Wild People I Have Known

This is the preamble to my  book, Wild Animals People I Have Known, which will be available at Amazon.com and Smashwords.com in paperback and e-book versions in May. It is a collection of true stories about murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals with whom I have come in contact.  I will be publishing select stories on this blog in the days and weeks to follow.

When I was about seven years old, I received a book titled, “Wild Animals I Have Known,” by Ernest Thompson Seaton.  It chronicled his interactions with several wild beasts that appeared to him to have human-like qualities, and who “adopted” him.

Also when I was about seven, we had a neighbour in the rural community in which I was raised who had befriended two deer in the early spring.  This sweet little lady hand-fed these animals for months.  By October, they willingly ate from her hand.  When hunting season started in November, she shot them and ate them.  So much for sweet old ladies and wild animals.

One day, I observed this little woman running past our place in pursuit of one of her sons, with a .22 gun in her hands.  I remember her words vividly:  “Come back, W, come back.  You know your father said I could shoot you.”

I later heard that her husband, in frustration with her constant complaints about the boy, had said to her, “Well, if you can’t take carer of him, why don’t you just shoot him?”  I doubt that it was meant literally.  I also doubt that she would have shot him, but you never know, do you?  That is part of the intricacy of the human being:  we have more than one layer and more than one aspect to who we are and how we think.

My childhood was typical of the rural environment in which I was raised.  Most of the people in our community were, if not dirt poor, then much closer to that condition than to affluence.  As I grew up and moved into the city, my environment did not change much for several years.  In that time, I met a great many people from a variety of backgrounds and income levels.  In my late twenties, I worked as a “Bouncer,” or security for two of the roughest bars in our city, even though I was far from a large and muscular person.  In subsequent years, I owned an investigative company that was involved in extensive corporate security issues.  It is largely on these acquaintances that I draw for this collection of true anecdotes about the more edgy side of life.

You will find accounts of twenty-eight people from that array of individuals, of which fourteen were involved in murders or manslaughters – some of them involved in more than one.  Three were killed by someone else, and eleven were involved in numerous violent crimes.  It also chronicle a handful of police officers who crossed that line of acceptable behaviour.  A couple lived significantly on the wrong side of the law.

The level of violence involved in each of these person’s lives is astonishing, and may seem appalling, but there is a constant across all but two of those individuals: an element of decency and humanity that is very rarely seen by the public.

The list of violent criminals with whom I have been associated includes those that have murdered children, raped women and young girls, shot at police officers, caved in another man’s skull with a metal bar,  robbed people at gunpoint, sold hard drugs, been involved in prostitution rings, and dozens of other major crimes.

I have written these stories, though, to show how, in even what most of us see as the worst of humanity, there is goodness, and that the world in which these people live and move is never as wicked as many of us assume, or the media portrays.  While you,, the reader, may see these people as wild animals, I see them as people, with depth, and character, along with exceptional flaws.  They are, for the most part, people who do not fully understand the rules of society, or do not wish to be part of that world.  So I have titled this book, Wild Animals People I Have Known, with apologies to Lord Thompson Seaton.