Thoughts From A Delusional Mind

Brian Darrell Davis was sentenced to death by the state of Oklahoma in March 2003 for the brutal killing of his girlfriend’s mother- Josephine “Jody” Sanford (right).

After returning home late at night and discovering his girlfriend, Stacey Sanford, and their 3 year old daughter missing, Davis contacted her mother in an attempt to try and locate her. However, Stacey was not with her mother, and due to concern for the whereabouts of her daughter, Jody ended the phone call and made her way over to their apartment in order to help Davis with the search.

Without realising the worry caused by spending a night away, Stacey Sanford returned back home as normal the next morning around 9am. However, the scene that greeted her was a terrible and gruesome one. She entered into the home and discovered her mother’s lifeless body- Jody Sanford had been raped, beaten, stabbed multiple times and also suffered a broken jaw. 

the beast- captured wrangled exiled hopes to escape

Pix magazine, Australia, February 5, 1938

Things turned sour between my wife and me before we were married. Before our marriage was even recognized by our state, in fact. There was too much mistrust; too many incidents from our respective pasts had bubbled up to demand our attention. But we soldiered on. The gesture of our marriage, we agreed, was more important than the fraying of our bond.

As the months dragged on, we worked to rekindle the essential elements of our relationship. For the most part, we were successful. Janelle’s sharp edges, honed by the coarseness of our interactions over our most difficult times, began to dull. Mine, too, softened. For a while, things felt good. Comforting. Familiar.

Familiarity, though, would beget slothfulness. It’s what I’d worried would happen. Every night, when we were curled up together in our bed, Janelle would snore and I’d be plagued by fear. It was the fear of inevitability. No matter how well things were going, once we got our wheels back in the familiar rut of our old routines, I knew our foundation would resume its inexorable deterioration. There was only so much damage it could endure before everything we’d worked to build would topple.

“Eskimo Girl Wearing Clothes of All Fur.”