Addendum to April 4, 2025 (Parts I & II)
I've been to the edge/ And I stood and looked down
Thoughts on two crimes tangentially related to the themes of two previous posts omitted due to length.
You don’t look for dark and macabre shit— it just finds you. You tried to lighten the mood with some Shane Gillis clips, only for him to describe the true crime documentary kick he’s been on. Gillis first tells his podcast co-host Matt McCusker about There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, about the 2009 Taconic State Parkway Crash, then expounds on multiple videos about the Hinterkaifeck murders in another.
You did some research and came to your own conclusions:
HINTEKAIFECK: Sick and Twisted BROTHERS GRIMM
It doesn’t exactly tug on the heartstrings the way the Taconic crash does, although that’s entirely subjective, and your heart goes out to the victims of course for how horrible their murders were and because there were children involved, but what you’re trying to get across is how creepy it is, how it overrides that sympathetic impulse, if only slightly, intensified by it’s brutality, the setting of the woods, the unexplained occurrences.
The entire scenario gives German Existential, like Heidegger hiking through the Black Forest, full of folklore and darkness. Lederhosen-clad, calabash in hand, and off to his cabin there— who knows what’s in that pipe— blissing out in the the living silence, daydreaming over the edge and into the abyss.
There’s a German-esque efficiency to the murders, a sense of organization in the way the first four each walked out to their deaths in the barn, how they were stacked upon each other after, something the Germans are known for (organization and a sense of meticulousness, not murder.) (Well,…).
Six people— a family and their maid— were found murdered on a Bavarian farmstead in 1922. Two of the victims were children, aged 7 and 2. They were found by neighbors— four in the barn, two in the main house.
There aren’t enough answers to fit each question. Like with any scenario, it demands of others to ask why, the most obvious question but which leaves a gaping hole, nearly everything around it filled in and answered— so a framed hole in the wall, one dug in with a mattock.
The crime is among Germany’s longest unsolved, and thus one rife with theories involving war, love affairs, brothers in crime, ghosts. The order of events just as they’re described sound wicked, like a bad dream; fabled and cursed. Something that’s whispered in your ear and that recurs when you’re home alone or standing in front of a mirror in the dark. A predominant theory involves the husband of the family’s widowed daughter, believed to have been killed fighting in the First World War, returning to the farmstead to discover the son his wife conceived and bore after his departure: her father’s son, her brother and her son. A man’s assailed pride knows a peculiar wrath, stoked beyond rationality. A psychological break is over the edge of the abyss, there’s no going back after that, or perhaps its more like looking into the abyss, which always looks back, and claims whatever it sees, the way ink seeps into paper or blood seizes cotton, and what seems to follow is delirium and instant realization, a simultaneous release.
TACONIC: Don’t Know Where You’re Going/ Only Know Just Where You Been
There must have been a some kind of psychological break; a stark realization or acceptance that changed everything.
The shortest and simplest answer is that she was drunk, that she was an alcoholic who was super high functioning and the habit caught up to her to devastating effect. But we’ll never know for sure.
Diane Schuler wasn’t a teetotaler, but she was also the furthest thing from an alcoholic, swears everyone who knew her. Diane was responsible, Diane was always in control. If anyone had it together, it was Diane.
Alcoholics are reckless, and everyone thinks crazy shit when they’re high,
(not that one needs weed to think unfathomable shit, or any other substances. We just pretend that we do, or that we don’t think those thoughts at all, that way we don’t have to take responsibility for them)
but this… there are only guesses as to why she did it. How, we have some idea.
The documentary delves into Schuler’s upbringing, where at a young age her mother abandoned her family, allegedly running off with a neighbor, and somehow that trauma contributed to her driving 70 mph into oncoming traffic and killing seven people, including herself and her own daughter. Maybe, but highly unlikely.
Her autopsy revealed high amounts of alcohol and THC in her system: that day she was batting .19, the equivalent of ten drinks. Her autopsy did not show any signs of stroke or aneurysm, or anything else aside from the vodka and weed that could have impaired her judgement (her vision) to miss all those WRONG WAY signs and oncoming vehicles.
There was something bothering her, she couldn’t shake it. Tried to calm down and went overboard— there was something she had to get through. Made it almost two miles going the wrong way.
Whatever it was, she saw it, or began to see it with a severe and pessimistic clarity. Looked at her own life and in the rearview at the lives awaiting her three nieces, son, and daughter, as she saw them. Maybe her childhood did catch up to her.
It’s a peculiar accident in that it took deliberate action for it to materialize. The mind lends itself to conjecture at those heights of empathy, getting loopy from the lack rational plausibility. (Read “Herman Wouk is Still Alive”.)
Another interesting theory is she had a tooth abscess and the pain drove her into a state of delirium. From a toothache. She did initially walk into a gas station looking for ibuprofen, using the Absolut Vodka that investigators later found in smolders at the scene, the one she’d brought from the camper she stayed at that weekend, where her husband swore she didn’t drink, and then only sometimes, until she was someone who had a cocktail, and even a puff of a joint, every once in a while.
There’ve been a lot of comments about how Schuler’s husband Daniel was in denial to the point it was ridiculous, and that he gradually revealed that Diane not only did drink but had been drinking that weekend. Ultimately, he came off (to you) as someone who was ignorant— clueless and unaware and didn’t know much because he didn’t need to know, and that extended to who he was married to.
It’s hard not to, one would think, if you’re living with them and are actually married, which means in love, and at the very least aware of one another. But Diane wore the pants: she was making six-figures at Cablevision and ran their lives. That much was obvious. They played a phone conversation where Daniel was asked the name on the phone bill, and he couldn’t answer. He didn’t know because he didn’t pay it— he didn’t even see it. It could have been under her maiden name or an alias for all he knew. She was always in control, absolute in her desire that it always be one way, and he let her, perhaps that’s why they got married and why their marriage worked, if that can even be said.
The families of the victims in the other vehicle (three adult men from Westchester) sued Daniel for wrongful death and launched what essentially became an Mexican stand-off of litigation with the aura of a minor media circus. His lawyer, disgraced attorney Dominic Barbara, friend of Howard Stern, the kind of lawyer who lets you know you’re guilty by the cut of his suit and his veneers poking through his lips, to his credit, advised Daniel against his public statements and crusade to prove Diane was not driving under the influence, which was when people dismissed him and moved on.
Well, those who can. Not the first responders (the crash is the worst in Westchester County history); not the families. Not the parents who lost all their kids, or the children and siblings who lost fathers and brothers.
“I’ve gotten to the point where I forgive Diane Schuler,” said the daughter of one of the men in the other car. “I pray for her like I pray for my father and my brother— and those children. The family that’s still alive I’m still working on.”
Before the crash shrunk to a cold spot in small talk, it was everywhere. Larry King interviewed Daniel and his sister-in-law (his brother’s wife) as they were pushing for a second autopsy same results). It became like an urban legend, just how drastic and incomprehensible it was, but plausible because it did happen, so it could happen to you. People love a spectacle, and there are those who are paid to feed it to them. It’s interesting when people die; Eat your dirty laundry.
Death’s horsemen is the tongue, which carries its name, and has not been to a single place on this earth were it was not already known. But where it goes it grows, and the human fixation on death compels us to stories like these that frighten and disturb. The news is a Paul Revere of the possible that rides yelling through the mind, preying on our fears of death— death in a spectacular and gruesome fashion— and of pain.
“What is it with reporters?” asks Brian Cox in the tub. “[They] take one person’s tragedy and force the world to experience it.. spread it like a sickness.”
Why such over-the-top violence? Why these people? Why at all?
It’s the senselessness of these deaths that emphasize their brutality to lasting effect.
Why is perhaps the most damaging of the five W’s and of questions in general, because there is rarely a straightforward, tangible answer. It does not always lead to meaning, or fit any meaning we have for it. Meaning is man’s search for why, for purpose, for answers, to place blame, to channel experience, to ascribe misfortune to, a goal, a carrot on a stick.