Robert

20th July 1991


Dear Robert

This has not been an easy letter to write, to send to you now but I do appreciate it will be far harder for you to read what I have written here. I have held a truth for over forty five years and I know I must return it now to you its rightful owner. I wondered for a good time, agonised in reaching my decision, but I do know it is right. I feel that so very deeply and speak not just to assuage myself of some dark feeling but to illuminate as far as I may,to smother this tale in light.

It will not be simple for you to hear and what I will say will seem unfair and change many things, but if I don't reveal this missing page to you then your very essence, your idiosyncrasies and deeper held beliefs would then have only been based on the turns and philosophies that life without this knowledge has allowed you to experience and I feel that as late as it is, you may have an opportunity to rebuild, somehow reconfigure the history of you and in doing so find  answers.

In holding this power my life too has undoubtedly carved a different path, not simply from the truth itself but by my pervading knowledge of your ignorance of it. I have known this for most of my life, and by my action, or rather inaction, you have remained forever in darkness. Of course to many there will be greater significance, but the idle will always make reason where it serves their own delight in others ignominy.

I tell you this now at the end of my life whilst God gives me grace and before I am finally wearied from this world. I cannot make this revelation any easier than perhaps by urging you to consider these opening words a little while longer before continuing.

I was born in Flathead County, Montana in nineteen twenty two and I murdered your father. I killed him for a wrong, a horrible cruelty he did. My act was not a cold blood thing you will understand but a killing none the less.

As a child my world began and ended with the fences on our family ranch. Ninety five acres of rippling plains beneath an infinite cobalt blue dome. Big sky country. When I wasn't being schooled at Bigfork or doing chores, my days were filled with riding the Paint horses that to my young naive mind just happened to live on and roam our land. It was only as I grew older that I understood why they were there, and the work my parents and eventually I would do to tend them.

We made strong sprinting horses and men would come from far off places to run ahand across the beautiful spotted coats, to stroke muscled legs and lift hoovesto check resistance.

We led a simple life and worked hard every day to make ends meet. The horses that we sold were our family income, which clothed and fed us. We had a happy existence, or at least we wouldn't have really noticed if we didn't. The wind blew and we swayed along with it.

To the west of our ranch, the Bigfork river curled around the bottom of the Swan mountains and no matter how fast I galloped across the plains towards them, those mountains never seemed to get any closer and by my late teens I began to dream of what might lay along that river, on the other side of the mysterious hard ragged peaks and whether my future was beyond the fields and small town life in Bigfork.

It was to be my destiny, and it came much sooner than I could have imagined when in nineteen forty one the draft began and I was conscripted into the US Army. I was nineteen years old.

I didn't meet your father face to face for another four years.

Things changed dramatically for me as life was cruelly inverted and the infinity of the Montana skies was now beneath my flailing feet as I scrabbled to find a footing in the frightening world beyond the mountains.

My basic training was seventeen hard weeks but I was enthusiastic and realised quickly that my efforts would be rewarded. I made friends and learnt much that would serve me well in the future. Whilst many of my fellow conscripts from the mid west were in one way or another skilled horse riders, I was seen as exceptional and soon seconded to the 26th Cavalry based in the Philippines. By 1941 modern combat meant the last remaining cavalry unit was slight and boasted less than eight hundred men and horses, but despite this we played a significant part in the allied effort and in December of that year we delayed a Japanese tank assault allowing many units to withdraw to safety.

My efforts in the far east were recognised and over the years I moved quickly through the ranks. I began working on undercover operations posted deep behind enemy lines. By nineteen forty four, I was made captain and had by now been involved in over fourteen attempts to assassinate your father. History tell us that all such efforts failed.

I cannot know what you are thinking now but I imagine and would expect you to doubt and dismiss these grotesque claims; but I do not lie. I have paid a large sum to have this letter delivered to you intact and unseen by any other. The seals you broke to open it will be proof that apart from myself you are the only other who has witnessed these words for if someone else had read it, the revelation would have surely reached you far sooner than the pages you now hold in your hand.

We found you just a few months old in April 1945 deep below the Reich Chancellery still in the arms of your dead Kinderfrau.

There was not a moments doubt as to whom you were and why you were there.  Intelligence had been lit up for several months with the rumours of a child,sending allied agents into a frenzy. Your tiny swaddled body hidden away in the underground bunker was the emphatic evidence we'd been missing.  The lines fell silent.

When I saw your father, I understood immediately so many things that had been said about him, and where I could only tinker with some flat outline in my head, I was now confronted with his calm monolithic presence and it terrified me.  As I entered the room he was standing behind a desk. He looked at me and nodded once. On the desk there was a hand gun half in its leather holster.  I was momentarily confused.

My orders should face to face contact be made were to capture him alive and I know I felt history changing even as I was reaching for his weapon. Suddenly the lives of a million more unknown souls were before me and the dead stood behind awaiting their retribution. The acid rose from my stomach and prickled at my throat.

In that hidden room beneath Berlin, in the time it took me to pull the gun from its holster, a small town country boy became the most powerful man in the world.A rage swelled in me burning the back of my neck and temples.  With arm outstretched I held the gun against his forehead. When he smiled I knew that it was loaded and I squeezed the trigger. It was done.

I cannot tell you anything about yourself to prove my story that is not public record or that by influence I could not gain from the penitentiary records.From the initial bunker blast you sustained second degree burns to the left hand side of your face, your left hand and feet. They were not as has been reported the result of a childhood accident but nonetheless the media have used your facial scarring to graphically support their depiction of you as a monster for the seventeen women you have raped and dismembered.

Your mother was never found.

Many wanted to kill you, the baby we rescued. Leave it to die from its injuries. I was arrested and court marshalled. I had disobeyed orders and expected a prison sentence but the extenuating circumstances could not be contested and I was quietly retired.  Greater powers wrote the history book for that day.

You were eventually taken back to the United States and adopted by Clark and Darcy Raines, your Mom and Dad. The newspapers have already made much of your adoptive status and they have sought to find your true birth parents. They will not.

You now approach the end of your life, to be extinguished as a revenge for your terrible crimes, and it is fair that you are acquainted with your blood. It can in no way excuse these acts but the truth of your nature cannot be ignored and I have delivered it to you.

The bend and creak of your fibres mapped long ago in some ancient ocean, snagged and blackened in your father and in you they have resisted the untangling and purging influence of a stable upbringing filled with love and opportunity. You have taken lives so violently and found solace only in your own aberrant and tortuous morality. I can only hope this letter gives you peace.

May God have mercy on your soul.

"Therefore, just as sin entered the worldthrough one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men,because all sinned" — Romans 5:12


By Darren Seeley