Chapter 40

Public Response

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, we have on our show one of the most notorious women in Chicago. Called the "Princess of Death" by Grace Miller, and identified by the Illinois prosecutors office as "the most misguided member of the Findley Cult", I would like to welcome Candy Mitchell. And with her this evening is Robert Mitchell of the Illinois Justice Project. Now Candy and Robert, for our viewers, you are not related?" Chelsea Winters said in her opening of the evening edition of Chicago Today.

"No, Chelsea. We are not. But I might change my name with all the notoriety around here" Candy replied with a laugh." Although the prosecutor's office and some other media have been calling me something else." Candy said.

"So, Candy, do you feel that you have been unfairly described in the media?" Chelsea asked.

"I think that calling me a calloused and sadistic murderer is unfair. I think Colleen McNair is a very unhappy woman and has overstepped the bounds of her office with what she has done. I feel that her personal persecution of me and others shows that there is abuse of the system for her personal satisfaction, and that only good legal help has kept me from being imprisoned for obeying the law." Candy said.

"Now, Robert, is the Illinois Justice Project involved this.?" Chelsea asked.

"Not directly. Actually we are investigating prosecutorial abuse regarding a lot of issues in the office today, but this is probably the most interesting. I approached this with an open mind and I was convinced here several months ago that Findley was peculiar but within the law at the time. Waging retroactive prosecution in criminal court is not a good use of the legal process."

"So what do you have to say about the accusation of enforced slavery with respect to the charges we are seeing?" Chelsea continued.

"Robert, you are the lawyer. I will give my own impression later." Candy said.

"Chelsea, the Slavery Statutes were brought about two and a half years ago after the involuntary termination of Meredith Williams of USN. Her termination on broadcast television as a part of the educational program that was done by Merle Hill at H&S Meats caused a major uproar. That and other substitution for pay incidents forced legislation of the Fair Selection Act under the Illinois operation of the Population control Act. Oddly enough, one of the co-authors and researchers of that bill was one of the people who was selected and sent to H&S last year. That is Carol Black."

"Really? Isn't that a coincidence that she was later picked? Carol was your workmate and she is your lawyer, isn't she Candy?" Chelsea asked.

"Yes. She was selected and reported the same day that I did. We were all pulled out by David Findley for business purposes at the same day." Candy said.

"What do you mean when you say you were pulled for business purposes?" Chelsea asked.

"There were four of us pulled out by Margaret and David. All of us were supposed to go to H&S that day, and we were sent instead to Findley because of the health department closing down H&S. It was Margaret's first day at the business, and she and David had talked over doing a different model from other slaughterhouses."

"So what happened?" Chelsea asked.

"There were four of us initially. I was there as a volunteer replacement for my mother. Carol was there, Elizabeth Carter a friend of hers who was a Marketing VP at UMC Financial, Nancy Abbot, professor of women's studies at U of Chicago and me." Candy said.

"Wow. That is some pretty high-powered company, Candy. How did you get mapped into that?" Chelsea asked.

"Margaret pulled me aside as well as another volunteer to talk with us about why we were there and what we wanted and why. My friend Stacy was the other volunteer, and she was found to be pregnant. Secondary screening found out she had a boy, so she was sent home to family services."

"Chelsea, I want to point out something. Findley had the highest percentage of Male pregnancy exclusions in the history of the PCA anywhere." Robert said. "No one else in the country ever provided the level of screening, intake processing and exclusion that Findley did."

"We had all heard that from the blogs and press, Robert." Chelsea said. "What I want to know is what happened next. I want Candy's story"

"Well, there isn't much to it. The four of us were part of a string of eight women being terminated at the end of the day. We entered the service area first and Margaret had us stand aside while she brought the other four women through and terminated them one at a time."

"Margaret Findley did this?" Chelsea asked.

"Yes. Then she slid them down to the butcher tables and set them up for carving. While she was doing that, she told David to take us up to the break room for Pizza and she would be there in a little while." Candy said.

Chelsea looked at Candy in shock. "What happened next?"

"Well, Carol went into dry heaves. Nancy feinted. Liz looked at Margaret and said she was a cold-blooded bitch. I asked if I could stay and help." Candy said in a calm monotone.

Chelsea was now thoroughly stunned. Robert was smiling at the other seat next to Candy, as he had heard this story before.

"What is important to realize, Chelsea, is that all of these women had been legally selected and had legally reported. They were in actual fact beyond the guidelines and governances of the Slavery amendment to the PCA in Illinois. There were no rules regarding their treatment at this point." Robert said. "They were surrendered to the butcher as being already legally dead. How they were to be terminated was not covered under any of the statutes." Robert continued.

"Actually, there were some rules regarding us." Candy said. "We were facility limited. We could not leave the property. We were marked as any individual in confinement was. And we were a community at risk." Candy explained.

"Now that is not legally clear." Robert replied, getting agitated." Nor has that been established by case law."

"In our case, I believe that we were. If any of us had violated the constraints of the situation, we all would have been removed. Which would have meant that we would have been terminated. The first weekend there, I had to confine one woman who was taking about having unauthorized company. The alarm would have brought the police who would have removed us pending management presence. And we would have been spiked at City Hall." Candy said.

"That is not normally the community at risk. You cannot be at risk unless you would be placed in violation of the law." Robert continued.

"I think that will be established in court." Candy said.

"Moving along, Candy, I have a question. What happened then?" Chelsea asked.

"Carol, Elizabeth and Nancy went with David, and I helped carve up Jane, Caroline and Stephanie. After that, I helped clean up the floors and came out for dinner. That was when Marty Robinson said that if I was going to be working in the process area I had to be unionized with respect to the contract". Candy said.

"And this is the real interesting part of all of this, Chelsea" Robert said. "All of the women who worked at Findley as part of the process plant were paid union employees. All were governed by conflicting rules of the PCA and the union contracts. The Union shop rules were the only issue of forced membership. Everything else is voluntary."

"You mean voluntary if you wanted to stay alive." Chelsea said.

"Yes" Candy said. "You had to make a decision to contribute to the business. And you had to kill people as part of that contribution. Or help them get ready to die." Candy said calmly. "It sucked but it was what it was."

"Candy, How were you able to do that?" Chelsea asked.

"I had grown up on one of the last farms to be able to raise livestock in Tennessee and had worked slaughtering animals for a long time. My uncle was always very respectful of the animals he slaughtered, and I guess I could see how it applied to humans. Margaret was extremely warm and consoling to the women we serviced, and I wanted to be that way too." Candy said.

"Now, how can you be warm and consoling to people in a slaughterhouse?" Chelsea asked.

"Chelsea, Did you have any friends sent to us?" Candy asked.

"Yes. And we heard all about the intake and settlement questionnaire before they were terminated. But what I want to know is how can you be warm to someone you are going to turn into a steak?" Chelsea asked.

"Is this the part of the interview where you ask embarrassing questions and try to put me on the spot?" Candy said with a smile. "Chelsea, you are a woman. Do you want to be ordered around and pushed with a club or a shock stick?"

"No" Chelsea responded, smiling.

"And do you want to face death surrounded by strangers who have no concern over your feelings or how you are treated?" Candy continued.

"Not hardly" Chelsea answered "but"

"Excuse me. One last question." Candy interrupted." Do you think that anyone not in the position of being selected could understand what you were going through? Your worries and your needs as a woman?" Candy asked.

"No. I guess not. And that was what I am getting at. Do you really know what a woman was thinking?" Chelsea asked.

"Chelsea, every woman who worked at Findley's went through the entire standard process experience up to the point of being terminated. All of us were interviewed and had consulting with respect to end of life matters. We were given our choices of how to die, and we were processed. We had our documents filled out, we had our medical workups done and we were stripped and marched into the slaughter room. All of us really didn't know what to expect when we went through that door. Often we were stunned, hung upside down and when we recovered we were let down and further interviewed. Everyone experienced everything short of having our throat slit or our head cut off." Candy said calmly.

"Really?" Chelsea asked. "And how did you determine who you killed and who you kept around?"

"The interview process. We picked out everyone who we felt we could pull out of the stream and either exclude or have work with us. We talked it over amongst our selves, and if a case could be made to exclude we started on day one. David and Margaret only picked the first 5 or so. We picked everyone else as a team. David and Margaret gave us their input, but we picked the women we worked with and lived with." Candy said.

Robert spoke up at this point. "You mean that the selection of who stayed and who could not was not David's?"

"No. David had to confirm our choices. He was the responsible licensee, but he didn't pick. Except for the first three, Carol, Elizabeth and Nancy. Margaret picked me out of curiosity more then anything. Helen was supposed to be like Carol, Elizabeth and Nancy. David picked them for a short-term business plan setup. They agreed to that. The initial deal was a fantasy termination for the four of them. But we kept delaying them because of the workload. I was the first to be a Union card butcher and lead." Candy said.

"So you really as a community selected who you thought you could save? And who you would want to be with?" Robert said.

"Like I said. We were a Community at Risk." Candy said. "At least, that is what my lawyers have all said. Not just Carol."

"So, Candy, you still haven't explained how you knew what a woman was thinking." Chelsea said.

"If a woman was going to be a interviewer, she had to be able to answer simple questions. Is it going to be painful? Am I going to be abused? Is this going to hurt? You can't answer that honestly if you have not had almost all of the experience." Candy answered. "You ask a doctor about pain or surgery, and they don't know. We knew exactly what the experience was, except for the last sixty seconds, because we had been through it. And we had lead women through it."

"How many?" Chelsea asked.

"This is where people start to look at me funny. Chelsea, I terminated an average of over thirty a day, three days a week, for fifteen weeks. Over fourteen hundred women." Candy answered.

The close up of Chelsea's face showed pure shock. She involuntarily moved away from Candy while remaining in her seat. "Fourteen hundred?" She asked.

"And as operations manager, I was responsible for five thousand that I didn't kill personally. Including Assistant State's Attorney Colleen McNair's sister, Sarah Blair." Candy continued. "Which is why I believe that this entire investigation was started in the first place."

Robert was stunned. Candy had dropped the bomb and directly accused the State's attorney's office of malicious abuse. He had not intended to announce this yet. "Candy, That is a serious accusation." He said.

Chelsea was also shocked. This looked like a real story bubbling up. "Do you think that is the reason for the investigation?" She asked.

"Chelsea, you had David and Carol on your show a few months ago. Carol was one of the people in residence. Did she look like she was enslaved to you? Do you think she violated the rules of professional ethics?" Candy asked with some emotion." Colleen is pissed because her little stubborn sister was not excluded like the other thousand women we excluded. And the reason we could not do it was her own stubborn attitude."

"Robert, What do you know about this that we can tell our viewers?" Chelsea asked.

Smiling ruefully, Robert looked at Candy and shook his head. You would kick over that hornet nest now, he thought to himself.

"Chelsea, after reviewing a lot of the facts in evidence, it would appear that the prosecution has gone after Findley for reasons that are not apparent in existing or pre order law. It has been an extraordinary expensive undertaking and it has yielded no sign of real prosecutorial justification. I believe that there is evidence of malice in this prosecution and we are looking to continue our investigation." Robert replied.