Campouts and Corpses in an Urban Park

I haven’t listened to Serial, Sarah Koenig’s
much-praised podcast exploring the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee in
Baltimore. But I have been to Leakin Park, where Lee’s body was
found, and I enjoyed Rona Kobell’s
article in Slate today about the past and present
of the park, which has long had a reputation as a corpse-dump.
(Full disclosure: Kobell is my wife, and I have a cameo in her
story.) Here’s an excerpt:

When I joined [The Baltimore Sun] in
2000, most reporters had to take a turn on the night desk, usually
under the tutelage of one David Michael Ettlin. A consummate
rewrite man, Ettlin had an exhaustive knowledge of Baltimore
ephemera. Three points became clear quickly: Most Baltimore cops
pronounce it “Lincoln” even though it is L-E-A-K-I-N; you could
pronounce it however you wanted but you better spell it right; and
dead bodies often wound up in Leakin Park. Ettlin recently lamented
to me that today’s murderers don’t care enough to wrap up the
bodies in rugs and dump them in the park. These days, he said, they
just leave them where they lay.

And, on the more positive side:

Molly Gallant is a Baltimore native who worked on
outdoor programs in Alaska, then returned to her city determined to
get Baltimoreans off the couch. Before long, Gallant had a job as
an outdoor recreation programmer with the city parks department,
taking locals kayaking in the polluted Inner Harbor, biking around
city reservoirs, and hiking parks under the moonlight. Her
co-workers applauded the boundary-pushing—until three years ago,
when she organized an overnight campout in Leakin Park. Then, she
said, they declared she was crazy. Even the normally unflappable
Gallant, who was raised to believe Leakin Park was “somewhere you
did not want to be,” began to wonder if she was pushing her
luck.

“There were tons of jokes,” Gallant recalled. “Are we going to be
that news story, 10 bodies found in Leakin Park?”

When they all woke up alive, Gallant decided it was time to get the
rest of Baltimore in on the fun. She worked with volunteers to shut
down access roads that, in Gallant’s words, “were screaming, ‘dump
me here.'”

Read the rest
here.