An essay

Below is a post from another blog that is public but which I use mostly as a diary, so I don't tell people about it. I got such interesting responses from the original post that I decided to put it here, and see what it generates. I'm especially interested if anyone has ideas about how I should use the information that came to me after I posted this essay.

WHY I BECAME A JOURNALIST

Michael Condetti attended my elementary school, in the second grade when I was in third grade. He went missing in November 1960 and was found dead three days later _ beaten, molested and smothered.

This incident had a profound effect on me, and not just for the obvious reasons. The horrific crime against a schoolmate is only one aspect of how this changed my life. The reaction of adults around me, and the coverage of the crime in The Washington Post, made a me decide to become a journalist.

Recently, The Post and other newspapers have made their archives available online. One can search on Google and hits will list the first sentences of an article. Purchasing an article, usually for just a few dollars, will produce a microfiche copy straight from the printed paper.

These archives are incomplete, and the microfiche copies sometimes are hard to read. But this gave me a chance, after more than 40 years, to compare my memory of the events to the reality, as reported in The Post.

I don't remember how I first became aware that Michael had gone missing; I did not know him. It probably was by reading The Post. I am certain, however, that neither the teachers nor my parents said anything. I didn't have any friends in elementary school, so I didn't hear other children talking about, if, in fact, they did discuss it.

My memory is that what I viewed as a conspiracy of silence was being conducted among the adults so as not to frighten the children. My mother, when I discussed this with her recently, said it was not a conspiracy so much as just how things were done in the early 1960s.

Today, of course, in addition to intense media coverage, teachers would take the opportunity to remind children not to talk to strangers or go anywhere with them. Counselors would be brought in to help the children deal with the fear.

But at a tiny, poor, Catholic elementary school in northeast Washington in November 1960, it was routine to keep secrets. Nothing was said, or so I remembered.

But I knew Michael had gone missing. I was a precocious child, the eldest of two college professors. I could read well before I got to school. I read the paper at the breakfast table every day.

It was in that paper, The Post, that I read about my schoolmate going missing. I saw my school's name in the paper, in the A section.

I was terrified. Some monster was in my neighborhood – Michael lived a half mile from me – snatching children off the street.

Yet, my 8-year-old mind knew that because no adults were talking about it, I couldn't talk to my parents about it, either. My mother, to this day, is at a loss as to why she didn't talk to me about the incident. She, too, must have been terrified, like all the other parents.

So I spent this time more frightened than normal (I was a very fearful child), running the five blocks to school, lest some monster grab me. Actually, at this point, all the mothers started walking their children to school. So I guess adults did change so things, but nobody talked to me about what was going on. And I couldn't talk to anybody, so I was just scared.

I found the unfettered truth one place – in The Washington Post.

Amazingly, my parents, who were quite proud of my reading ability, did not connect my reading The Post with what was going on. They seemed not to realize that I was reading about my school. My mother says it just didn't occur to them, or they didn't connect the dots because they were so worried.

Even after Michael's body was found, the teachers and my parents said nothing about the horrific way he was killed. This remaining preplexing to me, because his killer was at large, and would not be caught for months. Why didn't the teachers and my parents warn us not to go anywhere with strangers?

That's what Michael had done. He had gone on a bus from D.C. to nearby Maryland with a strange man who approached him in a five-and-dime that I had been in a few times with my mother.

I have no memory of finding out that Michael was dead. I have no memory of an announcement being made at school or reading it in The Post. I don't remember what I felt.

But apparently, there was discussion in the school, or at least in Michael's class, of his horrific end, according to The Post:

At Michael's school, Sister Alexadrine, the Superior, said the whole school was shocked by the tragedy and Michael's class ... visited the church in a body yesterday to pray for the family.

I do remember the entire school going to his funeral at the church next to the school. I don't remember the sermon, though, or whether any mention was of how Michael died. The Post reported that the monsignor urged Michael's killer to surrender, but I don't remember that.

I don't remember his parents or siblings or much except his casket sitting in the main aisle. I was terrified that I'd have to walk past it, perhaps even touch it, but communicants walked along the end aisles to receive the Eucharist.

One would think I would have remembered a lot more, because, according to The Post, it was quite a circus:

And, outside of the church was a swarm of detectives, including two who took newsreel photos of the people entering and leaving the church and those who remained outside. Also in the crowd were FBI agents.

I have no memory of the events that followed. It was months before a suspect was arrested, and there was a trial which generated a lot of publicity, judging from The Post clips. Remember, though, this was decades before cable TV and the 24-hour TV news cycle.

Perhaps because the trial was far removed from D.C. -- it was held in the federal courthouse in Baltimore because Michael had been kidnapped in D.C. and killed in Maryland – that I can recall nothing of it. Also, most trials tend to be very boring and filled with legalisms – something I could not have understood nor likely cared about enough to read daily in The Post.

But in reading about the trial now, it's fascinating from a historical perspective. This was decades before DNA science, and years before Miranda v. Arizona. Many of the things that happened inside and outside the courtroom would not be allowed today, and it's horrifying to read what passed for justice more than 40 years ago. I cannot make an informed judgment from the clips whether the man tried indeed committed the crime.

Ultimately, Joseph Alvey was convicted of killing Michael, but, because the jury had to unanimously agree on the death penalty and did not, he escaped execution. I cannot find any stories that detail what happened to Alvey. Did he die in prison? Was he eventually freed? Was there an appeal? Was he real killer?

My mother claims to have little memory of the incident from beginning to end, and the few things she remembers are wrong. She has a memory of being told that a stranger went to St. Anthony and said he was a friend of Michael's parents and was allowed to take the boy from school. The kidnapping occurred after school, at a nearby five-and-dime. My mother also claims that Michael was in my brother's class, but in 1960, my 5-year-old brother was in kindergarten at a neighborhood public school.

I'm perplexed by my lack of remembering any discussion of Michael's death and reinforced warnings not to have anything to do with strangers. I recall being made aware of his death, but not of the details. My memory is just, well, he died, and that's all the students were told.

I'm not saying parents and teachers should have given us gruesome details. The fact that I read them and was so terrified that I ran to school every day confirms that. But why, when this incident clearly had such a profound effect on my, do I have a strong, gut, lifelong belief that adults in my life told me next to nothing about what had happened?

In my child's mind's eye, adults around me, while motivated by nothing but a desire to protect me, kept critical information from me – information that I still managed to obtain from The Washington Post.

I had hoped that getting the clips would clear things up for me. There was so little discussion over the years about this horrific event that I sometimes wondered if it had happened at all. I believed for years in a conspiracy among the adults, when it appears that in the early 1960s, things simply were done differently.

Granted, my parents were big on keeping secrets. They always claimed that they would answer any question I asked, and that was true. But children don't always know what questions to ask. And in this case, I had an overwhelming sense that no adults were willing or able to talk to children about this, so I never asked.

The Post, however, gave me the information the adults in my life did not. Even in my 8-year-old brain, I knew that this was something powerful. I wanted, from then, to become a journalist.

Followup to the original post:

A few months after I posted this, I received e-mails from two former neighbors of the Condettis. They had been talking about the crime and how it changed Brookland from (what they perceived as) a safe neighborhood to a dangerous place. One did a Google search on Michael's name and my blog was one of the hits. We exchanged a few e-mails, with them asking where I lived in Brookland.

About two weeks after that, I received an e-mail from Chris Condetti, Michael's brother. He had heard (I don't know how) about my blog and wanted to read what I wrote about Michael's murder. I forwarded him the essay.

Chris wrote back that Joseph Alvey, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing little Michael, died in prison. Chris also wrote, "I prefer talking more about (Michael's) life rather than his death."

So what is my next step? I feel that after all these years of wondering about this incident, I've been given a chance to clarify so much. But what? I want to write more, but about what?