The Monster in My Front Yard
“Atlas: Milan” by Tiffany Dugan
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One Sunday morning in April 2021, I came across a post in a Facebook group I’m in about my hometown of Ellsworth, Maine. I’d often copied images of old photos of the town that appeared in it and sent them to my family, but this post was a query about a murder from the 1980s. The victim was an older woman, and the killer, the poster thought, was a man from one or the other of two little towns 30 to 40 minutes east of Ellsworth. What caught my eye was a subsequent detail he seemed more certain about: the murderer was either transgender or a cross dresser. Did anyone remember the case?
I graduated from high school in 1982, and came home for Christmas and the summers for the next couple of years, but had no recollection of the incident. A lot of members in the group did, however: in 12 hours, the post had received 75 comments. I nervously began scrolling through them. The names of the victim (Amy Cave) and convicted perpetrator (Samantha Glenner) were quickly confirmed, and the basic details of the case provided. Cave died by asphyxiation (according to the autopsy), and her body was buried in the tidal mud flats on the Hancock side of Egypt Bay—about 15 minutes east of Ellsworth—where police officers discovered it during a search of the area. Glenner was indicted on one count of murder by a Hancock County grand jury on November 5, 1984, and was subsequently found guilty. I also learned that a book had been written about the case by a journalist for my hometown newspaper, The Ellsworth American, who covered the trial: Pat Flagg, a name I vaguely remembered.
People then began reminiscing about the details of the case. I steeled myself. Several confirmed their own connection or the connection of family members or friends to it. One person’s brother subsequently lived on the property where the body was found. Another attended the trial. A third person’s friend testified at the trial. Glenner was referred to as “a he/she,” “the man/woman,” “about the ugliest woman I have ever seen,” and a “very strange dude.” As the comments piled up, or on, a general consensus emerged that the case was “bizarre,” “sad,” “weird,” “horrendous,” etc., and that Flagg’s book about it was “well written,” “great,” “fascinating,” etc. I did a quick search on Amazon, found a copy of the book for under $10, and ordered it. As a transgender woman who grew up in that area, I’d already decided I needed to write about this.
I. My Front Yard
“Front”
When I was about to enter junior high school, my family moved into a new house. My parents had decided to divide our ten acre lot in two, sell the hundred year old farmhouse I’d spent most of my first decade in and much of the land, but keep the shorefront property along the Union River Bay, and erect a new structure as close to the bay as state law would allow. As a child, I’d spent countless summer days with my mom, brother, and sister on this rocky stretch of beach, swimming at high and median tide, and marauding the rockweed and tidal pools for sea life when the tide was out. It was an idyllic spot to grow up in.
One thing I found hard to account for after our move was my folks’ insistence on referring to the thin wooded strip of land between our new house and the bay as the front yard. The part of the yard between the old farmhouse and the Bayside Road had been the front. The spacious part of the yard on the other side of that house, the part where we played on a red and green metal jungle gym as young children, the part with the two wild apple trees from whose fruit my dad made apple sauce, the part from which the bay was visible beyond an overgrown field edged with blueberry bushes—that part was the backyard. In our new home, we had a perfectly fine, if smaller yard between the house and the long dirt driveway up to the main road. Why were they upending this convention?
The answer, I realized later, was that my parents were applying “front” and “back” in valuational as much as functional terms. If the front yard was the locus of egress, the interface between home and world, its designation was also dependent on where in the world you most wanted to go. I grew up sailing with my family, first on the bay in small daysailers, and then in larger boats, a sloop and two old wooden yawls, cruising the eastern part of the Maine coast. Along with playing on the beach, sailing had been the focus of my summers as a child. As I progressed into and through my teens, my life increasingly centered on school, and college took me far away from my little hometown to the Philadelphia suburbs, and for a year Scotland. These journeys from home began on the Bayside Road. My folks, however, continued to look to the bay. The small cove just south of our house where they moored our boat was their gateway to the wide open playground of the North Atlantic, the crisp slap of its salty winds and mesmerizing churn of its swells, and to the secluded folds in the coastline where they spent quiet nights under a sky foaming with stars, tickled into sleep by ripples lapping like a child’s dreams against the boat’s hull. Designating the strip between home and bay the “front yard” reflected the role the coast played as a refuge from the stresses of work and community, as the names they gave the two yawls, Serenity and Halcyon, conveyed.
Hole #1
Flagg’s book, The Disappearance of Amy Cave (Down East Books, 1999), is separated into three parts. The first, a dizzying pastiche of eyewitness accounts presented in novelistic free indirect discourse, starts in late October 1984 with the recognition among Amy’s friends that they’ve neither seen nor heard from her in several days. She hasn’t answered her phone, and her car is found parked at a haphazard angle in her driveway, which was unusual for a person of such regular habits. The local police are alerted, and as inquiries are made and uncertainty mounts, the state police are called in. Law enforcement’s suspicions soon focus on Samantha, who deposited a $2,700 check from Amy at a bank branch in Ellsworth right around the time the victim was last seen. (The check is later determined to be forged.) It’s discovered that Samantha lives with friends of Amy, Glenn and Wes Askeborn; Glenn identifies her as their niece. It’s also discovered that Samantha owes Amy a little over $400, a debt that’s almost two years old. Both Samantha and Glenn are brought in for questioning. Their stories are evasive and riddled with inconsistencies, and the persistence of their interrogators forces each of them to reveal, separately, the most immediate reason for their hesitancy: Samantha “isn’t a woman,” but instead is Glenn’s “son” Glen. Glenn additionally reveals that her daughter has done time for armed robbery.
Based on the stories of mother and child as well as other suspicious information they’ve uncovered, investigators obtain a search warrant and comb the Askeborns’ property. At dusk, Ellsworth Police Department Chief Deputy Richard Dickson spies evidence of recent digging at the base of a low stone wall on the beach below the property. Samantha has told them that she built this wall, and asked them to be careful not to disturb it. Dickson asks for a shovel and starts digging. Soon after, EPD Lt. Nate Anderson “drop[s] to his knees beside the muddy hole and paw[s] into the slimy mass,” then requests that a flashlight be directed where he’s working. Its beam reveals “a patch of red,” the color of the coat Amy usually wore. Anderson “press[es] his fingers into the red patch,” which “[gives] way to his touch,” then stands up, staring into the hole.
“What a hell of a place for a grave.”
“Home”
The detail of where the victim was buried after she was killed instantly struck me. Tidal mud flats are liminal spaces that cycle with the tides between sea and land. And when exposed at low tide, they remain part sea. You might sink up to your ankles if you walk across them, and the smell that greets you when you do is not a land smell. The life concealed there, too, is not land life—clams and marine worms were the denizens the diggers were after when I was young.
My brother, sister, and I dug clams many times as children. On one memorable occasion when we were out cruising, the three of us rowed ashore in the cove we were anchored in and walked down onto the exposed flats there. It was a sunny summer morning, as I recall, but our attention was at our feet, watching for the squirts from retreating clam necks so that we knew where to plunge in our small hoe. As the large holes we made filled with water, we groped blindly in the mud beneath for the telltale edges of shells, inevitably cutting the tips of our fingers on them from time to time. As I groped in one hole that morning, I felt something different, a sort of raspy pinch as if a cat had simultaneously nipped and licked me, and I jerked my hand out of the hole with a shudder. I decided I’d probably disturbed a large worm, and recall being relieved that the skin wasn’t broken. According to a late ’80s booklet still available as a PDF on the Maine Department of Marine Resources’ website, the larger of the state’s two native species of marine worms, the sandworm or clamworm, can grow up to 900 mm, or almost three feet, in length. The booklet confirms that both it and the more diminutive bloodworm, max length 370 mm/14 inches, have “jaws.”
This was one of many episodes from my childhood that revealed the dark places edging our front yard and the halcyon world beyond, where monstrous things lurked. I couldn’t help but turn this recognition in on myself, and see mirrored in it the feelings I had about my own monstrosity—my transness, though I wasn’t calling it that then—the part of myself, or just myself, that I’d learned from the age of three or four to loathe and squelch. I came to think of its, my, presence in this idyllic world (my home) as a menace to that world. Just my being there made me, somehow, another blind, ravenous lurker in the murk poised to lunge at any hand that chanced too near my jaws. When I went away for college, I hoped to leave this sense of my inherent criminality behind, buried deep in some obscure spot, so that I could search for a more positive way to see myself. Leaving Maine would also preserve “home” for the sake of my family and everyone else who belonged there.
Body #1
The first information we receive about Samantha besides her name comes from Lt. Anderson, a transplant from Aroostook County in the northern part of the state. (My dad was also from “the County,” as it’s known in-state. My mom grew up in Ellsworth.) Anderson learns from the Key Bank teller who handled Samantha’s $2,700 deposit that she is “a very large woman in her forties.” He’s also the first to talk with her (on the phone), and he tells his mates after hanging up, “grinning” and “mimicking [her] high, breathy voice,” that she “sounds like Marilyn Monroe.” The bank teller and one of her co-workers elaborate for Anderson when he and a detective working on the case stop by the branch on the day Samantha and Glenn are questioned: “Amazon,” “football shoulders,” “very large hands,” “excessive” makeup. “Not the type you’d overlook in a crowd,” the detective remarks after. Amy’s friend Iva Patten offers a similar description when Anderson calls her from his office a little later: “a large girl, with huge hands and feet,” “such a lot on top,…and very narrow hips, way out of proportion…I felt rather sorry for her.” The police chief for the town of Hancock, who Anderson stops to consult with on his way to pick up Samantha and her mom, compares her to the 1950s TV actress Dagmar, “a big, buxom blonde.”
Dagmar on the cover of Life Magazine, July 16, 1951
Before we’re introduced to Samantha, the portrait of her that emerges is a mashup of Hollywood starlet and linebacker—the epitome of the stage tranny farcically aping femininity. As I read these passages, I remembered my own youthful idolizing of Marilyn (I had a poster of her on my dorm room wall for part of my freshman year in college), and my struggles with body image, in particular my conviction that I had hopelessly broad shoulders and a “barrel” chest. Like my grandad, my mom would say proudly, hoping to build up my self-esteem. Very strange dude.
Names
Familiar names in Flagg’s book further connected me to the story. There were the local businesses like Key Bank (the father of one of my best friends in high school was a loan officer there), Bangor Savings Bank, Wellby Drug, and Doug’s Shop ’n Save. And of course there were the people. My dad made an early, passing appearance as the attorney who handled Amy’s purchase of a lot adjacent to her house. (Real estate transactions were a central part of his practice.) He later testified during the murder trial, which was again mentioned in passing. A familiar figure who featured more prominently in Flagg’s narrative was Fred Ehrlenbach, an architect with Ray Builders who served as a part-time deputy in the initial investigation. Fred designed Amy’s house, and Ray Builders built it. Dad represented Bob Ray, the owner of the company, for many years. I worked for them the summer after my senior year of high school doing odd jobs—I had no qualifications beyond my physical health and work ethic—and occasionally interacted with Fred. I remembered Steve Coffin, a teacher and track coach at the high school, who appears for a couple of pages. I knew the names of all the local attorneys involved in the case, since I used to hear them mentioned at home. I also recognized from dad’s conversations the names of the current and prior sheriffs. Many other people whom I didn’t remember had last names that were familiar to me. Lenny Ober, another deputy at the crime scene, was I presumed related to a high school classmate of mine and his younger sister; Amy was in plays with my brother and me (our mom served as drama director for those years). Patten, Pinkham, Eaton, Sargent, Bouchard, Kane, and Beal were other families whose kids I went to school with.
These myriad personal connections made it impossible for me not to imagine myself in Samantha’s place as her transness became known.
“Maine”
Occupying her place reminded me how difficult staying in Maine would have been for me. Midway through her book, Flagg reveals that Glenn had “kept her daughter under wraps” for most of the time she lived with them, guarding her secret closely and making excuses for her when friends insisted she be included in a dinner date. “People can be so cruel,” Glenn observes to Ellsworth Sheriff Bill Clark after revealing the true nature of her relationship to Samantha. “[Y]ou have no idea how hard this has been.” During Samantha’s trial, a man at the courthouse assures Flagg that “there’ll be [a] homo chucked off the Sullivan bridge” if she were to return to the area after serving her sentence.
As challenging as the threat of harassment and violence was the near total invisibility of trans folks in my home at the time. Though Samantha stuck out in a crowd, ironically a lot of people didn’t at first read her when she began showing herself in the community:
“How come we didn’t see it?”
“Naw. No idea at all. I took him as, you know, this sexy babe.”
“Richard, why didn’t I know I was looking at a man [sic]? Did you, when you first saw her?”…“Well, no. No, I didn’t.”
Prior high-profile figures like American trans pioneer Christine Jorgensen, who returned to a media circus in early 1953 after undergoing hormone therapy and a series of gender confirming surgeries in Denmark, and pathbreaking professional tennis player Renée Richards, who retired in 1981, had seemingly left little to no lasting impression. (I knew of the latter in high school, but only learned about Jorgensen many years later.) That invisibility was due in no small part to the more general ignorance about us in those halcyon pre-internet days. Even the medical profession in the U.S. didn’t pay attention to us until after World War II, and “transsexualism” wasn’t officially recognized as a thing by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980. When Flagg writes her first news story on the case, she begins by looking up “transsexual” and “transvestite” in a dictionary. I didn’t hear the word “transsexual” until I was in junior high or high school, and it conjured up strange nocturnal creatures from the tabloids and the back pages of porn magazines—the most freakishly outré of the marginalized.
Christine Jorgensen on the cover of the New York Daily News, Dec. 1, 1952
It wasn’t just that Mainers weren’t used to us, however. My home was defined as a place where I and others like me simply weren’t. Chief Deputy Dickson refers to having a trans suspect as one of the “crazy things” he got used to during a prior stint at a finance company in New Jersey. “He didn’t expect to see people like Samantha in Maine.” “My God, what have we here?” Thelma Beal, the owner of a local fish market, recalls wondering after spying whisker stubble under Samantha’s makeup when she brought in some freshly dug clams to sell. “Not in Ellsworth, Maine.” The provenance of this sentiment can be traced back to the Greco-Roman pastoral tradition’s opposition of simple country living and decadent urbanity. Its more immediate antecedent, though, is the 19th-century appropriation of the pastoral in service of a conservative rejection of the evils of modernity, documented influentially by the British scholar Raymond Williams. This Romantic reboot informs our nation’s current red-state/blue-state divide, and the far right’s reduction of trans folks, in particular trans women, to a cultural and political wedge issue.
Just as the pastoral impulse in all its incarnations is at heart an urban fantasy, people from away tended to be more invested in imposing its ideals on my home state than we natives were. The state’s long-term reliance on tourist dollars—“Vacationland” has appeared on Maine license plates since 1936—has invited this sense of proprietorship, and helped ensure that national attitudes towards us are largely informed by it. Notably, the best known proponents of downeast humor, Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan aka Bert and I, were Yale educated New Yorkers who summered in the state growing up. Dodge once described his art as “an effort on the part of a city boy to regain some of the instincts I lost, or rather never had, growing up on the upper East Side,”[1] thereby casting Mainers as latter-day noble savages. Flagg herself moved to Maine full-time from out of state some years before the Cave murder. Both Amy (New York) and Samantha (Connecticut) were more recent transplants. I suspect the complex dynamic created by their status as outsiders, coupled with the ideal of “Maine” that Amy and she brought to the state with them, accounts for more than a little of the viciousness of Flagg’s portrayal of Samantha.
II. The Monster
Hole #2
Flagg abruptly enters her own narrative at the start of the book’s second part, when she describes her two attempts to photograph the hole on the Askeborns’ beach where Amy had been buried. Her interest is professional—the photo will be part of her paper’s coverage of the case—but also personal: “Amy and I had built our houses at the same time. We had been friends since she moved to Maine.” Her entrance coincides with her transformation of Samantha from comic mashup into monstrous chimera, a process to which the latter’s transness is integral.
Flagg presents Samantha as more bogey than human being, “a suspected killer—a huge person” (she’s around six feet tall) who had allegedly confronted a clam digger with bow and arrows on a trail above the beach, and who might materialize at any time. Flagg emphasizes her anxiety while she’s on shore both times, even though she makes her first attempt to photograph the grave when Samantha is herself being photographed and fingerprinted in Ellsworth, and is accompanied by another (male) reporter, a “strapping six-footer,” during her second attempt. At the same time, Flagg identifies Samantha as a man, denoting her name an “alias” and using he/him pronouns, which she continues to do when speaking in propria persona for the rest of the book.
The sum of these twinned representations is a botched Frankensteinian self-creation, a crazy thing “way out of proportion,” a thing whose “parts didn’t fit together,” as track coach Coffin is later reported to have said—assessments rooted in cisnormative standards of female appearance. This perceived incongruence and the deep-seated cultural prejudices it triggers become simultaneously an impediment to seeing Samantha’s humanity and a justification for not trying. She remains as opaque as a muddy hole—an empty vessel in need of filling, and free to receive whatever tangled knot of fear, prejudice, and fantasy the beholder brings to the task. In Flagg’s case, Samantha is necessarily because possibly motivated by monstrous impulses and secrets: though only “a suspected killer,” a thing presumed guilty unless proven innocent. Flagg says of the clam digger that he “lived to tell about” his encounter. Her “strapping six-footer” packs a revolver in his camera case. Samantha is also a thing to be loathed. “I was angry,” Flagg declares once she and her companion are back in the boat they used to access the Askeborns’ beach. “I resented being afraid on Taunton Bay, my own turf.” As an out of stater, she has no more claim on it than Samantha. But Flagg is a fixture in the community and Samantha is a transgender woman—a lurker in the murk—a criminal and a crime. From Flagg’s own perspective, her claim takes precedent because her presence there doesn’t disrupt her ideal of “Maine,” which has served as both her justification for relocating to the state and the set of expectations she feels my home in some sense owes it to her, Amy, and people like them to fulfill. According to the terms of this arrangement, she, and Amy, belong on Taunton Bay, and more broadly in my home; Samantha and things like her—like me—don’t.
Body #2
The focus of the men in Flagg’s book is Samantha’s large “boobs”—“jutting out like pontoons,” Chief Deputy Dickson is memorably credited with thinking—at least until her transness is revealed. Flagg, by contrast, fixates on her hands. Though large hands feature prominently in the cisnormative catalog of “tells,” this fixation communicates more than transphobia. Flagg gets her “first prolonged look at the accused killer” in March 1985 at a pre-trial hearing to review a civil suit Samantha has filed to receive trans related medical care while in prison. She contemptuously refers to this now common if often impeded proceeding as “a hormone hearing.” After registering her shock at hearing Samantha’s “small, high-pitched voice” for the first time, and recording the plaintiff’s account of coming out as trans, Flagg describes herself being stopped short: “I…stared at the witness [sic], the thought I’d been shoving aside suddenly clear: Had those hands closed around Amy’s throat and strangled her to death?”
Dr. Frankenstein’s botched creation killed his victims by strangling them. Guilty unless proven innocent.
A lot of space is also inevitably devoted to the status of Samantha’s genitals. Her mother Glenn claimed that she had “undergone a sex change operation” (a now outdated term), but several logistical matters hinge on the confirmation of that claim. Hancock County jail administrator Richard Bishop, for example, considers how to conduct the strip search upon her initial imprisonment in early November:
If…Samantha had undergone a complete sex change operation, a matron would have to do [it]…If their new prisoner still had a penis, the male corrections officer on duty would conduct the search. If Glenner had a penis and breasts, Bishop’s guys would be there to search below the waist and the matron above the waist.
Having brought us this far, Flagg could have stopped at the one sentence summary she provides of the determination made and actions to be taken (“a matron’s presence was unnecessary”). Instead, readers are treated to a one page account of the search:
Samantha’s clothing, including her undergarments (“women’s white underpanties and nylon knee-highs”), are cataloged as they come off her body.
When her blouse comes off, Bishop sees “little dark marks like hen’s feet” around her breast forms and presumes they must be “sewn on.” “My God, he thought.” (The “marks” are soon after revealed to be chest hair.)
When she removes the underpanties, Bishop “didn’t see a penis” and “nearly swallowed his tobacco” (a detail reminiscent of a comic scene in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life), then experiences “queasiness in his stomach” when he realizes that “Glenner’s penis was held between the legs in a small ring contraption”—a common practice known as tucking.
There’s more than a whiff of voyeurism in this description, but Flagg’s focus on clothing and body parts goes beyond the typical erasure of the target’s personhood. Her withholding of personal pronouns in some instances—“a penis,” “the legs”—linguistically severs these parts from Samantha’s body, giving the scene the feel of a lab dissection.
When the autopsy findings are reviewed at Samantha’s May 1985 trial, Flagg laments that Amy “had become ‘the body’.”
Though remarkable for both its level of detail and tacit prurience, Flagg’s account of the strip search is hardly an outlier in kind. She repeatedly remarks on Samantha’s clothing, makeup, and jewelry, to the point that she herself becomes aware of it during the latter’s August 1985 sentencing: “Why did I always notice Glenner’s clothes? I didn’t pay attention to what [anyone else] was wearing.” It’s one of a few moments of self-awareness in the book that she doesn’t bother to pursue further. Another notable instance occurs during the March hearing when she acknowledges that her “first prolonged look” at Samantha caused her to “respond with a vehemence that took me completely by surprise,” but then proceeds to give full throat to the vehemence without attempting to plumb the surprise:
[M]ost out of kilter in my eyes was that all of the players were addressing a six-foot man with his hair pulled back in a ponytail as “Ms. Glenner”…[G]ender identity dysphoria? Such a serious-sounding label by experts wrapped in the cloak of medical authority.
These elisions communicate less a refusal to engage in self-reflection than an assertion of privilege—the privilege of being cis, or as Flagg would doubtless have said, “normal.” Samantha’s transness is so far beyond the pale in her eyes, so ab-normal, so self-evidently monstrous, that accounting for her negative feelings about it is just as obviously unnecessary. The burden is on Samantha to prove that she deserves to be treated as anything other than a monster, and that burden is of course an impossible one to overcome. From the moment it’s known that she was assigned male at birth, her gender is fixed in Flagg’s mind, and the minds of more or less everyone else in my hometown. Any attempts she makes to present herself in a way that feels congruent will not only be de facto monstrous, they also might feel like an affront. They certainly did to Flagg. “So you think putting on makeup and jewelry and letting your hair grow makes you a woman?” Flagg asks when first seeing a photo of Samantha. “I had a sudden urge to wipe the lipstick from my mouth. The face in the [photo] mocked me. What right did it have to make fun of me? It was the phony. I wasn’t.” “The face,” “it”: again, Flagg’s withholding of personal pronouns separates Samantha’s physical features from her, enabling Flagg herself to appropriate them for her own use. Similarly, when she later sees a photo of Samantha presenting as male, she declares her a “nice-looking man,” then states, “Askeborn, I decided, was a better looking man than woman.” “I decided”: the cisgender woman asserts her right to tell the transgender woman who and what she is. Taunton Bay—“Maine”—is “my own turf;” so too is womanhood.
With some tweaks in its tone, Flagg’s relentlessly dehumanizing strip tease in the county jail would have fit perfectly in the “Forum” pages of Penthouse magazine. When I read the scene, however, I hear the collective voice of aggrieved cisgender privilege, my internalized transphobia, ruthless and clench-jawed, exposing the offending monster before the horrified multitude. I see my young self dragged to the center of my high school’s gym at a pep rally and stripped naked before my classmates, to be ogled, jeered at, beaten senseless.
Victim
I’m struck by the fact that Samantha’s time in the area overlapped so little with my own. She joined her parents in Maine sometime between the second semester of my junior year in high school and my first semester in college (different dates are given in Flagg’s book). The murder of Amy Cave, and Samantha’s subsequent arrest, trial, and conviction all happened during my junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh, the year I first came out to someone—one of my Edinburgh flatmates, whom I married a few years later—and first talked to a counselor about my gender identity. The few times I was home during that year—for Christmas, and briefly in June and August of the following summer—Samantha was at the state prison in Thomaston, a coastal town about 90 minutes’ drive south and west of Ellsworth, awaiting her trial and then serving her sentence. This interweaving of our lives reminds me of the German folk legend of the Doppelgänger, in particular as it left its mark on British fictions like Frankenstein. I had taken the back exit from my home to faraway places to come to terms with myself at a safe distance, hoping that I’d left the monstrous part of myself behind me, buried in a hole where no one would find it. Samantha was like that buried part of me, the incarnation of my inherent criminality, loosed in my hometown in my absence to strangle a woman almost my grandmother’s age and bury her in a muddy hole up a small side path off my parents’ front yard.
In imposing this symbolic role on her, I realize that I’m guilty of the sort of appropriation that Flagg, if to more hostile purpose, engaged in. Since the interweaving of Samantha’s life with mine pleads for some such interpretive overlay, though, let it be a sympathetic one: she was not the monster I feared I was, but the victim I feared I would become. I don’t mean to suggest that she was innocent of the crime she was convicted of. The evidence against her, though acknowledged by all parties to be circumstantial, was found to be compelling beyond a reasonable doubt. I mean rather the way in which Samantha’s transness sealed her fate, not merely in my hometown in the mid-’80s, but well before then.
Most revealing in this regard is evidence provided by Samantha’s second wife from Connecticut, Martha Evarts. In two phone calls with Flagg and one with a member of Samantha’s defense team, Martha mentions “serious emotional problems during the last couple of years of their marriage” stemming from Samantha’s time in Vietnam, and describes her
repeatedly suffer[ing] from episodes of violent behavior during which his personality and behavior differed greatly from that of his usual gentle self. On at least one occasion the defendant lost control and attacked Martha with a knife, but afterwards had no awareness or recollection of the incident, this conduct despite the fact that the defendant and [she] had a close, loving relationship.
Martha also indicates that despite pressure from her and other friends, Samantha refused to seek counseling. Of Samantha’s transness, which ended their relationship when it emerged in the late 1970s (a common outcome to this day), Martha expresses some doubts. She suggests at one point that the idea was planted in her ex by “transsexual counselors looking for a feather in their caps”: “He wasn’t coping well as a male and was vulnerable to anyone with a sympathetic ear.” And elsewhere: “I don’t know if Glen was transsexual or not. It might have just seemed the easy way to go.”
These doubts and misconceptions from even a sympathetic intimate underscore the profound general ignorance about the trans condition at the time, which more or less guaranteed that the nature of Samantha’s struggles would be misconstrued, and thus mishandled. For the great majority of those who even knew of it, being trans was at best a symptom of deep psychological confusion or, somehow, a form of escapism (“the easy way to go”: easy compared to what??). Chief Deputy Dickson considers at one point whether Samantha might have “changed sexes” to “defraud” someone—a possibility that was one of the rationales for the many local laws against public “cross-dressing” that began to appear in the mid-19th century.[2] Flagg, whose expertise on the subject stems from a glance in a dictionary, wonders after the March 1985 hearing why Samantha “didn’t…just get in touch with his feminine side?” My self-loathing drove me to effectively adopt the latter as a coping strategy around this time, and to muddle through two failed marriages and a stalled academic career before finally embracing the girl inside me as myself almost three decades later. That Samantha didn’t come out until her mid-30s thus doesn’t surprise me.
Also unsurprising, and far more likely to provoke a hostile response, is the psychological fragmentation that Martha describes. One year younger than my mom, Samantha grew up in a time in which ideas about gender were both fiercely cisnormative and strictly policed (laws against “cross-dressing” in public remained in effect in many places, including San Francisco,[3] into the 1970s). Confronted with this environment, the gender nonconforming child almost necessarily internalized strong negative feelings about who they were from a very early age, and learned to compartmentalize their psyche as a way to survive. Deepening internal tensions followed by psychological fragmentation and trauma were the all but inevitable results. Compounded with other sources of trauma like Vietnam, it’s easy to imagine how these conflictual inner dynamics could leave someone like Samantha deeply scarred in ways that would elude, and thus fall afoul of the cis-dominated world. Recalling his interactions with Samantha when transporting her to and from the state prison for a brief court hearing in January 1985, for example, Dickson “decided there’d been a change in Askeborn’s manner now that he was no longer Samantha. He seemed masculine and cold, even vicious. As though he’d kill you in a heartbeat.” Because the possibility that her transness might be a primary cause of her struggles—that she might still be Samantha—rather than a symptom of them doesn’t occur to Dickson, he “decides” on a more sinister explanation for her behavior. The tabloid True Detective, which published a story about the case in December 1985, was predictably more blunt:
Transvestite—a guy in drag. Transsexual—a guy or gal who wants to switch to the other sex. Which was the suspect? Actually, the cops didn’t give a damn. All they wanted was the right verdict in the murder-for-money case. They got it.[4]
At least they acknowledged the existence of trans men.
The one time I encountered an older trans acquaintance “en drab,” as she termed presenting as male, she seemed like a different person: brusque, even belligerent, the hardened shell of a persona she had forged over the decades to move in the world as male. Doubtless Flagg would have decided that she was “a better looking man than woman.”
Back
I loved maps as a young child. I remember freehand drawing the outlines of nations from around the world out of an atlas my family had. Tiny landlocked countries like Andorra and Bhutan, and Oceanian states like Tonga and Nauru, held a particular attraction for me, less because I wanted to visit them than because even then I think I sensed in them analogues to some of my deepest needs. For decades after that time, the answer to the question, Where did I most want to go?, was one I rarely let myself even fantasize about, since I could see no possibility of realizing it. I wanted to go somewhere I could live a “normal” life as myself, somewhere I belonged. I wanted to have a front yard that didn’t make me feel like I was trespassing. And I could imagine such a place only as an expanded domestic haven, obscured from the larger world up some rarely travelled byway—like a small island adrift in the Pacific or a mountain retreat nestled in the Pyrenees or Himalayas—a haven I shared with a partner and a small circle of fellow refugees.
The sole occasion I remember the possibility of counseling coming up when I was a child, I told my parents that I didn’t want it, that I could handle my situation myself. It was an assertion of yankee self-reliance that they thankfully accepted. (If I were growing up today, I would hope for a very different outcome.) Part me of believed, or hoped, that I could handle it on my own, but mostly I intuited that being placed in the hands of people like my teachers and my parents’ friends, no matter how well meaning they might be, would only make my situation worse. I intuited that my best course of action was to remain hidden until I could walk out the back door of my little hometown and find a place where—or wait for a time when—it would be safer for me to emerge. I can’t help but wonder now what form of aversion therapy or other barbarism I might have been subjected to had I agreed to undergo counseling as a child. At the very least, I fear my own conviction about who I was, tenuous at best due to the blitzkrieg of cisnormative messaging I’d absorbed, would have been fundamentally and perhaps irreparably shaken. But for better and worse, I chose instead to struggle alone in the protective sepulcher I’d erected around myself, hammering away at myself in its near-lightless chamber and rummaging through the shards for a glimpse of a staring eye, a quivering lip, the blur of an arm fending off a blow or folding over a head bowed in fetal retreat—fearing, hoping always that she, the monster inside me, would betray me to a foe or friend without.
Image sources
(1) Union River Bay: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) nautical chart 13316 (detail)
(2) Egypt Bay: NOAA nautical chart 13318 (detail)
(3) Sandworm and bloodworm illustrations: W. Herbert Wilson, Jr., and R. Eugene Ruff, Species Profiles: Life Histories and Environmental Requirements of Coastal Fishes and Invertebrates (North Atlantic): Sandworm and Bloodworm (Fish and Wildlife Service Biological Report 82 (11.80), TR EL-82-4, April 1988, PDF file, accessed from https://www.maine.gov/dmr/science-research/species/worms/index.html 3-29-2022)
(4) Life Magazine cover image (accessed from http://classicshowbiz.blogspot.com/2011/05/interview-with-milton-delugg-part-one.html 3-29-2022)
(5) New York Daily News cover image (accessed from https://lgbt-history-archive.tumblr.com/post/153906666342/ex-gi-becomes-blonde-beauty-operations-transform 3-29-2022)
(6) Taunton Bay: NOAA nautical chart 13318 (detail)
(7) Thomaston: NOAA nautical chart 13301 (detail)
(8) True Detective: Joseph L. Koenig, “$2,700 Was Motive Enough for the He/She Killer!” (accessed from https://www.ebay.com/itm/352625152700 3-29-2022)
Footnotes
[1] Patrick Flynn, “The Wicked Good Sense of Humor Down East,” Washington Post, July 31, 1988 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1988/07/31/the-wicked-good-sense-of-humor-down-east/b1860b24-4254-4e5f-b857-a5699d55d85a/)
[2] Bennett Capers, “Cross Dressing and the Criminal,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 20:1 (2008), p. 9 (accessed from https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu). See also Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Seal Press, 2008) pp. 31-36.
[3] “When cross-dressing was criminal: Book documents history of longtime San Francisco law,” February 2015 (https://news.sfsu.edu/when-cross-dressing-was-criminal-book-documents-history-longtime-san-francisco-law)
[4] Joseph L. Koenig, “$2,700 Was Motive Enough for the He/She Killer!,” p. 45 (https://www.ebay.com/itm/352625152700)
About the author
Maine native Anastasia Walker is a queer essayist, poet, and scholar living in Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared in several journals, and her first book of poetry, The Girl Who Wasn’t and Is, was published in 2022. She’s also a passionate amateur photographer and musicologist, and has translated her love for vinyl into dozens of snazzy low-tech music videos on her YouTube channel. She volunteers for her city’s PFLAG chapter and the Transgender Law Center’s prison mail program, and is a lover of long walks and (when she visits home in the summers) swimming in the ocean. Her blog: https://anastasiaswalker.blogspot.com/.
About the Artist
Tiffany Dugan is an artist and writer based in New York City. She is inspired by puzzling divergent elements together and revels in the synchronicities that emerge. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in New York and her work is in collections throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Her art has been published in *82 Review, The Penn Review, and Beyond Words. She received The Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College (2019) for Creative Non-Fiction. Please visit https://www.tiffanydugan.com/ and IG: @tiffany.dugan.