A Good Man is Hard to Find

He liked his women pretty and young, and as the years passed he seemed to like them younger and younger. Again, this was partly a matter of the times (through the sixties and seventies, girls were routinely becoming sexually active at younger and younger ages) and of the circles within which he moved, whose aging Lotharios enjoyed boasting to each other of their conquests and prized extreme youthfulness as a particularly piquant and exotic delectation. On the other hand, in Polanski’s case, more pronounced urgencies seemed at work as well…Younger girls posed less of a risk of commitment and were less likely themselves to be entertaining any untoward fantasies of parenthood, before the daunting prospect of which Polanski now seemed warier than ever…Finally, though preternaturally youthful himself, he simply felt more at ease with younger women–they were less jaded, had fewer ulterior motives, he could play with them and when not playing he could teach.

Lawrence Weschler, from “The Brat’s Tale: Roman Polanski”, one of Three Polish Survivor Stories in Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings (2005)

And among the crowd that had gathered in fronts of the house, no one intervened. I shouted to those closest to me: “So enter, rescue my mother. In the name of God, I beg of you. Do you want money?…Here, here are ten francs, here are twenty, here are one hundred francs, but go in, I beseech you. … No one will hurt you, it is me he wants…” No one moved. No one.
And then…I heard three deafening shots…I looked at the windows of the house; no one. The miserable man has just killed my mother and my sister, I thought.
So, as if crazed, I made my way into the house with other people. I climbed the stairs and on the first floor I met Luna who had just handed over the revolver to the maid of the villa. He said to me: “Trinidad, you are the cause of all that happened here, you are the cause of everything.”

Trinidad Pardo de Tavera recounting the night Juan Luna murdered Paz Luna y Pardo de Tavera and Juliana Pardo de Tavera y Gorricho, from Ruby Paredes’s essay, “The Pardo de Taveras of Manila,” in An Anarchy of Families, (1995) edited by Alfred W. McCoy

And lastly, here’s a really cheesy looking trailer for a really good movie that shows how ambiguous the terms can get in our attempts to come up with lines of defense and punishment for despicable deeds – Thomas Vinterberg’s Jagten (The Hunt):