Page 63 of Jealous of the Clouds

True Crime Audio Presents: The Case of the Unsolved Hate Crime

(Opening Credits and intro music)

Bailey Anderson, Host: It’s been a year since Shondell Kade committed suicide in my apartment. She put an end to a years-long reign of misery and terror both she and her brother Joshua caused, as listeners to this podcast can attest.

Family dysfunction and abuse can cause such twisted pain and wreak such havoc on any lives they touch. At the end of the podcast and online, I will leave some resources for domestic abuse and how to cope with familial problems. It’s not easy and I now see both Shondell and Joshua as victims as well as perpetrators, their lethal actions spurred by neglect and abuse.

And, in a way, I’m glad they’re both gone, rather than in prison. I don’t know if even prison could have cured their misery as I’m skeptical of the system’s ability to rehabilitate anyone. But that issue is for another podcast.

And, although we’ve moved on to the case of the missing college women in Oxford, Ohio, I have to pause and reflect how much that tragic and sad death affected me. Dark, bloody, and horrible, I liken it to the ashes out of which the mythological phoenix rises.

From their deaths and those of innocent people around them, I salvage good. I claim wholeness and a chance to meet heartache with warmth, compassion, kindness—and rebirth.

I salvage love, which is a commodity I believe Josh and his sister searched for all their lives and tragically, because of their own demons, never found.

But I did, listeners. Ted Cornish and I probably have the least likely “meet cute” romance of any couple on the planet.

But murder and mayhem brought us together and, for that, both of us are grateful.

We hope we’ve learned something from the fear and despair our crossing paths with the Kades caused us. We’ve learned to have compassion for even the most wretched and the most evil-seeming. We’ve learned, gradually, to trust again, to believe in the inherent worth and goodness of most people. We’ve learned to forgive, if only for our own benefit.

And we’ve learned love is possible.

Love is everything.

For now, we’re contemplating moving in together soon and, who knows, wedding bells may ring for us in the near future.

*

Ted taps me on the shoulder and when I look, he signals me to stop recording.

He’s smiling, eyes bright. It’s been a long journey for him, coming back to joy, trusting love again. Many nightmares have claimed our nights together. When Ted wakes screaming, we’re both glad we have the other for comfort, to banish the demons that will most likely always haunt us.

But those nights have been tempered with sweet intimacy and caring.

Sometimes the strangest things bring two people together.

“Really? Wedding bells?” He teases. “This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

I stand and take him in my arms. “I should have mentioned it you first.”

“Ya think?” He laughs.

Impulsively, I drop to one knee and take his hand. “Ted Cornish, will you do me the great honor of being my husband?”

He takes a while to respond, looking away, blinking back tears. After a while, when I’m really nervous he’ll say he has to think about it, or worse, no, he says, “Of course I will.” He kisses me and looks like he’s about to say something more, but then closes his mouth.

I like to think he was about to say, “Love wins.”