Passages taken from the letters of Henry Tyler to his step-brother

Monday, 7th July.

The first time I saw her I was sure she couldn’t have done what they said she had done.

Moira Bucker was a plump woman who wore huge oval glasses and had graying hair that she kept tied back. Her body showed a few signs that indicated that she may have once been desirable, but now she had drooping breasts, widened hips and a face made bearable only by the layers of make-up coating it

When she sat down opposite me, it seemed as if she had no idea what was happening to her and when I asked her, her single reply was; “Yes. I did.”

Perhaps I should explain exactly what Moira Bucker is charged with, though you’ve probably already read about it in the newspapers. Moira Bucker is charged with murdering and then eating her husband. The police found pieces of him in the garbage along with some meatless bones.

When I asked her plainly if she had eaten him, she answered without flinching, a guiltless;

“Yes I did.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, he had a heart attack while we were having dinner and I...”

“You ate him.”

“Yes.”

“Let me get this straight. The two of you were having dinner and he had a heart attack?”

“Yes.”

“Then, you ate him. Was the food you were having bad or was it something...”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic!” she snapped at me as though I she was scolding a little child. “You see, my husband had recently gained a lot of weight. Actually, not recently but in the last few years. Anyway, I’d always wondered how human meat would taste and when I saw him in that chair, lifeless; the temptation was too great.”

“But why didn’t you call the police?”

“Do you think they would have let me eat him?”

“But this is your husband we’re talking about. He might have lived if you had called an ambulance.”

“Listen Mr. Tyler,” she began with an intensity in her gaze. “My husband was over sixty pounds overweight, smoked like an old Volkswagen and drank excessively. There was no chance of him surviving that heart attack. And besides that -- I can tell you this because you are my lawyer -- I wouldn’t really want him to come back to life.

“You see Mr. Tyler, my husband and I didn’t talk to each other much anymore and we hadn’t slept in the same bed for months...years actually. Everyone knows that he was sleeping with that aerobics instructor down at the gym. He said they were just good friends. I’ll tell you what were his friends. Her twenty year old breasts and her tight little cunt!”

At this point her voice had reached a peak volume and for the first time I could imagine her killing her husband.

“So. Did you kill him?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“But you’re glad he’s dead.”

“Yes.”

I wrote down a few details.

“Did he ever beat you?”

“No.”

“Hit you, shout at you, rape you...”

Her husband’s genitals had been found in the garbage.

“I just told you that we hadn’t had any sex in years and I know that when you see a person like me you don’t think I need any. I don’t really, but I do need someone to hold me from time to time. Everyone does. But he preferred that stupid bitch at the gym.

“I understand.”

I looked up at her reddened visage, fingering the back of the pen I had been using to take notes.

“I can support all of this in court except for one thing,” I said, even though I wondered at my ability to defend her effectively with the explanation she had given me. “Why exactly did you eat him?”
The room was silent. I could hear only the throaty sound of her regular exhalations.

“Mr. Tyler...” she began. “Have you ever thought of what it would be like to eat human meat?”

“Not really,” I replied.

“Well I have, or rather I had. All the time actually. I’m a self confessed glutton and I admit I could eat almost anything. But the one thing I’ve always wanted to eat is my husband.

“When we first were married he had been well built and I used to love the way it felt to knead his muscles and rub him up. As our marriage progressed this gradually became the desire to bite him, slice him with a knife and taste his fresh blood on my lips.”

At this point I think I should point out that every lawyer says that they yearn for interesting cases, but I don’t think they really mean it. I for example, before this case, had been bogged down with case after case of drug junkies and petty thieves. I had often hoped for something -- anything -- to liven up my job.

The Moira Bucker case was not what I had in mind.

For one, she cannot plead insanity because these days a person has to hear voices, drool perpetually or have had a troubled childhood to be labeled ‘insane’.  To make things worse, since they won’t be able to write her off as insane the jury will never accept the strange logic behind her eating of her husband and will immediately presume murder.

If the prosecutor finds out about her and her husband’s bad relationship (and he probably will) this will be seen as motive and that will sum everything up in the minds of the jury.

Motive. Action. Effect.

That’s what people expect these days.

“There must be a motive for every crime unless the perpetrator is insane.”

I personally disagree with this philosophy. If one takes Moira Bucker as an example, she isn’t really insane. Her thought patterns are sound however much one disagrees with them. I’ve been to a few sanitariums and Moira isn’t even comparable to some of the screaming loonies I’ve seen at the Shaw Institute; though in truth I believe that, ‘Lunatics are made in asylums’; but that’s another story altogether.

In truth I’m just worried because Moira isn’t passably insane and I don’t know how to go about defending her.

Thursday, 17th July.

I haven’t written in almost two weeks because I just haven’t had the time. Right now it’s 3:00 a.m. I am writing now because I just had a disturbing dream. In the dream I was being led by a black-clad female guard to Moira’s prison cell.

When we reached the cell block’s she left me and I entered. I walked through a clean and well-kept cell block until I reached her cell, which was the third on the right. When I reached her cell I looked into its pitch black interior.

“Moira!” I called. “Moira.”

A light came on and I peered into the now dimly lit cell. She was standing in the cell's center in front of a ceramic bathtub that was filled with blood. Within it I could see the naked body of the prosecutor floating. His left eyeball had been scooped out and placed in his mouth and most of his chest area was missing, leaving a gaping cavity.

“Hello Mr. Tyler,” she said gleefully. “Why don’t you come here and join me? This is fun!”

She climbed into the bathtub, dislodging the lifeless body of the prosecutor, then she dipped her hands in the blood and splashed a spray over the front of her dress.

A crimson stream trickled down between her breasts and vanished behind a flower embroidered bodice.

“Why don’t you come here and have a bite!”

She lifted the prosecutor’s thigh bone, from which bites had already been taken

“Wouldn’t you like a bite?”

She spoke with the high pitched, goading, register that people use when addressing a child.

I didn’t respond. Watching her. Motionless.

“No Mr. Tyler? Then how about a taste of me?”

She stepped out of the tub, the distended bottom of her foot meeting the floor with a slap. She began walking forward, unbuttoning the front of her dress as she did so, revealing a canyonesque cleavage drenched in fresh blood.

Now, I’ve already told you that Moira isn’t exactly what you would call ‘attractive’ but dreams do have a tendency to improve people’s appearances.

“Come on. Wouldn’t you like to lap this up?”

Her whole upper body was bare now and she was running her palms over the pliant flesh. I walked forward, my body moving of its own accord and my hands reached through the bars.

“This is what I’ve wanted to do to you ever since I met you.”  She pulled me even closer to her then stuck her tongue through the steel bars and licked the side of my face.  "You taste so gooooood!” she whispered sensually and brought her lips once more to the side of my face. She smiled and then bit into my cheek.

I screamed.

I tried to struggle but her hold was too strong. Her bare upper body jiggled as she laughed at my futile attempts to escape.

“The defense's objections are overruled!”

Her teeth arced towards my neck and that was when I woke up.

I left the bed sweating and I was glad I hadn’t woken up my wife. She isn’t taking my involvement in the Moira Bucker case well.
I came straight here and began writing.

I suppose I should explain how the trial is going. The prosecution has brought forward its witnesses; Mr. Bucker’s girlfriend and some of their friends who had seen the couple fight.

The witness who did the most damage to my defense was one of the policemen who had been at the site when they had found out about Mr. Bucker’s death. He described to the jury very vividly how the police hadn’t found anything in the Bucker’s house other than her husband’s bones and a portion of his arm and belly that she hadn’t finished eating.

In the dustbin they found his penis, testicles and head, strangely enough, shaved of all its hair. The entire room had reeked of death and in the policeman’s own words;

“Only a psycho would stay in such a place!”

Oh yes, I forgot to mention, she had stayed in the house for two days after he had died, not telling anyone of his death and living off his corpse.

Her response when questioned about the body parts in the dustbin only made things worse. “You can’t eat a whole person you know. It’s like when you eat a chicken or cow, no-one eats the brain or the eyes. And as for the P-E-N-I-S...”she spelt the word out as if embarrassed to say it in public. “...It would be simply vulgar to eat something like that.”

That’s the second thing she said that crippled what little defense I had created for her. The first was when in response to the question; ‘why did you eat your husband?’ she answered,

“Well, it was better than letting him get eaten by worms!”

And as for that line in my dream. “The defenses objections are overruled!” That followed my objection to Mr. Bucker’s girlfriend’s testimony in which she described Moira threatening to kill them both.

I believe that just because one threatens to kill someone (especially when that person is sleeping with one’s spouse), that doesn’t imply that they will actually do it.

The judge didn’t agree.

In defense, I called a few people who knew Moira to give testimony of her good nature and her incapability to perform an act such as murder. The revulsion of most of them to the fact that she had eaten her husband in the first place didn’t help matters.

Tomorrow we will give our closing statements and then the verdict will be given.

Friday 18th July

I would say that the closing statements were what totally finished us. I spoke first and made a futile attempt to explain that cannibalism was not a crime and murder was separate from it. I also tried in vain to arouse jury sympathy to her husband’s neglect. Maybe it would have gone better if he had beaten her!
The prosecution skillfully worked on the jury’s natural stigma towards cannibalism by eloquently regurgitating the policeman’s testimony concerning the findings in the garbage and the fact that she’d actually taken the time to shave his scalp. (By the way, I didn’t explain that, she said that she had needed to use the hair as spices when cooking).

Quite naturally the verdict was ‘guilty’ and she was given a life sentence, thus ending the most controversial case of my career.

Saturday, 26th July.

I visited Moira today. I guess I had to because she’s only the second client of mine to receive a life sentence and I felt obligated to see her..

She seemed pleased to see me and we talked.

After ten minutes of speaking of irrelevancies I asked her the one question everyone wants to ask those who have eaten human meat.

“What was it like?”

She was silent for a few seconds and I thought she didn’t understand the question. But then she spoke.

“Mr. Tyler,” she started. Her voice was gentle and strikingly earnest as though she were telling me a long kept secret. “Have you ever been truly, ‘hungry’?”

“Yes,” I answered though I did not fully understand what she meant.

“Not that teasing hunger you feel after missing two meals but I mean true insatiable hunger.”

“I guess so,” I replied, still unsure of what she was getting at.
“Well. All my life that’s how I felt. Hungry. That’s why I was a glutton and why no matter how much I ate I was never satisfied...” She said nothing for a few moments then spoke again. “But after eating my husband...the hunger passed.

“I wish now, that it had taken longer to chew each morsel of his flesh and I wish that they had only found me after I’d eaten his whole body. But they found me when they did and you know what, it was worth it.

“Prison life isn’t that bad. I’ve made a friend. She’s called Anita and she’s in for armed robbery. But even if it was a hell-hole in here I’d still do it over if I had the chance to go into the past and change things because now, I’ll never feel that hunger again.”
As she said this the look in her eyes was the same as it had been in my dream and perturbed, I left without saying anything more to her.

I went back home with her words in my mind, chilling me.
Once I had arrived I didn’t tell my wife where I had been. It was too strange to talk about and it would probably upset her.

She had made Irish Stew for supper.

I looked down at the plate and I didn’t feel like eating. The memories of Moira’s words were too fresh. I forced myself to eat a few forkfuls but each portion was a task to eat.

I looked at my wife. She hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t eating much. I felt my eyes drawn to the abundant symmetry of her breasts, her exposed neck and her creamy arms. I thought of taking a bite out them, maybe roasting them first, and then leisurely satiating my hunger as my teeth tore into her cooked flesh…

THE END