My Child, My Dear Dove (RP Post)
- Memories of Family -
The digger grabbed the fingers of his mud-encrusted black leather gloves with his teeth and gave them a sudden tug. For just an instant he thought he might swoon from the overpowering stench of Goblin rocket fuel and raw sewage that seemed to seep from every crevice in the dank cellar.
He choked back his own bile as he stuffed the glove into the breast pocket of his Stormwind Guard issued waders. The moment that the foul air touched his bare skin, a chill ran down the digger's spine and he suddenly felt somehow unclean. He picked up the metal sieve filled with mud and gave it a shake. Thick black slime oozed from the bottom of the pan, leaving behind, what? A pebble, a tiny shard of glass, a tattered piece of cloth....and....what was that? That small white fragment there in the mud?
His imagination was getting the best of him, the digger told himself.
He needed to focus. This was a crime scene. Nothing more. He was a professional and his job was to collect evidence, however small, bag it, tag it, and send it upstairs. He wasn't there to make judgments.
It was up to the detectives to put it all together and decide what it all meant. They would decide whether the evidence showed that this was the house of an innocent working man or whether Eddie Gathvo, the Farmer with the dashing smile, really was the monster he was accused of being.
It was up to them to determine whether Gathvo's daughter had been telling the truth when she accused her father of seducing her and then conspiring with her to murder six members of their family. They would decide whether it was true that together father and daughter had hacked up their family -- Gathvo's first wife, his daughter's mother, his own son and young daughter -- and dissolved the pieces of their bodies in an acrid bath of acid. All the digger had to do was pick up the pieces.
He reached into the filth at the bottom of his sieve and tentatively probed the tiny white fragment with his finger. It was exactly what he had thought it was.
It was a human tooth. There beside it was a splinter of bone, a piece of a kneecap, a small bit of human flesh and beside that, a chunk of human skull.
At first, the case hadn't look like much, a fairly routine complaint. Five years earlier by a young woman named Kalli Gathvo, the mousy then 25-year-old daughter of a wayward farmer, a quiet but diligent woman who spent her days working in the map department of the Royal Library.
Her whole demeanor made her easy to ignore. A lackluster young woman, blank unblinking eyes behind nondescript spectacles, she seemed to be the kind of person who wandered around the fringes of life, always overlooked. Perhaps she had issues with her father. Women like that often do, authorities thought. She certainly had seemed a little odd when she first walked into the Guard's headquarters claiming that her father had turned her into his sex slave.
But she also seemed sincere when she told police that she was worried.
She said that four years earlier her father had sent her and her older brother on holiday to the coast for several days. When they returned, she told Guardsmen at the time, her stepmother, Edith Gathvo and her sister, Andrea, had vanished.
"Don't look for them," she recalled her father telling her on her return. "They're not coming back."
But in the end, her complaints went nowhere. Investigators had looked into the case back then without much enthusiasm - and had come up empty. There was no evidence to support her claim that she had been sexually assaulted. Nor was there any evidence that her father's parsonage was, as the news couriers would later call it "A House of Horrors." Investigators had spoken briefly with the farmer and he had offered a perfectly plausible explanation for his wife and daughter's absence. "They have returned to Lordaeron." he told authorities. He had even offered them proof that the missing family members were alive and well in Eastern Kingdom. He had a stack of letters purportedly written by them.
His explanation certainly seemed satisfactory. The investigators thanked the disheveled man for his time and moved on, closing the case, confident that the whole thing was just a bizarre tale spun by a frustrated spinster, filled with resentment for her respectable father.
Certainly, Eddie Gathvo might have seemed a little eccentric, but he was a mere farmer.
Of course, that was back in the days before the Guard had been shaken the foundation of all the institutions in Stormwind. Times had changed, authorities thought. Maybe it was time to revisit the Gathvo case one more time.
Silas Rothan was starting to get frustrated. Rothan had been listening almost sympathetically to Kalli Gathvo's rambling statements for hours but it seemed to the veteran prosecutor that something was missing. The newspapers were already reporting her bizarre allegations against her father. "I am ashamed that my father might turn out to be one of the worst serial killers in history," she told a Belgian newspaper. But there were great gaps in her halting tale.
Rothan gently suggested to her that, perhaps, a walk through the courtyard of the Keep might clear her head. And so she strolled, her hard-soled boots clicking on the blocks in the courtyard, while a few paces behind her, guards kept close watch on her. The ornate and terribly civilized facades, the carefully tended plantings, the sculptures that adorned this corner of the courtyard all seemed so calming and orderly, a far cry from the squalid industrial lane where Gathvo had lived with her father, a place that reeked of sewage and slaughterhouses. If she had to summon the ghosts of slaughtered family members, though, perhaps this was a good place to rally them.
A half an hour later, she returned, leaned forward and softly said to Rothan, "I am going to tell you how we killed five people."
Her tale was one of imaginable horror, a grand case of murder and sexual ownership and depravity at the house on Merry Lane in the rundown quarter of Stormwind known as Old Town. She talked of how her father, a hearty farmer, had seduced her when she was just 13, had his way with her is perhaps a more accurate phrase, and how she felt she had no way of escaping him. "I had no way out," she would later tell authorities. Her will had been totally subjected to his.
By the time she was finished talking, Kalli Gathvo had implicated her father and herself in five homicides, all members of their family. The body parts that would later be pulled from the mud in Gathvo's murky basement, the slabs of unidentified "meat" pulled from his freezer, would offer an even more chilling glimpse into the horror.
She spelled out in graphic detail how she and her father, described by a fellow neighbor as "unfathomable and mysterious," with a constant smirk, "a little smile" had killed their victims. Some were shot. Others bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Then they hacked their victims to pieces and stuffed their remains in small linen bags, dumping some at a nearby wagon, dipping others into a vat brimming with an acid cleanser that ate all the meat from the bones and then dissolved the bones themselves.
The full scope of the horror was beyond comprehension, Rothan thought. Much of it, as Rothan would soon learn, would be beyond the powers of the Stormwind authorities to prove. But there was certainly enough evidence, what with the viscera that had been collected at Gathvo's house and with the damning statement of his daughter, to prove that Eddie Gathvo was a deranged killer in a hemmed blue suit.
The news callers in Stormwind would later call him "The Diabolical Wheat-man," but there was nothing in Eddie Gathvo's calm and quiet demeanor that would indicate the depth of his potential for depravity. By all appearances, the family was the picture of propriety. But behind the closed doors of one of those houses, the picture was quite different. The family was a study in dysfunction.
Kalli, it now appears, had become at least one of the objects of Gathvo's rapacious sexual appetite. She would later tell authorities, she was just 13 years old when her father began sexually abusing her. She would describe herself as his sex slave, according to reports.
Kalli later admitted that she tried to bludgeon her sister, but her sister managed to escape and fled. Somehow, she managed to remain out of Gathvo's reach. Other members of Gathvo's family were not so lucky.
For years, Kalli had been silent. Silent about her own abuse, silent about the unnatural series of killings on which she and her father had embarked. Of course, she had tried to tell the story, or at least part of it, before. But no one had been listening. So she simply remained silent.
They were listening now. For two days that fall, she talked. It was, she told authorities, at her father's behest that she killed her own mother. Together, between ten years, they killed her stepmother and three of her siblings.
But as she sat in Rothan's office on that October afternoon, she was anything but silent. She told the police how she and her father chopped up the corpses using kitchen knives and axes before dissolving the remains. She told them how she had eviscerated one of her own stepsisters with her own hands. "It was my task to take out the organs while Gathvo was cutting up the remains," she said. "I just used a kitchen knife . . . you have to exercise strength, you know. It's not that easy."
The only real sensation she could recall, she would later testify was this: "It felt cold."
The digger grabbed the fingers of his mud-encrusted black leather gloves with his teeth and gave them a sudden tug. For just an instant he thought he might swoon from the overpowering stench of Goblin rocket fuel and raw sewage that seemed to seep from every crevice in the dank cellar.
He choked back his own bile as he stuffed the glove into the breast pocket of his Stormwind Guard issued waders. The moment that the foul air touched his bare skin, a chill ran down the digger's spine and he suddenly felt somehow unclean. He picked up the metal sieve filled with mud and gave it a shake. Thick black slime oozed from the bottom of the pan, leaving behind, what? A pebble, a tiny shard of glass, a tattered piece of cloth....and....what was that? That small white fragment there in the mud?
His imagination was getting the best of him, the digger told himself.
He needed to focus. This was a crime scene. Nothing more. He was a professional and his job was to collect evidence, however small, bag it, tag it, and send it upstairs. He wasn't there to make judgments.
It was up to the detectives to put it all together and decide what it all meant. They would decide whether the evidence showed that this was the house of an innocent working man or whether Eddie Gathvo, the Farmer with the dashing smile, really was the monster he was accused of being.
It was up to them to determine whether Gathvo's daughter had been telling the truth when she accused her father of seducing her and then conspiring with her to murder six members of their family. They would decide whether it was true that together father and daughter had hacked up their family -- Gathvo's first wife, his daughter's mother, his own son and young daughter -- and dissolved the pieces of their bodies in an acrid bath of acid. All the digger had to do was pick up the pieces.
He reached into the filth at the bottom of his sieve and tentatively probed the tiny white fragment with his finger. It was exactly what he had thought it was.
It was a human tooth. There beside it was a splinter of bone, a piece of a kneecap, a small bit of human flesh and beside that, a chunk of human skull.
At first, the case hadn't look like much, a fairly routine complaint. Five years earlier by a young woman named Kalli Gathvo, the mousy then 25-year-old daughter of a wayward farmer, a quiet but diligent woman who spent her days working in the map department of the Royal Library.
Her whole demeanor made her easy to ignore. A lackluster young woman, blank unblinking eyes behind nondescript spectacles, she seemed to be the kind of person who wandered around the fringes of life, always overlooked. Perhaps she had issues with her father. Women like that often do, authorities thought. She certainly had seemed a little odd when she first walked into the Guard's headquarters claiming that her father had turned her into his sex slave.
But she also seemed sincere when she told police that she was worried.
She said that four years earlier her father had sent her and her older brother on holiday to the coast for several days. When they returned, she told Guardsmen at the time, her stepmother, Edith Gathvo and her sister, Andrea, had vanished.
"Don't look for them," she recalled her father telling her on her return. "They're not coming back."
But in the end, her complaints went nowhere. Investigators had looked into the case back then without much enthusiasm - and had come up empty. There was no evidence to support her claim that she had been sexually assaulted. Nor was there any evidence that her father's parsonage was, as the news couriers would later call it "A House of Horrors." Investigators had spoken briefly with the farmer and he had offered a perfectly plausible explanation for his wife and daughter's absence. "They have returned to Lordaeron." he told authorities. He had even offered them proof that the missing family members were alive and well in Eastern Kingdom. He had a stack of letters purportedly written by them.
His explanation certainly seemed satisfactory. The investigators thanked the disheveled man for his time and moved on, closing the case, confident that the whole thing was just a bizarre tale spun by a frustrated spinster, filled with resentment for her respectable father.
Certainly, Eddie Gathvo might have seemed a little eccentric, but he was a mere farmer.
Of course, that was back in the days before the Guard had been shaken the foundation of all the institutions in Stormwind. Times had changed, authorities thought. Maybe it was time to revisit the Gathvo case one more time.
Silas Rothan was starting to get frustrated. Rothan had been listening almost sympathetically to Kalli Gathvo's rambling statements for hours but it seemed to the veteran prosecutor that something was missing. The newspapers were already reporting her bizarre allegations against her father. "I am ashamed that my father might turn out to be one of the worst serial killers in history," she told a Belgian newspaper. But there were great gaps in her halting tale.
Rothan gently suggested to her that, perhaps, a walk through the courtyard of the Keep might clear her head. And so she strolled, her hard-soled boots clicking on the blocks in the courtyard, while a few paces behind her, guards kept close watch on her. The ornate and terribly civilized facades, the carefully tended plantings, the sculptures that adorned this corner of the courtyard all seemed so calming and orderly, a far cry from the squalid industrial lane where Gathvo had lived with her father, a place that reeked of sewage and slaughterhouses. If she had to summon the ghosts of slaughtered family members, though, perhaps this was a good place to rally them.
A half an hour later, she returned, leaned forward and softly said to Rothan, "I am going to tell you how we killed five people."
Her tale was one of imaginable horror, a grand case of murder and sexual ownership and depravity at the house on Merry Lane in the rundown quarter of Stormwind known as Old Town. She talked of how her father, a hearty farmer, had seduced her when she was just 13, had his way with her is perhaps a more accurate phrase, and how she felt she had no way of escaping him. "I had no way out," she would later tell authorities. Her will had been totally subjected to his.
By the time she was finished talking, Kalli Gathvo had implicated her father and herself in five homicides, all members of their family. The body parts that would later be pulled from the mud in Gathvo's murky basement, the slabs of unidentified "meat" pulled from his freezer, would offer an even more chilling glimpse into the horror.
She spelled out in graphic detail how she and her father, described by a fellow neighbor as "unfathomable and mysterious," with a constant smirk, "a little smile" had killed their victims. Some were shot. Others bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Then they hacked their victims to pieces and stuffed their remains in small linen bags, dumping some at a nearby wagon, dipping others into a vat brimming with an acid cleanser that ate all the meat from the bones and then dissolved the bones themselves.
The full scope of the horror was beyond comprehension, Rothan thought. Much of it, as Rothan would soon learn, would be beyond the powers of the Stormwind authorities to prove. But there was certainly enough evidence, what with the viscera that had been collected at Gathvo's house and with the damning statement of his daughter, to prove that Eddie Gathvo was a deranged killer in a hemmed blue suit.
The news callers in Stormwind would later call him "The Diabolical Wheat-man," but there was nothing in Eddie Gathvo's calm and quiet demeanor that would indicate the depth of his potential for depravity. By all appearances, the family was the picture of propriety. But behind the closed doors of one of those houses, the picture was quite different. The family was a study in dysfunction.
Kalli, it now appears, had become at least one of the objects of Gathvo's rapacious sexual appetite. She would later tell authorities, she was just 13 years old when her father began sexually abusing her. She would describe herself as his sex slave, according to reports.
Kalli later admitted that she tried to bludgeon her sister, but her sister managed to escape and fled. Somehow, she managed to remain out of Gathvo's reach. Other members of Gathvo's family were not so lucky.
For years, Kalli had been silent. Silent about her own abuse, silent about the unnatural series of killings on which she and her father had embarked. Of course, she had tried to tell the story, or at least part of it, before. But no one had been listening. So she simply remained silent.
They were listening now. For two days that fall, she talked. It was, she told authorities, at her father's behest that she killed her own mother. Together, between ten years, they killed her stepmother and three of her siblings.
But as she sat in Rothan's office on that October afternoon, she was anything but silent. She told the police how she and her father chopped up the corpses using kitchen knives and axes before dissolving the remains. She told them how she had eviscerated one of her own stepsisters with her own hands. "It was my task to take out the organs while Gathvo was cutting up the remains," she said. "I just used a kitchen knife . . . you have to exercise strength, you know. It's not that easy."
The only real sensation she could recall, she would later testify was this: "It felt cold."