Who Owns the Words
![handle is hein.journals/studlyr19 and id is 228 raw text is: Who Owns
the
Words?
Thanks to the Copyright Act,
biographers are discovering a new
kind of censorship
T wo days before Christmas in
1984, Elizabeth Haysom, a
freshman honor student at
the University of Virginia,
wrote her boyfriend, Jens Soering,
about her parents: Would it be pos-
sible to hypnotize [them], do voodoo
on them, will them to death? she
asked, adding, I think I shall seriously
take up black magic... I despise them
so much.
One day later she mentioned them
again: My parents are going mad. We
can either wait till we graduate and then
leave them behind, or we can get rid
of them sooner.
Allowing for the vagaries of the
postal service, it took ten days for Soer-
ing, also a UVA freshman and honor
student, to respond. Yes, he replied,
voodoo, etc., is possible. Then he
seemed to expand upon the topic. The
fact that there have been many bur-
glaries in the area opens the possibility
for another one with the same general
circumstances, only this time the un-
fortunate owners... leaving the sen-
tence uncompleted.
Almost a week after that, on January
9, 1985, Soering noted cryptically: You
know that certain 'instrument' for a
certain 'operation' on somebody's rel-
Ken Englade is an Albuquerque writer.
atives? And, later in the same letter:
Remember that 'test' [you] were talk-
ing about doing at the beginning of next
semester? My hope is that it'll help you
to begin to accept yourself.
On January 10, he was more direct:
I have not explored the side of me
that wishes to crush to any real ex-
tent-I have yet to kill.
Two days later he penned: I have
the ultimate 'weapon'... My God, how
I've got the dinner scene planned out.
And the next day, January 13, Jens
wrote: Whatever the test you were
talking about is, let's have it.
At the end of March, 1985, a little
more than two months later, Eliza-
beth's father, Derek, a retired execu-
tive from South Africa, and her mother,
Nancy, a member of an old Virginia
family and a cousin to the late Lady
Astor, were found slashed to death in
their home in Boonsboro, near Lynch-
burg. Nancy Haysom was all but de-
capitated; Derek was cut or stabbed
some three dozen times, and his throat
was slit. Evidence indicated that they
had been eating dinner when the killer
arrived. The visitor was invited in and
given food. Soon afterwards, as deter-
mined by post mortem reports, Derek
and Nancy were slaughtered.
Suspicion eventually fell on Eliza-
beth Haysom and Jens Soering, but they
By Ken Englade
Illustration by Greg Buske](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/studlyr19&div=34&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Who Owns the Words
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