What if?

Yesterday a friend suggested a movie to me, The Texas Killing Fields, starring Sam Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It sounded familiar to me and when I looked it up online I discovered why, because I had watched a CBS 48 Hours news story about the real life unsolved murders in the stretch between Houston and Galveston known as ‘the killing fields’. Over the last few decades a sickening number of young women have been brutally victimized then dumped in the old oil fields. A few of the cases have been solved but the majority have not. While watching it again yesterday I remembered something I mentioned in an earlier post about the Black Dahlia murder, how if I could go back in time it would be to find out who committed that horrendous crime.

Here’s where the what ifs comes in. What if we could somehow travel back to the hour each one of these girls was last seen and follow her, see who takes her? Write down tag numbers, descriptions, rush it to the proper authorities…but wait. If that much was possible why wouldn’t we simply warn the girl not to get in the car with the man or tell her not to leave home that day? Because if we do warn her we’ll never see who picks her up and he’ll simply go and pick up some other girl. So many stories have been written about going back in time to alter history, but because of all the variables I suspect that like mythology’s Cassandra we would find ourselves unable to change a thing.

And if we had to satisfy ourselves with simply seeing the truth of the moment, discovering who did it (who and how many shot JFK, who was Jack the Ripper, etc.) and could not alter any part of it, would we still do it? I’m no longer sure I would. Something tells me it would feel a lot like the last day of the O.J.Simpson trial, and that day sucked. Are the answers to such mysteries worth having simply for the sake of knowing?

Link to the 48 Hours story on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7385610n

Trailer for The Texas Killing Fields, starring Sam Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan