By Rocky Barker
As a journalist, I have walked into the world of crime like a tourist, checking out the sights and then returning home.
The crime and court stories I've written over the years are like home movies piled away in a box on the closet shelf. They've been edited down to interesting anecdotes and mystery novel plots I keep saying someday I'll sell.
There was the heir to the Parker Pen fortune who was accused of robbing a small town Wisconsin bank and the county judge who was running a house of prostitution. I won't forget the Indian tribal chairman who was leading a drug-dealing ring or the southern Utah lawyer whom I helped catch for scamming a widow out of her resort. Then there were the murderers. Bill Gray, who despite his sickly condition rode a bicycle seven miles to kill his wife and her friend just outside of Idaho Falls in 1989. Jeannie Disney, who hired teenager Michael Book to kill her husband in 1990. Paul Ezra Rhoades, the cold, heartless serial killer who unleashed a reign of terror over eastern Idaho in 1987 that was more frightening than any Patricia Cornwell bestseller.
But in the last few years, crime has become a lot more personal. It hasn't been something I could leave at work. I've had the usual stolen bikes, tools and tapes, and a year ago even had a pistol taken from my house.
Those were nothing compared to the early morning when an intruder hid in the room where my daughter slept and ran past my horrified, screaming wife after the little girl's whimper awoke her.
Now it seems crime forces its way into my life and the life of my family like a rude door-to-door salesman.
Shawn Uttich was shot and killed one block away by friends playing a twisted, deadly game of Russian roulette.
I had purchased a six-pack of beer from Maria Tomchak at the Grant Store on my way home from duck hunting only weeks before her murder. One of the suspects was in classes with my sons at Clair E. Gale Junior High School.
Angie Dodge, the girl whose recent violent slaying remains unsolved, worked with my wife Tina at Barnes and Noble. Everyone in our home knew her. My daughter remembers when she dressed up as a witch for Halloween and later pranced around the store in a bunny costume for children's time.
I never knew anyone who was murdered when I grew up. But violent death hangs around my children's lives like coyotes around a band of sheep.
Even though I feel more crowded by crime, the bizarre reality is that in Idaho Falls, it's actually dropping significantly. In the first quarter of 1996, aggravated assaults dropped from 82 a year ago to 31. Vandalism is down from 353 incidents from January through March of 1995 to 282 in 1996.
Burglary is down from 116 to 59 in the same period and rapes, larceny and motor vehicle theft are all down significantly. Overall, crime is down in the city by 20 percent this year, said Police Chief Kent Livsey.
Now crime is going down nationwide, he said, so Idaho Falls' drop just in itself isn't significant. But most of the decline nationally can be attributed to the aging of the population.
Here in eastern Idaho, our population keeps getting younger, so Livsey wouldn't be out of line taking credit for the good numbers his department has rolled up. He's got more officers out on the streets during the high crime periods, bike patrols are catching youthful offenders off guard and high crime areas are getting more patrols.
Unfortunately, his statistics don't measure the security we feel, which at least in my case is at an all-time low. Murder cuts through a community, through people lives, like a jagged switchblade. It's unsettling and fills us with anguish.
It's hard to celebrate when people are driving through town on a shooting spree as happened Wednesday night. Good law enforcement and swift, sure justice can help minimize crime.
But we can't really address it unless we refuse to allow it to become ordinary.
Rocky Barker is a Post Register columnist and the author of "Saving All the Parts: Reconciling Economics and The Endangered Species Act.ยจ He can be reached by e-mail at: rbarker@srv.net