The Body in the Basement
Kimberly Garts Crum
Word Count 997
I live in Old Louisville, a historic Kentucky neighborhood comprising 48 blocks of 19th century mansions. Our homes are haunted by urban legends who famously (and infamously) lived and died in the homes we now occupy. Quirky people choose to live here. We celebrate our peculiarities. So, I suppose we should expect a body in the basement now and then.
On June 17, 2010, police discovered a corpse buried in the cellar of a mansion only two blocks from where I live. A man stabbed to death had been laid to rest under the dirt floor, his body folded into a plastic Rubbermaid-style tub. The neighborhood response was not what you might expect. There were no town meetings. No cries of declining property values. No threats of exodus to the suburbs. Weeks later, on a sweltering Kentucky Fourth-of-July, neighbors ascended the steps of a Queen Anne mansion for a Fourth-of-July gathering. Conversations were abuzz. Hot as hell! No gardening in this weather! Taken any good vacations? What do you think about the body buried in the basement? Perhaps it was morbid curiosity or an active imagination that inspired me to start a conversation about the murder. It seemed the perfect antidote to small talk with two new neighbors.
“Rumor is the guys owe $650,000 on the house. That’s got to be about three times its value; it’s such a wreck,” Mel said.
“Would you buy it?” I asked. “ I mean, how could you buy it, considering its history?”
“I heard they’ll have to disclose the murder when the guys try to sell the house. Like it’s a leaky basement,” said Nick. We speculated on the realtor’s conversation with potential buyers. No water damage to the cellar, but I think you should know there was a body buried in the crawl space for six months. It’s gone now. Shouldn’t give you any trouble.
“Did you know the guys who lived in that house?”
“I know someone who sort of knew them,” Mel replied, politely. “They were into some bad stuff. Drugs. Methamphetamine. The paper said they had guns.”
“I heard they were in trouble with the law.”
We assembled a collage of hearsay. One guy’s father owned the house. The bank owns it now. It was a love triangle, a crime of passion. It was a botched robbery, for narcotics. And did you hear about that incident in Chicago? The guys had $50,000 of counterfeit bills in a room at The Hyatt, as well as guns and the date-rape drug.
“Makes you wonder how many guys are folded into Rubbermaid tubs across the Midwest,” I joked.
The body had been buried in December. The arrest was made months later, preceded by a domestic dispute. One man was trying to break into a bedroom with a hammer, where his boyfriend had locked himself. The boyfriend called the police. The alleged abuser, upon arrest, informed police of the buried body. One LMPD investigator was later quoted in the Courier-Journal as saying, "We often get, 'I know where a body is buried,’ . . . You're normally on a wild goose chase . . . But this time there was actually something there."
The ‘something there’ was a man, James “Jamie” Carroll.
I imagine a plastic tub full of Christmas decorations. The perpetrators have a problem: a warm bloody corpse in an upstairs bedroom. One of the men hurries to the basement and dumps a plastic tub of tree ornaments and colored glass bulbs; the Christmas decor makes a soft clinking sound as it tumbles to the floor.
“What’s odd is that the man the police arrested in the domestic dispute accused his boyfriend of the murder. Don’t you think he would try to keep the murder a secret?”
“Maybe he wanted revenge?”
“Maybe he wanted to be punished.”
I popped a cheese cube in my mouth. Nick left to fetch beverages. Mel strolled the perimeter of the dining table; I put my chardonnay on the fireplace mantle and nibbled on a few dill-dipped carrots. After the three of us reunited, our neighbor Laura joined us. “Happy Fourth! What’s up?”
“We’ve been talking about the body in the basement.”
“Tragic,” she said, circling the rim of her wine glass with her index finger.
“And what do you suppose those guys were thinking?” I said. “I mean, I can almost understand why it’s possible to kill somebody in a fit of passion. But storing the body in the basement? Who would do that?”
“The way I see it, there would be two choices. You can call the police and explain you didn’t mean to kill the man. Or you could hide the body.”
“Or you could burn it,” Nick said. We then discussed alternatives for body disposal.
“Do you think they dismembered the body before putting it in the Rubbermaid bin?” I asked.“What I’d really like to know is how they handled the smell. How could they live in the house? I mean, one time, there was a dead mouse in the wall of our house, and it smelled just awful. Took months to get rid of the smell.”
Laura covered her brow with the palm of her hand. After a few moments, she walked away, waving the back of her hand in our direction. The ghost-of-a-conscience silenced us.
“You know,” I said, “This whole thing is really a tragedy, and we’ve been laughing about it,” I said. “I mean, the dead guy had a life and a family . . . somewhere. Somebody out there loved him!”
“Well, that’s the most amazing thing,” Mel said. “He was buried six months in that basement. The paper says no one was looking for him because he often went missing for months at a time.” He paused. “Can you imagine if no one noticed you were missing?”
We looked down into our wine glasses. No answers found there. The sun shining through the leaded-glass windows had shifted. Desolate platters and cratered casseroles signaled the imminent end of the neighborhood feast.
*
Kim is co-editor of the multi-genre literary anthology The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation (Butler Books 2019) and is working to finish a full draft of memoir, We’ll Laugh About This Someday. Personal essays have appeared in The Louisville Literary Review, HerStry, 94 Creations, The New Southerner, Today’s Woman, the Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing 2020), The Boom Project, and The New Social Worker. Kim edits a Medium.com publication, Landslide Lit(erary), where she publishes both prose and poetry.