Chapter 1

My name is Robert Eugene Connors, and this is a full and complete confession of the crime I perpetrated against Chastity Pearl Blaylock. Chastity was, at the time of the offense, sixteen years of age and was the step-daughter of my sister, Amy Blaylock (nee Amy Connors), who married Chastity’s biological father when Chastity was almost a year old.

Okay, now that the official part of this confession is out of the way, I’ll give the details, as specified in the order the judge gave me three days ago. It has taken me three days because a lot of other things went on after the trial ended. This is the first chance I’ve had to sit and write ... and arrange my thoughts in some cohesive fashion. The point is, what follows isn’t meant to be an X-rated novel ... it’s just the details I must provide per my understanding of Judge Gardner’s order. He ordered me to provide details of the offense, and explain my actions. He said this is part of his pre-sentencing investigation. He found me guilty, but won’t sentence me until after this pre-sentencing investigation is over.

Not that there hasn’t already been a ton of investigation.

Anyway, I’m not an author and I’ve never taken a course in creative writing, but I got the impression Judge Gardner didn’t want me to be “creative” about this. I don’t even know exactly what to say. My lawyer wants me to save space at the end to fill that in after sentencing. He said something about how the whole thing might be useful in an appeal. My point is, I’m just going to tell things the way I remember them happening, and hope it’s what Judge Gardner is looking for. He didn’t say so, but I get the feeling this might be made available in some cleansed format for other people to read as a deterrent, should they ever be tempted to do what I did. Or maybe it will be used by professional counselors to treat other ... perverts. I guess that’s what they’re calling me. I don’t feel like a pervert. I guess all I can do is say what happened.

One other thing, before I go on. I’ve thought about this a lot since I got arrested, I guess to try and understand it all myself, so mixed in with my confession there’s going to be some philosophical rambling. That isn’t to try to obfuscate the facts. But the judge said to “explain my actions” and part of my actions were based on how I thought about things. One definition of philosophy is that it’s the study of general and fundamental problems associated with existence. Chastity created a general and fundamental problem associated with my existence ... and I suppose the way I reacted to that did the same thing to her. So I don’t feel like ruminating on that a little bit is wrong. Call it part of the details of my confession. Besides, the constitution says we get to defend ourselves.

Before I get to Chastity, I’ll give my own background information. I know the court already has it, but it’s better for me to put it in here and not need it, than need it and not put it in here. I was thirty-two at the time of the offense, younger than my sister by three years. I was widowed and self-employed as the owner of an outdoor shooting range. It’s the only public range in the county and my list of membership is fairly extensive, so between daily fees, dues, special events, and salvage of brass, I make ends meet pretty well. I’m five-ten, in moderate shape, don’t smoke, drink occasionally and look normal. At least that’s what I think. I’ve been told women think I look “rugged,” whatever that means. I detect interest from women, particularly in classes for beginners on owning and shooting a gun, but I don’t mix business with pleasure, so women I meet at the range are off limits by my own rule. I like women just fine, but running the range, even with some employees to help, doesn’t leave a lot of time for socializing. I suppose I just haven’t met a woman who I felt was worth giving up what free time I have for.

Had not met a woman like that.

Before the offense.

Now, about Chastity, who I decided to nickname “Chas” when she was about ten. That name is usually short for Charles, but it fits. She was the quintessential tomboy back then.

The name “Chastity” is interesting, on a sociological level. Here’s one of those philosophical ramblings: If you want your little girl to grow up pure and chaste, don’t name her Chastity.

I should explain that. The meaning is obvious and works fine during a girl’s prepubescent years. It fits, it’s cute, and it reminds one to avoid introducing her to things adult. But little girls grow up and then that name begins to become a liability. It doesn’t work anymore. Not in this world. Maybe it did in the seventeen hundreds, but not anymore. These days having a name like Chastity is like waving the red cape at the bull, or having a T shirt that says, “Bet you wish you could see my pussy. Bet you wish you could lick it!”

How do I know that? Well, being sixteen was only sixteen years back for me, and my mind isn’t so foggy that I don’t remember it. I remember the conversations I had with my friends about girls. Horny teenage guys don’t think about names like “Chastity” like adults do. The ‘meaning’ gets a little skewed by hormones. Especially if the girl is bubbly, cute, and has long blond hair and curves out the ass.

Hmmm. I wonder if I’m going to get docked for language when the judge reads this. He’s the one who said, “Be honest in your portrayal of what happened and why,” so that’s what I’m trying to do.

What I meant was that, for a teenage boy, a lot of life is wishing you could have what is forbidden to you. One example is that you want to drive in your early teens but are forbidden until your mid to late teens. Then there’s booze and ... of course ... sex. When it comes to sex, you want the girls you probably can’t actually have. And what could be a hotter fantasy than wanting a girl named Chastity?

As it turns out, that fantasy stays hot, even after you stop being a teenage boy.

Say, for example, even if you’re a thirty-two year old man.

I didn’t intend for it to happen, of course. It’s not like I have a particular interest in teenage girls. Sure, they’re fun to look at, but I also know most of them haven’t had enough life experience to be able to enter into a mature, satisfying relationship with an older man. The things most girls in their teens are interested in and excited about just aren’t the kinds of things a thirty-two year old guy is going to find engaging. So looking is kind of like entertainment. It’s fun to imagine what the girl will be like when she’s mature enough to carry on a decent conversation and then get excited about hopping into bed.

I used the word “most” twice in the last paragraph, and I think it was the right word to use. Unfortunately, “most” didn’t include Chastity. She was, in my opinion, much more mature than her peers, more mature by as many as five or six years. And her interests were close enough to mine that when we were together, it was more like two friends hanging out, than an uncle and his niece being together.

Why do I feel she was more mature? That’s hard to express. She’d had some hard knocks. Her father embezzled money from his company when she was ten, and got sent to prison. Three years into that, he witnessed a murder and testified about it. A week later he had been shanked, himself. So Chastity went from visiting daddy in prison every month to being fatherless.

And I went from seeing my sister and Chastity once a month to being there a lot. It’s not an excuse. It’s just why I started taking a heavier interest in my niece. My own wife had died five years previously of ovarian cancer, so I knew what they were going through.

I don’t think of myself as being a father figure to her. I had (and still have) no clue as to how to be a father. All I could do was be there while my sister got her wrecked life back on track. She’d been going to night school before this, and had recently passed her exam to become a real estate agent. So she was just diving into the pool that was real estate, looking for a broker to work under, trying to make friends in the business, trying to start a new life. I thought she should take some time to grieve, but they were broke and she felt like she had to charge ahead.

The problem was that Chastity wasn’t old enough to stay home on her own while mommy was out trying to earn a commission.

Enter ... me. Again, it’s not an excuse. It’s why I started spending a whole lot of most days with Chastity.

At thirteen, Chastity was like a colt. I’m not a horse person, so I can’t supply good ages for this analogy. But you know how you see a young colt, prancing around in the pasture. It doesn’t have all the muscles of a bigger horse, and looks slim and leggy. But it’s just full of energy and loves to play. From what I hear, a young horse like that will play with anything, another colt, the rancher’s dog, sheep ... anything. It’s not afraid of the world, yet.

Chastity was like that, except that she already knew what the world could throw at you, and how quickly things could change. Besides her dad, she lost a friend to suicide when she was fourteen. I think I’ll say a little more about that, because it’s a good example of the kinds of conversations we had.

As I said, I run a shooting range. I also teach classes in gun safety and concealed carry. So, naturally, I own guns, have them in the house, and carry one concealed most of the time. So Chastity was around guns from the time she was about six. When I became her primary care-giver she began interacting with guns. I’d already given her instructions on how to handle a gun safely, but she hadn’t done any shooting up to that point. My sister always refused to learn anything about guns and, therefore, is afraid of them. She was afraid of them on Chastity’s behalf, too, and didn’t want Chastity to touch one. That was fine with me, except that if Chastity was going to be around me, she’d be around guns, and I believed it was in her best interests to learn how not to have an accident with one.

In other words, I taught Chastity some things we both knew her mother would be unhappy about. Which is why we didn’t tell her mother she’d been taught those things. Another philosophical moment, here. Entering into a conspiracy to keep secrets from a girl’s parent(s) makes it easier to keep other secrets from a girl’s parent(s). And breaking one rule with a girl makes it easier to break another one.

Amy worked a lot. I mean a lot. I worked ten hours most days, but had the advantage of being the boss, so I could choose which ten hours I wanted to work. That meant I could take Chas to school and pick her up, which freed Amy to go do realtor stuff. The market was still depressed, because of the housing bubble of 2008, and she had to put in more fourteen hour days than I can remember.

So, when school was in session, a typical day for Chastity would be go to school, get picked up by what her friends called her “hunky uncle”, do her homework at the range, in one of the training rooms, go home to either my house or hers to eat supper, and then go back to the range with me. I’d close up and get her home by nine, and either turn her over to her mother or send her to bed. If Amy wasn’t there, I waited for her. I like to read, and always have a paperback or three in my truck.

If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like much of a life for a thirteen and fourteen-year-old girl ... well, you’d have to talk to the girl. Chastity thrived on it. That’s my opinion, of course, but there are details too numerous to throw into a simple paragraph like the one before this.

For example, it almost never took her more than an hour, maybe two, to finish her homework. That would make it somewhere around four-thirty. So she’d get a pair of ear muffs and go watch people shoot. By the time of the offense this is all about, she’d probably watched a million rounds being launched down range, and had learned a hell of a lot about the issues and problems people have, trying to make one bullet go through the same hole in the paper as the previous one. That’s what makes people interested in target shooting, by the way. The challenge of trying to shoot ten rounds and make them hit the target exactly where you want them to can be addictive.

Which, I suppose, brings us to an example of one of my previous philosophical ramblings. The one about how breaking one rule makes it easier to break the next one. When Chastity first started doing her homework at the range, she had handled guns, and knew how to determine if one was loaded or not. She knew how to make one safe if it was loaded ... but had never fired one. Once she started being at the range with me, and seeing people shoot a wide variety of guns, she observed that all the gun does is sit there until someone pulls the trigger. Then it goes bang and jumps a little. It produces some smoke and maybe a fireball at the tip of the muzzle. But it doesn’t knock people down, or anything like that.

She saw men and women and kids her own age shooting. So one day she asked me if she could shoot a gun.

“What kind of gun?” I asked.

“I think I want to start with a .22,” she said. “They look pretty tame.”

“That’s a good choice,” I said.

So I got my Ruger Mark III out of the safe in my office and went to the middle range, which had nobody on it at the moment. I had three ranges. One was a rifle range that went out to 200 yards. I had a golf cart that people used to go set and retrieve the long-range targets. If you were shooting up to a hundred yards, you just walked. Then there was a 25-50 yard range, primarily for sighting in scopes. The pistol range was next to that. It went out to 25 yards.

I set her up a target in a movable target stand, about ten yards from the bench, and went through the fundamentals of shooting with her. It’s not hard. You have to think about several things at the same time, but with practice that gets easier. I also had her rest her hands on sandbags, to take lateral movement out of the situation. That let her concentrate on sight picture and trigger pull.

Her first round was an inch right of the bulls eye.

Within twenty minutes, she was tearing up the red circle in the middle of the target.

Within twenty days, she’d progressed through .38 special, to 9mm semi auto, to .40 and .45 auto.

She was a born shooter, and she loved it.

By the time she was fourteen, she was as good with a handgun as I was. Then she turned her eye to rifles.

I had a lot of rifles, too. I sometimes meet people who, when they find out what I do, ask, “Do you own a gun?” That usually tells me they don’t, and that I may get some other ... um ... questions from an inexperienced point of view. Some other people I know call them stupid questions, but I don’t think that’s fair. If you know nothing about a subject, you’re going to ask some questions that sound silly to an expert.