Headline, May25, 2013

'''ATTRACT​ION TO DARKNESS : 

AND WHAT IT IS LIKE'''

The grief stricken Gonzales family believed that removal of their daughter's head and hands had been done by someone who knew her.......

The story begins on a frosty Saturday evening in 1997, just five nights before Christmas. Around nine, a slender, striking 19 years old university student named Mokhtaria Chaib stepped out of a friend's apartment, just down the busy Avenue du General de Gaulle from the train station.

Perpignan today, as it was in the past, a hectic regional hub, home to over 100,000 people, many of them of Catalan origin, along with a healthy sprinkling of Mediterranean Arabs, The toll road from the French Riviera to Barcelona runs the length of the town, and Perpignan's tree lined avenues and sinuous shopping alleys are dotted with the beggars and Gypsy bands one expects to see in a well-traveled European border city.

According to friends, Mokhtaria Chaib was planning a trip to beach town of Collioure, 15 miles away, the next morning, and she decided to walk back through a harsh, freezing rain the three miles to her dorm room to get ready -she had no car and her bus didn't run at night. Blessed with beautiful mocha skin and shoulder length brunet curls...........

Mokhtaria Chaib had long struggled to be a modern woman, a French woman. Her mother had died when she was an infant, and her father had remarried. Mokhtaria and her stepmother fought constantly. At 16, one friend says she ran away from home, moving in with her best friend Sabine Lopez.

She fiercely resisted any efforts to go back, and her case went to juvenile court, according to friends; social workers intervened, and she ended up in Perpignan shelter for wayward teenagers, where she lived until she graduated from high school in June 1997.

The summer, like many of the region's teenagers, Chaib drifted to the beach, where she cleaned hotel rooms and joined Sabine in a carefree group of young girls who called themselves Charlie's Angels. She came down with a bad case of Facial eczema that summer. She and Sabine planned to become nurses, maybe in the French Army, and travel abroad to work with refugees.

In the fall Chaib enrolled in sociology classes at the university of Perpignan. She didn't want to be sociologist. It was just a means and not an aim. The University helped her to emancipate herself. Yet Chaib was never able entirely escape her past.

On the night of December 20, tramontane, the fierce wind that blows the cold off the snow dusted Pyrenees to the south, whipped the rain nearly sideways as Chaib began the 45 minute walk to her dorm room. About midway, where her path crossed the Avenue Julien Panchot, was a spot where hitchhikers often hailed cars.

Maybe Chaib accepted a ride from someone, may be not   -after shutting the door behind her as she left her friend's apartment, she was never seen alive again.

The next day around nine, a man out for his morning stroll came upon her nude body lying facedown in a weed-covered cemetery. What the police found when they examined the corpse sickened them. It is far too gruesome to describe here. Death had come from three deep stab wounds to the heart. And this is absolutely to say nothing.

A ritual or satanic killing one detective surmised to reporters. Maybe the work of a psychopathic doctor or medical student. For the moment that was all the police head: theories. If there was any telling physical evidence left by the murderer, it went undisclosed.

So, as the police and all, bent down to comb the weeds for evidence that frigid Sunday morning, some of the detectives began to murmur about another pretty girl with long brown hair, a girl who, two years before, had been last seen stepping out of Perpignan station into the familiar of the Place Salvador Dali.

Don't miss the next tragic part as the post continues!

With respectful dedication to  ''Fate's Shears.'' 

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless