Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

This was her story now. It would always be something that had happened to Jenny, and to Hazel, and she would be rewriting the narrative for the rest of her life, shaping it, defining it, hurling it against the wall.

This was not about him. It never had been. It seemed insane, almost laughable, that one person—Ansel, a single man, so deeply average—had created a chasm so colossal.

Ansel was no evil genius. He did not even seem particularly smart. From across the table, the brilliant psychopath she’d hounded all these years looked to Saffy like an unremarkable man, aging and apathetic, bloated and dull. Some men, Saffy knew, killed from a place of anger. Others killed from humiliation, or hatred, or depraved sexual need. Ansel was not rare or mystifying. He was the least nuanced of them all, a murky combination of all the above. A small and boring man who killed because he felt like it.

She had spent her years chasing pointless violence, if only to prove it could not touch her. What a waste this hunt had been. What a disappointment. She had finally solved this epic mystery—touched the place where Ansel’s hurt had congealed—only to find his pain looked just like everyone else’s. The difference lay in what he chose to do with it.

There would be no story, for these girls alone. There would be no vigil, no attention at all. They are relevant because of Ansel and the fascination the world has for men like him.

justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction. As Saffy takes a long breath of alpine air, she pictures the needle, pressing into Ansel’s arm. The blue pop of vein. How unnecessary, she thinks. How pointless. The system has failed them all.

He gets the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack or a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves. Instead, Ansel has been given this noble sacrifice. Martyr status.

it is a privilege, to stand in front of the cameras. It is a privilege to be seen, to speak your last words into a microphone. Ansel gets the glorified title of serial killer, a phrase that seems to inspire a bizarre, primitive lust. Books and documentaries and dark tunnels on the internet. Crowds of women, captivated.

There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.

A death like this—sterile, regulated, watched from a box—is just death. She has no idea to what extent it serves as punishment.

The tragedy is that she is dead, but the tragedy is also that she belongs to him. The bad man, who did the bad thing. There are millions of other moments Izzy has lived, but he has eaten them up one by one, until she exists in most memories as a summation of that awful second, distilled constantly in her fear, her pain, the brutal fact.

Average men become interesting when they start hurting women.