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| Ed Wood has a rhetorical question for you today. (Photo from Garter Girls.) |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Who Wants to Get Involved." Originally published in Garter Girls (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 6, no. 2, May/June 1972. No author credited.
Excerpt: "The figure in the darkness detached itself and with knife in hand started running after the woman . . . death was but a few running footsteps behind her. Over her shoulder she could see the figure and the gleaming knife. She burst out onto the busy sidewalk screaming for help. Most of those who saw simply scampered out of the way, or stood back aghast . . . shocked as the man caught up with Kitty and plunged the knife into her body time and time again."
Reflections: Back in 2014, I reviewed Ed Wood's "Scene of the Crime," one of the best and most unusual stories in Blood Splatters Quickly. It's about a news reporter interviewing the witnesses who failed to intervene when they saw a woman being murdered in broad daylight. At the time, I compared it to the infamous 1964 Kitty Genovese murder case in which 37 New Yorkers (supposedly) failed to come to the aid of a woman being pursued and murdered.
Well, in retrospect, I wish I'd known about "Who Wants to Get Involved," a nonfiction article that Ed Wood wrote just months before "Scene of the Crime" in 1972. This piece for Garter Girls deals with the same exact issues as "Scene of the Crime"—namely, people's reasons for not wanting to intervene when they see a crime being committed—and directly references the Genovese case. In fact, Ed describes Kitty Genovese's murder in a dramatic and suspenseful way. The so-called "bystander effect" is clearly an issue that Ed found important. When I revisited "Scene of the Crime," I noted how often the characters use that same, all-important word—"involved."
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| A billboard asking for information in the bizarre and tragic Carmen Colon case. |
The Genovese case is the one people always associate with this phenomenon, but Ed describes one more that I'd never heard of: the 1971 murder of a 10-year-old girl named Carmen Colon in Rochester, NY. Dozens of motorists saw Carmen undressed and in obvious distress by the side of the highway but failed to stop and help. Days later, she was found sexually assaulted and murdered. Her killer apparently chose victims whose first and last initials were the same. The horrific case has never been solved.
It cannot be a coincidence that these two parallel tragedies, Kitty Genovese and Carmen Colon, occurred in Ed Wood's home state of New York. That might be part of the reason why these stories resonated so deeply within him. As usual, Ed gets philosophical by the end of the article and cannot resist getting a little, well, Ed Wood-ish with his choice of words:
The ghoulish delights of terror which are deep within everyone of us demand that we watch . . . or read about such things in the newspapers and see it on television . . . and the matter is of much interest and we must, because of conscious reasons, say "Why in hell didn't somebody step up there and help that poor person?"
That last question might be one that we ask about Ed Wood.
Ed Wood's own life was a tragedy, for sure, but not the dramatic type experienced by Kitty Genovese or Carmen Colon. His was a more subtle, slow-motion tragedy occurring over the course of several decades. And many people did try to help Ed along the way. The pages of Nightmare of Ecstasy are filled with stories of people who got involved and tied to rescue Eddie from his self-destructive ways. Maybe, when he wrote "Who Wants to Get Involved" and "Scene of the Crime," he felt that he had been abandoned or ignored by those who could help him. Unlike Kitty and Carmen, Eddie had some good Samaritans in his life, but even good Samaritans can only do so much.
Next: "An Age of Hunchbacks" (1971)