It was Easter Sunday in 1983, and we were visiting my grandparents in Griswold, Connecticut. I was 11 and my sister, being six years younger, was a precocious five year old. We were walking down the road with my older cousin, who was in his late teens, picking some of the daffodils on the side of the road to put in a vase for Nana. Cute kids stuff, and justification for all of the chocolate she had just loaded us down with.
As we walked along the road, we saw a little blue toyota up ahead, just sitting on the side of the road. It either had broken down or someone must have been at the house across the street. As we walked by a thin man with dark rimmed glasses strode out of the woods and made his way up towards the car, and being the polite children we were, we all nodded and wished him a happy Easter. He smile, nodded as we wished us the same as he got into his car and drove away.
If we had only followed the daffodils a little deeper into the woods, we would have found the bodies of two teenage girls. One was gutted from the throat to her belly button, and had been filled with the smooth slate rocks that one finds in the woods around Griswold. The other was tied to a tree nearby, a bloody broom handle near her naked body. She had been forced to watch as her friend was raped and gutted like a fish, before she too was violated by the broom handle until she bled to death.
The man who wished us Happy Easter was Michael Ross11, a serial killer who killed young girls indiscriminately in the early eighties in Connecticut.
Happy Easter.