My Mother Has Always Been Crazy Or So I Thought…

Yes, most parents can be completely neurotic; they can have the tendency to become crazy over the weirdest things that to the naked eye seems so simple that only a crazy person would act in such a way.

I’m only going to touch on one crazy thing about my mother, which is that ever since I could remember she always insisted that we have an unlisted phone number. She always said that there are crazy people in this world, and you never know if some crazy person would pick your name out of the phone book to do something bad to you, or even worse, kill you.

Part of me always thought part, if not most of her reasoning for this was to keep her ex husband away from her, or possibly as a way to keep a childhood friend of hers who grew up to become a deranged, and dangerously violent man who would reach out to her and my family every now and then. Whenever this man came around, all the kids on my block HAD to get inside somewhere, and fathers would go out on the stoops to try and intimidate the man.

Either way she instilled this fear of publicly listed phone numbers in my head so much that now as an adult I pay the couple of dollars a month to keep my number unlisted.

Then today, I ran into two brothers that I grew up with. They asked me about an unsolved murder that took place very, very close to where we all grew up.

They had only recently heard about it from a rerun of Unsolved Mysteries.

It was a murder that took place on Mother’s Day 1982. They wondered if I remembered it, and or if I had ever heard about it.

Since I was not yet two years old that Mother’s Day, I did not remember anything of it, nor had I ever heard of this incident. For the life of me I don’t know how this unsolved murder could have gone unnoticed our entire lives since it happened.

Before googling this murder, I asked my mother if she had ever heard of a murder that had to do with a bomb. She said, “no, but I remember Mrs. Kipp was murdered.” She then recalled about how there were lots of police and the bomb squad was there, and how the person had apparently left the “package” on the doorstep of the victim.

This murder literally took place on the street that we all grew up playing football on. Sewer to sewer – it’s a Brooklyn thing, I think.

I have however heard of the M.O. of the murderer. Who is known in the media as the Zip Gun Bomber.

I remember hearing about this serial bomber back in the 1990s, when he or she had sent a couple of bombs to people in the New York area.

Since 1982, the bomber has struck numerous times, and police have no idea how the person or persons pick their victims.

Phone book maybe?????

So, it turns out that my mother may actually have had some real legitimate reasons to this whole “people might pick you out of the phone book to harm you” mentality of hers.

I’m finding all of this very odd for numerous reasons, only two of which are:

How could I have never have heard that this happened so close to where I grew up?

How could my mother have actually had a reason of truth behind the phone book fear?