I’ve been considering writing about violence and war as an infectious disease.
I decided, “today is the day to start.” One of my friends lost a family member who lived in an Israeli settlement attacked by Hamas terrorists. Their little child was shot but survived. So now there are two orphaned children. She is reluctant to speak out and has already heard awkward and even abusive comments to this deeply tragic news.
Most of our fiction and entertainment is created by people who directly know little of violence. I’m not one of them.
Neither was my lifelong friend and mentor, Algis “AJ” Budrys. He wrote, “Orphans is orphans and we understand each other” in his dedication to me in a paperback copy of his amazing and largely-forgotten novel Hard Landing.
Yes, I am an orphan. Yes, I had to “figure it out for myself” in just about every area of life. Yes, I grew up in a highly mentally, emotionally, and physically abusive home. Nothing like what a child who is raped by a father or grandfather like my friend “Marcy” experienced, but still harmful.
I could have enacted the behaviors that I experienced from my grandmother and carried on the cycle of abuse and devastation of a child’s mind and ego. But I didn’t.
Yet these same behaviors played out in my partner Alan Rodgers’ life. His more-than-a-decade custody battle with his ex-wife and her spouse, a deeply disturbed and deranged man, was epic level child abuse. At the very end of it, the judge who convicted Alan’s ex of felony child kidnapping said it was one of the two or three worst custody cases ever seen at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
I was a “bystander” to this horrific, multi-year tragedy. But I, my son, and my daughter, suffered tremendously even so: just like there are little children getting killed by bullets and bombs in Gaza right now.
Even though Alan’s ex- and her husband had no relationship to me and their children spent only a limited time with Alan, that didn’t prevent them from doing anything in their power to harm me and my daughter and to act like deranged crack-addict psychopaths after my baby Anthony died.
I used to wonder, why would someone do that?
The answer is simple: when you’re that infected by evil, you will do anything. You are in the grip of such a severe illness that you will act out verbally, emotionally, and physically to alleviate your condition.
Who Did I Want To Kill And Why?
I wanted to kill Daniel Keys Moran, the man who’d destroyed Alan’s family and either coached, forced, or had so-twisted Alan’s ex- and children that they wanted to repeatedly invade my home after my baby’s death and destroy or steal the last memories I had of my baby. About two weeks after Anthony died, I experienced the second-worst day of my life, when I thought Moran had killed my dog Badger and I had found my baby’s Christmas houses smashed to pieces by my own hammer, I thought, “I want to kill them,” but it was just a thought, not a serious plan.
The following year in the summer of 2006, I was at work at Beyond Shelter when a sci-fi writer who shall remain nameless dialed me up and said, “Have you seen the Alan Rodgers Experience web page?”
Apparently Alan had hired a private investigator and located his children. He had taken his ex back to court. This phone call was how I learned of it.
So, Moran (if you’re reading this, I know it’s a lot of names to remember, so consider these facts — this man is the spouse of my former fiance’s ex-wife — no relation at all to me, my baby, or my daughter) put this huge Blogger web page up stating Alan had murdered Anthony and also stating that I, and even my daughter, age 13 at that time, had been involved in the “crime.”
Anthony, my baby who died at age 6 months in an accident at home, had Down Syndrome. This was the primary reason he aspirated his formula and died. I still wonder what meaning his death had, but perhaps, the meaning is to play a small role in helping people to move forward and heal from perpetual evil, cruelty, and violence.
Who Are These People?
Alan Rodgers, my baby Anthony’s father, was married to a woman named Amy Stout for at least a decade. They had three children, two girls and a boy. The girls were older than my daughter, while the little boy was younger, a preschooler when I first got to know him.
I’m not naming them because they deserve their opportunity at good lives and recovery.
Amy Stout left Alan after the family had moved to Oregon from New York City. She was a book editor. She left Alan while he was at work at a factory job to support the family. She had been having a steamy affair with a man who purported to be a writer named Daniel Keys Moran. Before she got involved with Moran, Moran had ingratiated himself with Alan and had told him he was his “best friend.”
The order of business with the affair and taking the kids out of the house was really awful and would have made a salacious Medium post. This was probably in 1996 or so and I didn’t know Alan Rodgers at all.
Most of the ensuing nightmare of repeated child kidnappings and internet warfare lasted until 2010 or 2011 was pursued by the two men, Rodgers and Moran.
I did everything in my power to make life decent for Alan and his children when they were with us. There were a lot of mistakes I made along the way: assumptions of “what should happen” — because I didn’t understand the full insanity of the other couple or the incapacity of any system to deal with people this debased and this deranged. I will always give Alan credit for hanging in there for his children. I have no idea what they think or don’t think as young adults, but I hope they do have a basic understanding that their father had a lot of courage and he hung in there for them. The best thing I can say about Alan Rodgers is that he hung in there for his children when I truly do not know any man or woman who wouldn’t have walked away in the face of the nonstop insanity and abuse of the other couple.
But Alan’s hanging in there made me, Anthony, and Meredith collateral damage just like the innocent children suffering right now in Gaza and Israel.
So, even though Amy Stout took her kids into my house after Lali died and they stole my daughter’s things, ripped up my things, and eventually, she re-entered the house and trashed it, destroying Lali’s Christmas houses (and a bunch of other meaningless stuff), and — at the time, thought they had killed my dog (he had just run away) —
It’s a True Crime podcast, isn’t it? Only the only one who died was my innocent baby, and it was a horrible accident.
After I saw that web page, I couldn’t sleep for two weeks. I had finally sunk into genuine complex PTSD. If you have it, you know the symptoms. I had all of them.
Especially, I heard my baby crying.
After two weeks of no sleep, I began to form a plan to kill Moran. I enjoyed thinking of what I would do. An ugly man physically. And the spirit or whatever possessed him? I knew I would be doing the world a favor by removing that type of possessed evil from it.
Over time, the depredations this horrible man committed were endless. From ruining Alan’s ex’s life and dominating her to the heinous situations he dragged Alan’s kids through, through his endless sociopath/narcissist gaslighting b.s. and —
Here is what you need to know about Moran: 1) his 1980s sci-fi novels that Alan thought were so great in the days he mistakenly thought this beast was his “best friend” were retreads of Heinlein’s Future History books, which Alan and Amy Stout would have instantly known, had they actually read the originals, same for Moran’s fans, too; 2) All these attacks on me, my house, my stuff — Moran never stepped foot inside. He sent Alan’s ex- and the kids in to do it.
The first time I laid eyes on this brute, he threatened Alan’s 9- or 10-year old daughter right in front of me. For the “crime” of going to visit her father on the weekend. That was years before the web page he decided was a “great idea” —
I’ve known many ex-cons, drug addicts, and horrible sociopathic people who should never have had children.
And Moran is in a class of his own. If there’s any negative adjective able to be applied to a man, they can all be applied to Moran.
And what I just wrote is why, despite I really wanted to kill him and made serious plans to do so —
I finally healed enough from my PTSD to realize that somebody as miserable as Moran deserves to live.
A plagiarist, a liar, an egregious abuser, an idiot who never graduated from high school. Someone so weak and pathetic he sent a woman and children in to do his dirty work because his genius-level brain was aware of Charlie Manson’s theory as to how he’d get off for the Tate-LaBianca murders.
The cops told me that in the middle of the night when I dragged myself down to the Van Nuys police station to see if they knew anything about my dog Badger. “He knows he can be charged if he goes into the house, he’s like Manson.”
I hope he’s alive right now and I hope the world is treating him as he so richly deserves.
But I know exactly what people think and feel when they decide to kill others. I know the things they tell themselves to “justify” the action.
I have heard these things for the past week in the renewed Israel-Gaza (and perhaps now West Bank) war.
Violence is a disease so pervasive and so virulent that it would even infect someone who is such a distant relation to me. No relation at all.
Oh — yeah — I also decided I wasn’t going to stick an icepick in Moran’s ear and laugh as he twitched because I had a daughter. And she needed me.
Therefore, I needed to get better.
And, I did.
And now, I am healed. Now, healing is what I write about. Healing is every story I had previously written, pretty much. Healing, finding one’s self, finding one’s family, finding love.
I not only wanted to kill this man, I know I could have, and I also know that I could have had a reasonable chance of getting away with it due to —
Look at me. The same way Alan’s ex-wife Amy Stout had to kidnap her children parentally a dozen times before she was finally held to any type of legal account. The same way she busted into my house, tore up everything in her grasp and tried to kill Alan, but received no charges.
And I had money, looks, friends in relatively high places, prestige — all things Amy Stout lacked. Yes, I wrote that on purpose. If you had experienced what these debased, deranged, diseased individuals did to me and my daughter and in the wake of my baby’s horrific and tragic death? This would be mild compared to what you would say.
Who would believe someone like me would do such a thing?
Violence and evil are diseases. Infectious, intractible. The worst, oldest diseases of all.
PTSD is a symptom and it can be cured. But it does not happen overnight.
Writing this is, I hope, one of the later steps in my healing journey and I also hope it will help others.
If you have been harmed by violence, don’t respond in kind. Heal yourself.
Thank you for taking all the risks involved in writing this. The problem of violence is one of our most human dilemmas. I'm glad you came out the other side.