The Side Effects of Endorphins

What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done when no one was watching?

Sit and Listen (Fiction Based on a True Story)

I met this woman in a dive bar just off the Rhine in Mainz. It was too late to walk to a bar, but I was not in a good decision-making mood. I cannot say she liked me, but she certainly had a story that needed telling. I do not even know what started the conversation. The bar was quiet that night with only a few young men who were touring around Europe. They were from Canada. The flags on their backpack, hinted at such. They bought us each a beer. The beer bolstered my confidence, and I even tried to speak to her in German. And she understood what I was saying. However, I had trouble understanding what she was saying. She simply spoke too fast.

I was not that much in a talking mood, and I let her talk. She never told me her name even after introducing myself. She referred to herself as Maggie, and I had to believe that to be her name.

She spent many years working in a swab manufacturing plant. She did many things at the plant, including working the assembly line and once promoted she did quality assurance at the end of the assembly line. She was a hands-on employee and manager as well. She liked her job as the task were varied and interesting.

There was an underlying seed of bitterness as she told her story, yet her words were clear and concise. She signaled to the bartender like she had been here before. Two tumblers of whiskey sat before us. I assumed this was a beer only bar. The whiskey tickled my nose.

She thanked me repeatedly for listening and telling her story. It was like someone was following her. It seems like she had been there before. She told me of a day she was working her shift and the Poleizai suddenly showed up to where she was working. When they abruptly walked into the room, she was busy, wrapping some gauze around the leg of a dummy she had in the corner of her dimly lit office. It was standard procedure.

She told me there was not a standard protocol, so she decided to answer their questions. She hoped none of her employees are in trouble. They asked her some vague questions and one specific question of what she was doing on the night of April 3. They said it was the day before Easter. She did not remember what she did that day, but she knew she was not at work. She said it only told me about the exact details that day she told me about how the sun was shining into the windows and how it was a perfect day. She simply wanted to get home from work, and they kept asking her questions that are related to almost nothing.

And then she stopped talking and sat and drank with attention to detail. The drink was a smoky strong tickler of my curiosity. It had a muskiness that matched the enigma of the evening. Her speech became more ethereal and hung in the air between us. She said it was not like I killed anybody. I did not know where she was going with this.

She told me the story of how law-enforcement would show up outside her work and even follow her home. She had no idea why she was at target of their investigation. She was sitting in the main square enjoying a cold beer. It was late September, and they told her that she was under arrest. She said the sun that day was showing her age, and she wanted to be back in school.

The criminal was a rarity, a female serial killer, and a terribly busy one: police had linked DNA evidence from 40 crimes — including the infamous homicide of a police officer in the southern German town of Heilbronn — to the same woman. And she was that woman.

And there she sat accused of these crimes. Psychopathy is strongly associated with a significant lack of empathy. Individuals with psychopathic traits often prove a diminished capacity to understand or share the feelings of others, particularly when those feelings involve pain or distress. She could have kindness toward crime victims of crimes she did not do.

When I first met her, I was not aware of the crime she was accused of. Her DNA showed up at the crime scene. The German police have been trying to solve this crime for what seems like an eternity. For anybody who has taken a basic statistics class, you can see why the police had tied her to these crimes.

Because the police were lazy. Naturally, her DNA was at the crime scene, as she worked in the Swab planted that tested the DNA at the crime scene.