Kickass and Captured Killer by Bill Stokes

Attribution: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper and Phyllis, along with everyone else in the Midwest, relieved at the capture of the Minnesota murderer from his hiding in a wooded area.

And of course, it recalls for the keeper the long-ago murder of three people at a Bloomer, WI. camper dealership: and the murderer then wandering the countryside until he was located in a grove of pine trees and a gunshot was heard that effectively ended the pursuit but did not provide detail as to whether the murderer was dead or alive.

The keeper needed to know that fact for his looming call-in deadline, but a deputy guarding entry to the pine grove would not tell him and would not give the keeper access to the area.

As the keeper pleaded his case to find out the alive-or-dead condition of the murderer or to get access to the pine grove, the deputy stated in no uncertain terms, “Nobody gets in there until the coroner gets here!”

The keeper remembers calling in the story from a phone in a barn full of bellowing cows that had just been separated from their calves.