If you live in Knoxville, Tennessee, as I do, you have been unable to get away from a terrible double murder that took place in January, 2007. The details of the case are almost beyond comprehension; two happy, healthy college-age students out on a date together are carjacked by several career thugs. Over the next 24 hours, the young people, Chris Newsom and Channon Christian are held captive, blindfolded, tied up, sexually and physically tortured. They are both eventually murdered – separately – and the specific details of how each finally met their death after what they had already endured are the stuff of our deepest, darkest, most nightmarish fears.
At the time of the crime, I was working as the online producer at WBIR, in the newsroom. I took many of the first calls that came into the newsroom as the case unfolded. Within only 8-10 hours of the couple going missing, their parents and close friends had organized their own search parties, and were literally combing the areas that certain clues (cell phone signals, etc) told them their kids might have ended up. This was at a point where police were mostly uninvolved; the families reported that Chris and Channon had never come home that night, but there was no evidence yet of any crime, and let’s face it, even the most conscientious 20 year olds sometimes fail to come home at night. The police can’t and don’t begin treating every call they get from a worried parent as a possible crime until there is some further evidence of some kind that it is a crime.
We got a lot of calls like that in the newsroom each week, too – parents begging for some publicity for a teenage or young adult child whom they considered “missing,” but the authorities did not. Each time I took one of those calls, I imagined how I would feel if my own adolescent child had suddenly gone missing, but I couldn’t get anyone to help me try to find him. I always tried to be compassionate and gentle. I encouraged the parent on the line with me to continue communicating her worries to the police. I always felt really sad and kind of helpless after we would hang up.
And then, after Chris and Channon’s bodies were discovered, and as arrests were made, I spent the next year, before I changed jobs, writing numerous stories about the case. Because I had to repeatedly, over time write out the terrible words that described what was done to these two people, I found myself emotionally and mentally detaching from the reality of it. I just couldn’t “go there.” If I let myself really think deeply in an emotional way about the crimes, I knew I’d be unable to do my job.
But perhaps the biggest part of my emotionally dissociative state regarding writing about this case in the year after it happened stemmed from WHERE it happened. The small house where Channon Christian was held captive, raped, tortured and brutally murdered is very, very close to my own. In fact, I could walk there in probably 10 minutes. The railroad tracks where Chris Newsom’s burned, mutilated body was found by a railroad engineer on that cold January morning is almost as close. But that little corner of my part of town – even though it’s geographically close, is not one where I ever go. I don’t ever need to drive through it, and it’s not a place anyone would seek out as part of their daily constitutional. So even though I wrote on a regular basis about the address where the murders happened, I was somehow able to ignore the fact that this happened where it did, and basically pretend it wasn’t where it was.
But since leaving my newsroom job in August of 2008 – meaning that I no longer have to cover or write about the case – I have been increasingly unable to push away the realities of the whole thing. Over time, as the criminal prosecution of the accused has become the next phase in the story, and press coverage has continued at a very intense level, I’ve found myself “going there” emotionally, and it’s been hard.
One day found myself – almost without volition – driving by the small rental house (since torn down by the owners as a sign of compassion and respect for the Christian and Newsom families’ suffering) to see with my own eyes what I’d seen in photos so many times. I stopped a few houses away, unable to bring myself to get any closer to something that seemed so tangibly evil.
And that’s when it hit me; the thing I’d been unable or unwilling to think about previously was the fact that in those 24 hours in January of 2007, someone’s beloved children were being tortured and murdered in unspeakable ways while I happily went about my life in my own house only a few blocks away. I know it’s irrational, but I found myself feeling as if I should have known, or sensed somehow that someone was being hurt so terribly over a prolonged period of time so very close to the place I consider the warmest and safest in the world – my own home. That sense that I was oblivious to that level of suffering and cruelty over those many hours taking place so close to me has given me more than a few nightmares in the past year – generally the same nightmare. In my dream, I hear someone’s daughter screaming for help, begging for help, and I am frantically running up and down streets in our part of town, knocking on doors and trying to find her before it’s too late, but I always fail, and I wake up feeling sick and sad.
The other thing that I finally allowed myself to think about after my visit to the scene of the horror was the fact that the terrible, sick, predatory individuals who did it almost certainly DID drive by my house, likely on multiple occasions, as that’s the route they would have taken from their rental house to a major thoroughfare, and the interstate. Were my children playing in our front yard,? Did they consider hurting one of them, just because they were an easy target, like Chris and Channon? Did they ever see me standing outside my car on our city street, perhaps fumbling with my keys, and consider carjacking me? Did we pass one another in the aisles of our shared neighborhood grocery store? Did they case our street to consider possible home invasion targets? These are the thoughts that now come to me, now that I understand in a meaningful way the very real geographic connection between my home and that house.
As the details of the case have become even clearer with the police investigation and judicial proceedings, I am, of course, horrified by the brutality of the men who did these things. You hear about sexual sadists – and that’s surely what these guys are – on TV and in true crime books, and you pray that you don’t have one of this relatively rare but incredibly dangerous kinds of predators living in your own neighborhood. But what are the odds that we apparently had three or four men who all knew one another capable of this level of depravity living basically up the street? Three or four men capable of something that went far, far beyond the “ordinary” criminal behavior of robbing, killing or even of raping a woman in an opportunistic way. And not only were there three or four of them who were capable of doing something savage like, they were capable of doing it over and over and over for at least 24 hours, hurting Channon Christian, leaving the house for groceries or to visit friends, and then coming back to hurt her in new and unbelievably horrific ways. This brutality wasn’t carried out in a brief time frame – in a sexual or murderous rage or frenzy, or while under the influence, or during a psychotic episode – this was a conscious, willful brutality over a prolonged period of time. The fact that that many people with that level of evil perversion and willingness to cause pain to another human being over that period of time were here, right here all the time, chills me in a way I can’t quite express.
The last thing that I really struggle with is the issue of the women, at least one (she admits it) and probably others, who knew that there was another young woman, just about their age, hogtied, blindfolded and bleeding in the bedroom at their boyfriends’ rental house, and yet they went about their lives inside and outside the house during the day or more that Channon was being held captive. They did things like prepare sandwiches for the men between their individual forays in and out of the bedroom to rape that other young woman. At least one of the women has children of her own, just like Channon’s mother. At least one of them knew that Channon’s mouth was washed out with household cleaning chemicals in a bizarre and horrible attempt to erase evidence of rape. But these women, who could have ended Channon’s suffering and saved her life DID NOTHING. And there is absolutely ZERO evidence that this was a case where the women in question were “brainwashed” or had any sort of battered women’s syndrome or that they even felt actively threatened by the men during that period of time. They weren’t strung out on drugs and incapable of thinking clearly. No, they were just without consciences, and part of a trashy, thuggy subculture that’s both incredibly sexist – everything caters to the men, and to getting and keeping these worthless men who father their children – as well as very self-absorbed. But as a woman and as a mother, I just find it incomprehensible that other women, another mother, could stand by and let this happen without making any attempt whatsoever to make it stop.
I am sure that there are many thousands of other people all over my adopted hometown who are also haunted by this case, and who have nightmares about it, like I do. Sadly, however, I suspect that the people who committed the crimes – or who stood by watching others do it – sleep just fine at night. And that’s terrifying to me.
ADDENDUM: Attention kneejerk racists who have just started posting comments on this: this is MY blog. Thus, I decide what content appears here, including comments.
You will not be allowed a platform for your ugly idiocy here. Your redneck conspiracy theories have no home here.
The men who appear to have committed these terrible crimes happen to be black. Their white victims happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no evidence that race played a role ib this crime, say police, prosecutors. Your racist “post ergo propter hoc” logic is faulty to a fault. Jeffrey Dahmer (white) had Asian victims, but that doesn’t mean he targeted those victims because they were Asian.
This crime is not about race. It’s about evil and pathology. Your disgusting attempts to use these murders as nothing more than a platform for your nasty, stupid and one dimensional agenda is pathetic and disrespectful to the victims, my community and to the law enforcement officials who have worked so hard on this case.
I will delete what I deem to be pointlessly racist or hate-inciting comments, so posting them is a waste of time. Go away. You aren’t welcome on my blog, and you aren’t welcome in Knoxville.
I will attempt to allow a debate in the comments on issues related to race, and how those issues might or might not have played a role in this crime, and in my response/my community’s response to this crime. I may not agree with your point of view, but as long as you express it in a thoughtful, considered way, and without promoting ad hominem racist hate, I will allow it to remain. This is because as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I generally do allow comments disagreeing with me (or with each other) to remain. That’s my default setting on comments, but again, I will take down comments that I deem to have crossed the line I’ve articulated.
You can call it censorship if you like; I call it keeping house, my house. And hate gets no hospitality here. I
Katie