| The Naked City | Jul 9 2018 |
The hardest question to answer is always why.
Today in 1959 in a quiet area of Inglewood, California, a police officer was putting a ticket on a car that hadn't moved for at least two days. While writing the ticket he looked in the window and noticed that on the front seat were a sweater, a pair of Capri pants—and a bloody front tooth. He pried open the trunk and inside found a dead woman, Meredith Jean Prestridge, a twenty-six-year-old married mother of two. She had been missing from her Fresno home for a week.
In the top photo police officers and coroner’s personnel examine the crime scene. Soon the cops would be looking for an unidentified man seen with Prestridge shortly before she vanished. They would learn of a suspect named Robert Lee Kilmer and mobilize to arrest him where he was holed up in a friend's house. Kilmer didn't go easily, and in the end police fired tear gas and stormed the place wearing masks and bullet proof vests. In the resulting melee police fatally shot Kilmer in the head.
His guilt was not seriously in question in any of the accounts we read, but due to his untimely departure from the material realm the motives and thought processes behind his murder of Prestridge were never explained. But they surely would have been as banal as those of other murderers. Kilmer was just another bad man in the naked city, and Prestridge was just another victim in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His guilt was not seriously in question in any of the accounts we read, but due to his untimely departure from the material realm the motives and thought processes behind his murder of Prestridge were never explained. But they surely would have been as banal as those of other murderers. Kilmer was just another bad man in the naked city, and Prestridge was just another victim in the wrong place at the wrong time.
