It is difficult not to feel sorry for Lori McLuckie to a degree, but only to a degree. It is mostly inadequate young men who lead tortured, lonely lives. Any girl, any woman under the age of about forty who is not 12 stone overweight or slightly less attractive than Medusa can at least get laid. Well, almost, there is that Janis Ian song "At Seventeen", remember?
McLuckie had an unhappy childhood but earned herself a degree, then moving to a new city where she had no friends, began hanging around with street people even "dating" at least one of them. One day, her homeless lover raped her, that was not her diagnosis but her neighbour's, a guy some twenty years her senior who had nothing more than a genuinely neighbourly interest in her. It was he who persuaded her to report the rape, but perhaps because she'd had sex with the same man before and even more due to her emotionless performance on the stand, he was acquitted.
Then she formed a relationship with another if not homeless person then inadequate, a man of about her age. Was this an abusive relationship? The consensus is yes, but there is no consensus as to who was the exploiter. Perhaps they simply used each other. After throwing him out she had a one night stand with her first boyfriend, from college. After she told him she was pregnant he offered to help pay for an abortion.Yup, she sure could pick 'em. Then her young lover came back into her life, and accepted her pregnancy, even though he knew the baby wasn't his.
According to McLuckie, who is given considerable space herein, he raped her. One is tempted to misquote Oscar Wilde here, to be raped by one lover is unfortunate, but to be raped by two sounds like carelessness. According to the DA, there was no evidence she was raped this time, and her claim that she killed Andrew Vigil in self-defense doesn't hold water. In view of the uncontested facts of the murder, he might just have a point.
McLuckie half-told her friendly neighbour what she had done, he guessed the rest, and it was he who called the police.
Her first mistake was to tell her friend, says the resident psychobabbler. How about her first mistake was to handcuff her boyfriend to the radiator, batter and stab him to death, and then dismember his body?
Her baby was taken away from her at birth, and of course her own life is in ruins too. If she had adhered to the loony "feminist" maxim a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, she might have made a life for herself after all. Some people – mostly men but also some women - are meant to be alone, but alone need not mean loneliness. Alas, that pearl of wisdom comes 26 years too late for Lori Mc not-so-luckie.