Vis-à-vis regular boilerplate crime - murder, armed robbery, burglary, those staples of the old-time daily newspapers where I began what the New Agers call my career path 30 years ago - Cincinnati, my just-revisited home, and Seattle, my adopted home most of the past 20 years, have gone in different directions.
When I arrived here in 1984, fresh from covering Cincinnati's approximately 50 murders a year, I discovered that Seattle, although a tad bigger, also averaged about 45 to 50 homicides annually.
In the 1990s, when Seattle's murder rate spiked and forced the creation of a gang task force, our citizens-removing-citizens rate of 70-plus surpassed that of Cincinnati, where the murder rate dropped under 40 per annum.
But Seattle somehow grabbed "aholt" (as we say in the near South) of itself, and lately murders have dropped to under 30 annually. At the same time, with gang problems, police brutality and racial tensions on the rise - in a city the census claims is 35 percent black, but where black activists claim a full 50 percent, many unrepresented, of the citizenry - Cincinnati's murder rate has soared. At this writing, 80 citizens (a record pace for the alleged Queen City of the Midwest) have already been removed from the faulty census rolls, most, of course, the victims of gunshot wounds.
To even the untrained eye, Cincinnati is a more violent place than Seattle.
But somehow, despite shrinking numbers, this area has always provided weirder crimes for us reporters to cover.
After all, we and no one else spawned Ted Bundy (Tacoma) and Gary Ridgway (Auburn-Federal Way). And we cannot leave out the Enumclaw horse-farm event of a year or so ago, when a man died after being congressed by his pet stallion.
If you were caught getting killed doing something like that in Bible Belt Cincinnati, they would dig you up and kill you again.
"Why are you so retrograde and racist?" might be our question to Cincinnati.
Their question would be much simpler: "What is wrong with you all?"
I was reminded of the Northwest's penchant for spawning severely disturbed whackos by two recent events.
First, on the train ride back from Cincinnati last week, I overheard a large, thickly muscled young white man telling a newly befriended seatmate why he quit the Whitefish Police Department and became a sheriff's deputy up in Kalispell.
It was a boring tale of office politics, cops-style, but the word Whitefish tweaked my reporter's brain.
I went back and said, "Excuse me, two words: Kyle Huff."
This deputy turned out to be the very man who had arrested Huff in 2000 for blowing up a papier-mâché moose outside a Whitefish art gallery.
Cops believe the offending anti-art weapon was one of the same guns Huff carried with him while he perpetrated the Capitol Hill Rave Massacre recently.
"People hate him in Seattle," I said, "but all the news articles with Whitefish sources claim Huff was a nice guy."
"He was," this former Whitefish cop said.
"He never stood out," he went on to say. "I knew him from when we were little kids. He played softball on my team. I knew his mom and his twin brother Kane. Neither one of them stood out. They were quiet. Not bullies, even though they were big."
The cop said that other than literally dragging a man to the police station whom the Huff brothers had caught going through their pickup truck's interior, and the aforementioned mâché moose-icide, Kyle Huff was just another good old boy.
"Sure he had guns, but everybody up here has guns."
I didn't say, "Yeah, but everybody doesn't kill a bunch of innocent kids with them."
What was the point? Until Huff moved here and drank the water, he had never killed anything worse than a badly sculpted moose.
The day after I returned, my suspicions about violent wackiness were confirmed when I read about the Pierce County 4-year-old female pit bull authorities wanted to put to sleep because of its history of biting innocent civilians.
Opponents of putting violent dogs down pointed out that the dog was abused. Primary evidence put forward: there were two cellphone photos of the 26-year-old owner having sex with the poor dog. Wifey snapped the pix.
If the alleged dog-doer is convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for bestiality, the first man in state charged under the Enumclaw horse farm-inspired 2006 law.
Meanwhile, he has been released to his Spanaway home, but as a condition of his release a judge straightfacedly told him he has to stay away from all animals.
That makes me feel better.
It's good to be home in weird and wacky northwestern Washington state.
Speak with Dennis Wilken via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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