Mystery meat

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor W hen I was a teenager, one of my favorite shows on TV was “Unsolved Mysteries” on NBC. Each week, the super-serious Robert Stack would come out and present several segments on cold-case murders, UFO sightings, missing persons, lost treasures and all sorts of other freaky phenomena.

I’m also a big “Scooby-Doo” fan, so I guess I like mysteries… except when they happen to me. Which, thankfully, isn’t too often.

So last Thursday night, my family and I were over in Memphis eating dinner at Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken ahead of a trip to the movies to see the new “Black Panther” movie. Out of the blue, a friend and neighbor calls me up to let me know that a friend of her mother’s has a box sitting on his front porch with my wife’s name and address on it.

I know it’s not too weird for Amazon or UPS to drop a package off at the wrong address, and my wife is certainly keeping the online shopping people busy this time of year. So, through a game of phone-message-relay, I told her to give the guy my number and made arrangements to pick up the package the next morning. Problem solved, right?

Wrong… About 15 minutes in to the movie, I can feel my phone buzzing over and over in my pants pocket. Finally, I gave in and broke movie theater etiquette and took my phone out. I had four missed calls from the same unknown number followed up by a message from my friend saying, “He needs you to call him. He say’s there’s blood coming out of the box.” Well, this immediately got my attention, so I “’scuse me, pardon me’d” across the aisle and made my way out to the lobby to call the guy.

The “guy” just happened to be our very own Crittenden County Coroner Bill Wolfe. Weird, right? I called. He answered very quickly. He assured me that it was indeed blood. I told him, “If anyone would know, it would be you, right?” Now, I was really perplexed. Who would send my wife a box of something that would be leaking blood? He read the address off the shipping label. It was someplace in Minnesota. I Googled the address. It was a computer company of some kind. It made no sense.

Out of ideas, I asked if he would be OK with opening the box. Surely whatever grisly discovery awaited inside (Gwyneth Paltrow’s head?) was nothing a longtime county coroner couldn’t handle… but maybe something a longtime mild-mannered reporter didn’t want to see. He agreed, probably quite curious himself at this point.

Thankfully, it was not a murder victim or a gift from the Minnesota Mauler or whatever. It turned out to be a very large collection of butchered deer meat. I don’t know if I could have identified it as such but he assured me that’s what it was. He agreed to bring it inside and bag it up so that it wouldn’t leak more blood and I went over and got it the next morning.

My wife and I did, however, spend the next two days trying to figure out who FedEx’ed her what had to be 50 pounds of venison. Was it a relative? She comes from a long line of hunters? Was it poisoned? Was it some sort of “Godfather”-style message from an unknown enemy? We did not know. I put the meat in our deep freezer, fairly sure we would never, ever eat it (I mean, it was probably fine but we did just watch the Jeffrey Dahmer show on Netflix).

On Saturday, I went over to my Mom’s house to help her with some computer stuff and I just had to tell her the story. She was just as fascinated as I was with the mystery. It was only then that she looked over at my Dad, who had his back to us and was for some reason completely disinterested in the wild tale.

“Wait,” she suddenly exclaimed, like Sherlock Holmes suddenly having an epiphany. “Was it you?”

So see if you can connect these dots: In August, my parents’ computer died, so, knowing nothing about computers, they had me order them one off Amazon, which is in my wife’s name. It came a week later, shipped to our house and I took it over there and hooked it up. Fast-forward to the recent election, where my Dad was a full-time campaigner for Ray Nassar’s city council bid. And who did he spend a lot of time with? Why Bill Wolfe, who was running for re-election. And guess what one of their conversations was about during those long hours outside the polls? Hunting! And so my Dad tells Mr. Wolfe he can hook him up with some deer meat. And guess what box he happened to have still lying around to put it in. That’s right… a computer box from Minnesota with my wife’s name and address on it.

I won’t say it’s the craziest series of events you’ll ever hear about, but it was a real bizarre case for sure. The important thing here is that I have a freezer full of deer meat now, even if it took the craziest route to get there!