Clarity

As I get older, things that may have previously seemed complex or sophisticated become remarkably clear and simple. In the last two days;

1. The burlesque stripper hired to perform at a tech industry awards night in Adelaide this week, prompting walk outs and complaints from women attendees. The stripper claimed her show was ‘burlesque’ – a kind of ironic performance piece where she engages with the tropes of female objectification and sexiness in a humorous way. Thing is, a performance is necessarily about its audience. And in this case, the audience sees a stripper. She can tell herself whatever story she likes about motivations, but her work is received as soft porn.
2. While explaining the measurement of degrees of freedom and F-tests, I realised it’s simplest to think of a t-score (for instance) as something that measures the variability of the existing data points (and distance from a mean) but also estimates all the possible locations of the data points. Really this is degrees of freedom I suppose but it helps me to think about it differently.
3. New Zealanders get on the radio and bullshit like there’s no tomorrow. ABC Radio National Breakfast interviewed the head of a sports shooting group in Christchurch. The host asked why there were so many guns in NZ, more than one for every three people. The answer? “NZ is an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural society”. 86% of kiwis live in cities or other urban areas. New Zealand’s population has been majority urban since the establishment of ‘urban’ (about the 1920s). This is national-myth making.

 

Time capsule

Tragically, my once-in-a-blue-moon visit to facebook informed me of this story, where a young woman, Nicole Tuxford, was recently raped and murdered by Paul Wilson, in Christchurch.

Wilson had previously murdered another woman, 21 year old Kimberly Shroder, in Hokitika in 1995. I remember it – she was a couple of years older than me, and like many people I knew the killer’s family (I did not know Kimberly).

There are two things that really stick out in this article. The first is this incident, Wilson’s first violent assault, prompted by Kimberly’s rejection;

Seeing [Kimberly] at the Westland Hotel in Hokitika, [Wilson] demanded to know where she was going but she refused to tell him. Her cousin Bruce Schroder and a few mates took him outside, roughed him up and sent him on his way.

He returned with a loaded shotgun. Bruce put himself between Wilson and Kim and Wilson pulled the trigger. The gun failed to go off and Bruce and others wrestled the gun from him.

The gun didn’t go off. If it had, Wilson would have most likely murdered Bruce Shroder by shooting him with a shotgun. The local community reacted thusly;

“Call it naive… we just believed at the time that it was so out of character for him to do that and we just believed that this had to be a one off. We all thought we knew him so well.

“We all rallied together and we got petitions and stuff, got references about his great character. We rallied together as a community and did what we could to support him.”

A petition vouching for his good character collected 800 signatures.

Wilson went to jail for ten months and,

The Schroders kept supporting him. On almost every Saturday of his prison term, Kim and her mother Nancy travelled to Christchurch to visit him. Wilson said Nancy was always there to pick him up when he fell…”more of a mother to me than my own mother”.

He spent Christmas of 1993 with the Schroders [after serving his time for attempting to murder Kim’s cousin with a shotgun] and thought he could renew his relationship with their only daughter. But Kim was moving on and had started another relationship. Wilson found out and began visiting her flat at night, torturing himself by listening to the couple’s lovemaking. Kim began calling him her stalker. One night he knocked on the door and punched her in the face.

On May 17, 1994, he went to her flat about 9pm. Earlier in the day Nancy Schroder had dropped off a jersey she had knitted for him.

To be clear; Wilson had been stalking Kim. One night he knocked on her door and punched Kim in the face. Soon after that, Kim’s mother took Wilson a jersey she had knitted for him.

If an ex boyfriend punched my daughter in the face, I would knit him a jersey out of his intestines.

That evening, after the knitted gift from Kim’s mother, Wilson visited Kim’s flat, tied up her flatmate, and waited two hours for Kim to come home. He then waited for Kim to make a hot drink and visit the bathroom, where he raped and murdered her.

This wasn’t the dark ages. It was the 1990s. We were all watching 90210 and listening to Big Audio Dynamite. Reading this now I’m astonished that everyone was so accepting of this behaviour. But then I put my 1995 Greymouth hat on, and I’m not surprised at all.

Perhaps one of the most chilling parts of this story is that Wilson was stopped on his way to Ms Tuxford’s flat for a random breath test. He was three times over the legal limit. The police checked his licence and told him he’d have to walk, and he couldn’t take the two large knives he had in the boot with him. He took a taxi to Ms Tuxford’s, waited all night for her to arrive home (she’d spent the night with her boyfriend elsewhere) and then tortured, raped and murdered her.