Hi,
I have started a newsletter through Constant Contact. If you wish to receive postings like are on here then I suggest that you write me and give me your email address for inclusion into my newsletter posts. My email is GKUHNWRITES@AOL.COM and I look forward to communicating with you.
Sincerely, Gordon Kuhn
A Soft Tapping in Darkness Came
Last night I was wakened from a deep and troubled sleeping
Sleeping deep, blanket wrapped, and restless in the dark
When there came a soft tapping, a gentle and easy rapping
Gently placed upon the cold glass window near my bed
And from that slight sound, that gentle tap, I was drowsy led
Led from my sleeping deep and blanket wrapped, restless in the dark
To peer with no slight concern and wonder and seek the sight
That lay hidden, perhaps in death, in the rain filled night
Death in memories with ghosts that leave the living in fright
While hoping and thinking it must be a branch from my tree
One close to the side of the window that I could plainly see
That in the wind and rain that storm filled restless night
Could rap and tap and do its best to cause me no common fright
Should I but simply stare off to where there was no light
And then sudden appear some phantom in my sight
Some ghost of man or men who walked last night
Whose shadows live and come from the past
While haunting now their sad memories are cast
They that walk their walks restless always every night
So close and far they live and walk within my sight
From memories best dealt with in the light
Memories best left alone during a restless, sleepless night
Apparitions real perhaps that haunt my every thought
While in a restless sleep just peace is sought
Simple peace of mind that cannot for any price be bought.
© 2018 Gordon Kuhn, All Rights Reserved 6/30/2018
This is a continuation of the text in the book: Predator; The Man Who Didn’t Exist; Do You Know How to Fly?
The main title (Do You Know How to Fly?) was a question posed by Delmer Smith to a woman victim as he held our out naked over her 12th floor balcony in the middle of the night and (after he had physically and sexually abused her) he asked her if she knew how to fly.
The book was developed over a period of years with interviews of not only the killer, but of his fiancé at the time, the victims who were alive and approachable, law enforcement, and the attorneys involved. If you desire to buy the book it can be purchased directly from me (I sign it) or at Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or any bookstore for that matter. My website is http://www.authorgordonkuhn.com and you can make a purchase there.
Okay, so here we go:
Chapter 2 “He’s my Uncle.”
The defenses plea for mercy.
“He’s My Uncle.”
It is August 14th, 2012 and Mr. Brunvand, Delmer Smith’s defense attorney, will introduce two young women to the Court. They have traveled to Bradenton, Florida from Detroit, Michigan out of love for the defendant. Brunvand plans to show a different side of Delmer to the Court. It is an attempt to obtain some leniency for his client to avoid the death penalty. “Good morning,” he said to the first woman. She had just taken a seat on the stand and been sworn in, “Please tell the Jury your full name.”
“Alicia Phillips.”
“And Alicia, how old are you?” He smiled gently at her.
“Twenty-nine.”
Brunvand continues with questions regarding Ms. Phillips residence and employment. She has come from her home in Bradford, Michigan where she lives with her 3-year-old daughter. She has come to Bradenton to speak in open court on behalf of a man being held on first-degree murder charges.
“How do you know Delmer Smith?”
“He’s my uncle.”
Brunvand asks her if she can point out Delmer in the courtroom “and tell the Jury what he’s wearing?”
She does so, indicating a man seated at the defense table wearing “a striped blue shirt, collared shirt.”
“And is he someone who you consider yourself close to?” Brunvand gently asks.
“Yes, I love him very much.”
“Do you recall an instance as a child where Delmer came to your aid?”
“Yes,” Ms. Phillips went on to tell about an instance where she had “been bad” and was being punished for it by getting “a spanking.” She explained that her grandmother, Velma Shelton Smith, Delmer Smith’s mother, had picked up a switch, her apparent singular choice for dealing with such issues, and was spanking her when her nose began to bleed. Delmer, she told the Court, stepped in between his mother and his niece protecting her from being struck anymore by his mother.
“And he calmed me down, and—you know, he always came to my aid.”
To Be Continued.
AuthorGordonKuhn.com
GordonKuhn.com
or gkuhnwrites@aol.com
The following is an excerpt from Predator, The Man Who Didn’t Exist; Do You Know How to Fly? It is the first chapter. I already posted part of it and this is the entire chapter complete now.
1
Birth of an Evil Seed
Delmer Smith III was born July 19, 1971 in Detroit, Michigan to a couple who are now both deceased. He is one of multiple children from this mixed-race union. His mother, Velma Shelton, was white and his father was black. Delmer is light skinned, light enough to pass for being white in many circumstances. The mixed bloodlines will provoke identification confusion in the future when, as an adult, he is the suspect in several crimes.
He is given his father’s name and the family happily pronounces him to be Delmer the 3rd. His name, and that of his father, is a variant of Delmar (also used within the family) and comes from Spanish and “Old” French. It means “of the sea.” The choice is, perhaps prophetic in an eerie way.
The sea is a mercurial place. It can be calm, inviting, sublime, and soft at one point in time and then, with little if any warning, it will become treacherous, evil, violent, destructive, a merciless killer. And, so it was to be with Delmer the 3rd. As it is for the sea, he also will be a mystery to those he meets in life. Michele Quinones, his onetime fiancé, told me as she was trying to make sense of their relationship, “He was the man who didn’t exist.”
She went on to say to me, “I recall one day we were fishing and he was standing off behind me and I looked up at him. He didn’t know I was watching him. What I saw was a man stripped for a moment of what or who he was. He was so soft standing there, a little boy. So strange,” she smiled as she thought back. “He was so at peace. And yet, there is this other Delmer that I did not know or even suspect might exist. I saw him for what he might have been, what he could have been, not as he was.”
He was a burglar. He had a weird sexual appetite. He preyed on women who were elderly, or close to being so. Moreover, he was a brutal killer without compassion for his victims, or sense of guilt for what he did to them.
This is a man who is an enigma to many—perhaps even to himself. In his wake will be both terror and love as well as questions—questions that no one will ever be able to fully answer.
The newborn entered the world as all children do, coated in a wet blanket of blood and body fluids from his mother, which left his small wrinkled body coated in a shining slime that needed to be hurriedly washed off. But first, so his mother could touch him, the doctor laid him up high on her stomach. The newborn wriggled about and let go a torrent of crying while the doctor clamped and cut the umbilical cord. Then, nurses carefully lifted him and took him over to a table and water to clean him up.
He was quite a sight, all slick and slimy from the birth, his lungs sucking in huge gulps of air to expel in great rips of crying in protest for having been taken from a warm place and thrust into cool air beneath blinding lights, assaulted by monstrous noises, and unknown things touching him while his arms and legs swatted here and there and at everyone around him as he let his anger be known. Soon, they brought him back to Velma, wrapped tightly in a soft blue blanket and laid him down so she could hold him close. It was only a short while later that Velma and the baby were transported to her room where she could spend more time examining and loving on her baby. And then a small flood of waiting relatives and friends arrived to greet her and the newborn.
Exhausted, he had closed his eyes and drifted into a deep sleep ignoring the trip down the hall on the stretcher to where they lifted he and his mother onto her hospital bed. It was much later that he felt someone tugging on his blanket and holding his tiny hands.
He opened his eyes to the harsh glare of ceiling lights and a cloud of faces peering down at him all with smiles beaming well wishes. But he didn’t understand all that and he didn’t understand why they were holding his hands and marveling at how strong he was. “What a grip,” someone said. “Just look at how he holds on.” Little could the friends and relatives surrounding him then imagine that those tiny hands would grow and one day beat, sexually assault, drag, and even kill women not much older than his own mother was then.
Then he was surrounded in safety and comfort by his parents, brothers, sisters, other family members, and a handful of family friends. They most assuredly were like others when addressing a new born for the first time. They would have remarked at how tiny his fingers and toes were in comparison to theirs. Perhaps they marveled about how strong the tiny hands were as his fingers curled about theirs and tightened, never suspecting that those fingers one day would be suspected of curling around a baseball bat and beating a woman to death in Sarasota, Florida.
They would have laughed as they tried to get his attention by making odd sounds and tickling him. And he, like all newborns, probably just yawned and looked this way and that, not focusing on any one person or thing. They would have wondered about his future. They surely laughed and were excited about his prospects and, like many parents and well-wishers do, probably even imagined him becoming some famous and wealthy person, maybe even the President of the United States. However, it was not to be. A bad seed is hard to recognize when so tiny. He would become famous, in a sense, as he terrorized parts of Sarasota and Manatee Counties because of the brutality of his crimes.
It is doubtful that anyone present in Delmer Smith’s life then would have dared to predict, or could have imagined, that thirty-eight years later this then tiny bundle of life would be under arrest and accused of being a violent serial rapist, home invader, burglar, murderer, and suspected drug trafficker. All they would have seen before them then, wrapped in a soft blue hospital blanket, was a baby reaching up, sleepy eyed, with curling fingers and toes, stretching, a wonder of life.
No one could have anticipated his troubled youth or his struggle with education. This child would repeat the second grade, and then the third, the fourth, and the fifth. At age fourteen, and in the fifth grade, he was surrounded by nine and ten year olds. Then, suddenly, he was promoted to the ninth grade skipping all the years between, and placed into a special needs class. Testing would determine his verbal IQ to be seventy, one point above “retarded.”
Not one of his then admirers saw the monster he would become. However, as he grew older, there were several neighborhood events, referred to anonymously by those who knew him as a child, which surfaced in and before his teenage years, that were indicative of a troubled future. No one then recognized his lack of impulse control that would plague him. It would not be identified until he was much older and then on trial for his life.
Nevertheless, Delmer Smith has another side to him that was noted by Michele Quinones. It was also discussed in open court during the presentencing stage of his murder trial when the defense introduced two of his family members who, as young girls, had their lives significantly influenced by his interactions with them over the years.
More contacts.
Harsh Reality wrote that like my comment on “Life.” And, I did and do like it. Harsh Reality is also known as Opinion Man. He is someone who really puts a lot of thought into what he is writing and has a huge following.
https://aopinionatedman.com/2017/08/16/life-5/?c=451612#comment-451612
==============================
MakeItUltra is another site worth visiting. The author speaks on therapy, narcissism, and narcissistic abuse. That can be found at https://makeitultrapsychology.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/5-signs-you-havent-fully-healed-from-narcissistic-abuse/
There he offers 5 signs about narcissistic abuse. Very interesting.
======================================
Man of Many Thoughts is another that I have commented on and is well worth a journey to his blog to see what he is writing about. Guaranteed he can set up a scenario that will generate a lot conversations. https://keithgarrettpoetry.com/2017/08/18/dismantling-of-america/
==========================
Then there is this delightful blog BlueFishh. The author welcomes you warmly and explains what she is all about in a few simple paragraphs. The blog used to be call Economix.
https://bluefishh.wordpress.com/about/?blogsub=confirming#blog_subscription-3
==========================
If I could… (Friday Night Poetry Corner #142)
You have to visit this location. Seriously. The art work is interesting in itself, a bit confusing at first, but draws the artist/poet/searchers/etc (etc is a pretty big area) right in. So go, read.
=========================
Lakshmi Padmanaban is an Indian girl who …. well, you can read about her at
https://thethoughtfulrants.wordpress.com/about/
if I tell you anything it will spoil the adventure of going and reading her blog. So, go, now. Just do it.
==============================
jade0207 ah, this one is an area for ladies.
164 bloggers like that page!!!!!!
Personally I have always had more girl relationships than male relationships. I guess I just like women more than men and, as far as my mom and dad were concerned, that was and is a good thing. Women are just so incredible, love everyone I ever met.
===========================
Later more on Delmer Smith and the victims whose blood he shed.
CHAPTER 1
Birth of an Evil Seed
Delmer Smith III was born July 19, 1971 in Detroit, Michigan to a couple who are now both deceased. He is one of multiple children from this mixed-race union. His mother, Velma Shelton, was white and his father was black. Delmer is light skinned, light enough to pass for being white in many circumstances. The mixed bloodlines will provoke identification confusion in the future when, as an adult, he is the suspect in several crimes.
He is given his father’s name and the family happily pronounces him to be Delmer the 3rd. His name, and that of his father, is a variant of Delmar (also used within the family) and comes from Spanish and “Old” French. It means “of the sea.” The choice is, perhaps prophetic in an eerie way.
The sea is a mercurial place. It can be calm, inviting, sublime, and soft at one point in time and then, with little if any warning, it will become treacherous, evil, violent, destructive, a merciless killer. And, so it was to be with Delmer the 3rd. As it is for the sea, he also will be a mystery to those he meets in life. Michele Quinones, his onetime fiancé, told me as she was trying to make sense of their relationship, “He was the man who didn’t exist.”
She went on to say to me, “I recall one day we were fishing and he was standing off behind me and I looked up at him. He didn’t know I was watching him. What I saw was a man stripped for a moment of what or who he was. He was so soft standing there, a little boy. So strange,” she smiled as she thought back. “He was so at peace. And yet, there is this other Delmer that I did not know or even suspect might exist. I saw him for what he might have been, what he could have been, not as he was.” TO BE CONTINUED
See authorgordonkuhn.com
A book about a serial rapist and killer.
This is a blogged book. It is about a real killer and real victims.
PROLOGUE
“How is it that you didn’t know? How could you not see these things about him?” Michele Quinones leaned her head slightly to the side as she repeated the same questions that had been put to her by those she thought she knew and whom she thought knew her.
Her face was expressionless; however, her head and right hand responded with a slight rise and then dip as she placed emphasis on each “you” echoing the questions put to her repeatedly in disbelief by family members and friends.
It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon, April 14th, 2013, and the one-time girlfriend of Delmer Smith, an attractive, intelligent, forty-two year old woman, sat with me at a small table outside the Panera Bread Company in the Coco Plum Plaza in North Port, Florida, drinking iced coffee. We had just finished lunch at the sandwich shop where we met to discuss her relationship with a man who terrorized women living alone in Sarasota and Manatee Counties in 2009.
She paused in her thoughts, her unblinking, dark eyes held mine in their grasp. I could see in her gaze that she was hurting deep within.
“That is what they asked me. You know? Over and over again.” She looked away and down, and then added, “It wasn’t so much a question,” she said, “but more of a demand.”
A short-lived smile touched her lips. Her voice lowered, softened. She lit a cigarette, busying her fingers, took a deep draw on it, then blew the first exhale up and away from my direction. “My friends,” she inhaled again. “My family,” she said quietly, more to herself than to me. Her eyes were still looking down and with the palm of her free hand she absentmindedly smoothed her dress. “It was like, you know, I was at fault for some reason. I was the guilty one. That is what they wanted to know.” To be continued.
Just woke and fixed a salad made up of cucumber, sweet onion, tomato, and Caesar dressing. Love it. Thinking of writing a play. Wish I had the talent. Don’t think that I do. In the meantime I look at my family history and think of all the rich material there and believe it is sad to let the story not be told. I look at life and see mistakes, countless mistakes, and a tragedy that should never have occurred and wonder just how to handle it. I wonder if it should be told and does it really matter. I don’t know. Really. I don’t know. I just see this pile of shit (can I say that?) and wonder about it all. I wonder who would it matter to except for myself?
==========================================================
Once
a poem by Gordon Kuhn Copyright 08.03.17
I was young once and lived all alone.
Each night I sat drunk in the dark
And listened to the neighbors fighting down the street
He said, she said, oh who gives a royal fuck.
My nightly dinner a plate of fresh boiled spaghetti,
The sauce a greasy mix of fried bacon with sweet onion
My drink a tepid six pack of cheap bought beer
The couch before the tv was my throne
And drunk I had not a drop of respectability
As I staggered about in my individuality
Inside the one bedroom apartment
Lost in a world without companionship
Lost without counsel, without guidance
And faced life confused and all alone.
Beer cans setting on the counter
One rolled up under the recliner rocker
Neighbors fighting down the street
He said, she said, oh who gives a fuck
Simply leave me alone, all alone
Its how I want to live, all alone
Being young once and eating a dinner of spaghetti
Its sauce fried bacon and onion on top a greasy mix
Washed down by a six pack of Old Milwaukee
I could not afford a better fare.
Beer cans setting on the counter
My body asleep on the floor
Alcoholism was the bed time Teddy Bear
Beside the bed near the door
Where I could see the beer can under the rocker
The neighbors screaming, fighting down the street
He said, she said, oh who gives a fuck.
Beer cans setting on the counter
The neighbors fighting down the street
He said, she said, oh who really gives a fuck.
Chapter one: How do I love thee, let me count thy bruises.
He stood in front of her rubbing the knuckles on his right hand staring down at her where she sat on a wooden chair in front of him. He growled as she reached up to where blood trickled from the bruised flesh below her right eye. Touched it, saw the blood, then lowering her arms clasped her hands in front of her on her lap. Slowly she looked up at him with tears racing down to her chin. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he voice trembled. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The year was 1926. She was just 19 and he was 27.
He slapped her hard jerking her head to the left. She slowly recovered. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“So, my mother and sister are liars?” Blood stood against the vows of marriage. Sometimes blood is stronger, and in this case it was. “They saw you at the theater”
“No,” her voice wavered, “no they, if anyone it was Virginia and all I did was acknowledge an old school friend.”
“Who you then went into the movies with.”
“He had his girlfriend with him”
“You sat with him.”
“I sat with them, not with him,” she said her face hurting her badly. Her tongue slipped sideways and found a tooth had been dislodged.
**********************
Stiffness of mind can be a problem and should be noted to tend along with a great deal of anger. I deal with anger. I have problems with anger. I can be very un-nice with anger when it overtakes me and lately it has been near me too much. I think it is just that the world is moving at such a strange pace and what I hope for is not actually happening but the reverse is. Maybe that holds true for you as well. In any case being catatonic would be a problem not only in Milwaukee but in Bradenton as well.
I wonder if people can really change or is it just backwash that we get when we think we changed and then something happens that drags us back into all the same shit. I don’t know. I just known that when looking at my life I can see too many mistakes.
Its a new day and hopefully a day where anger doesn’t creep in to my life or yours.
Oh, and I have never been in Milwaukee but I understand they brew a very fine beer there.
