A quick on-line search for headlines pertinent to the above picks out the following: Toddler drowns in Esporta health club swimming pool; Beaumont baby dies days after falling into pool;Baby dies after left by father in hot vehicle; Two Babies Left Home Alone Die In Fire; and many more.

Only yesterday, indeed, the British press reported that a five-month-old baby taken to hospital after his pram plunged into the River Thames.

All of us make mistakes…

What they did, they each did in the worst of possible ways—he hit her when he was only slightly drunk, a clumsy blow that stunned her by its singular ugliness and left a rime of reddening defeat under her eye, then left to drink more and black out the earlier event—whilst she, she who should have ran, run far away, crawled across the floor and rolled to a foetal memory, clutching her mother's fringed shawl from the couch at her back like some filthy umbilicus to her stomach, and reverted,…

Yes, I am the one who wrote the ransom note.

The detective brought me a Pepsi and talked nicely when he handed me a pen and paper and told me which words to write five times each -- daughter, money, police, bills, suitcase, deliver -- in cursive script, not printing.



"Who asked you to write the note, sweetheart, and why you?" he asked me from across the small table with sparks coming…

He brought his fingers to the stinging flesh of his scratched cheek and the tips came away blood red, the result of his attempt to slip his hand into the waistband of her sweatpants.

He put his fingers in his mouth, licking away the vital bodily fluid, and smiled sickly.

"Feisty bitch, ain't ya?" he said.

"I'm more than that," she said, burying the knife in his stomach.

She had thought she could escape, buy herself a moment's peace,…

At three thirty in the morning, it was eighty-five degrees.

Lela was naked, sleepless, seated in the darkness on her porch swing, sipping lemonade and fanning herself, sick of this heatwave that had lasted four days now and no end in sight.

Her body was curvy, voluptuous, the desire of many men, the envy of many women, a fact that delighted her and made her many adversaries at the same time.

The gunshot came from her left at three thirty-two,…

At a certain angle, the lights of the city reflect themselves in the gathering puddle of blood beneath the young man, head turned to the side, as if he's listening to the earth rotate, his eyes wide and unblinking.

It is half-past midnight, extremely early morning.

The ambulance is far too late, though someone was thoughtful enough to call Homicide; the detectives stand around, cups of coffee in their hands, waiting for the ME to…

Henry, Hank, whatever you want to call him, is not what he appears to be.

This is what he's said anyway.

Personally, I believed that he was just talking so that he wouldn't get his ass kicked.

That was until about twenty minutes ago, before the two punks walked in here and tried to take the till, put the gun in my face and said they'd kill me if I didn't open the drawer and hand over the cash.

Henry, Hank, whatever you want to call…

Psychiatrist Ivanovo was forensically meticulous as his statement to the Dublin High Court shows in the way he pursued the cause of Muldoon’s dementia and reached a disturbing conclusion, passing it on to the police who followed the trail back to a neo-colonial villa in the Bermudas on Paradise Isle, where Patricia McCarthy and her lover resided.

Neighbors identified Muldoon from pictures, alias Patrick Doherty and, just as Ivanovo suggested there might be, on a shelf in a…

State Prosecutor Bracken’s spiral of questions in the High Court grew in intensity concerning Muldoon’s alleged condition but, throughout, Chief Psychiatrist Gus Ivanovo remained calm to the point of appearing obtuse.

Muldoon had been placed in his care for investigation for a period of two months, following a brief hearing in Dublin High Court where lawyers representing the amnesiac banker…