. They are extraordinary people.

THE FREAK SHOW
     
    When I was a kid, you could buy your way into a freak show for a quarter. You saw Siamese twins, sword swallowers, bearded ladies, midgets, and fire-eaters. This satisfied a universal craving for the bizarre. Today it’s crass even to admit an interest in human freakishness. Cops, however, get to see things even the circus would never have displayed.
    For instance, cops in North Miami once found the upper half of a woman’s body, frozen solid, on an oceanfront condo balcony in 90-degree heat. How could that happen? The corpse was too big to have been in a refrigerator freezer. They finally figured out that the woman had stowed away in the wheel well of a jetliner and become frozen in the minus-50-degree cold of 35,000 feet. When the landing gear was lowered, her frozen corpse split in two and dropped out of the jet while it was coming in over the beach for a landing. Her legs probably fell out first, dropped into the ocean, and became shark snacks. The top half landed in the condo balcony.
    In Miami, cops chase voodoo doctors who dig up bodies from graves and sever corpses’ heads for use as fetishes. I once investigated a headless face. It belonged to a suicide who had placed a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It blew away the skull and brain, but left the face and the front of the skull intact. The face was peaceful; the eyes closed. I’ve often wondered whether the writer Ernest Hemingway looked like that when he capped himself in Idaho. Only the cops on the scene know.
    Of course, there’s cop comedy. One of my clients, after complex and clever motions made by yours truly, was released from jail and placed under house arrest with a radio transmitter ankle bracelet. After a few days, however, he just had to get out and get some love, so he sawed off the bracelet. Figuring he would fool the probation officers, he duct-taped the bracelet to the hind leg of his dog! When the cops showed up, they had a laugh, patted the dog, and waited until he returned to arrest him. Many times you wonder not only what these guys are thinking, but whether