Skip to main content
Categories
News

The Murder of Eliza Fletcher and the Fall of Memphis, Law and Order

The most important thing to keep in mind in a period of intense change is that things are, in fact, changing. Things weren’t always this way so memory, history, is your best defense against manipulation. When you remember the way things were, you can fight to preserve them.

{snip} So, with that in mind, it’s worth remembering that 100 years ago, Memphis was one of the richest, best organized cities in the country. It had a booming economy. It had beautiful municipal parks, a lot of them, more than 100. It had one of the most modern sanitation systems in the world {snip}

{snip}

In 2021, according to federal statistics, Memphis, Tennessee, was the most dangerous city in the United States. Last year, it recorded a total of 342 murders. Now, how many is that? Well, by comparison, San Antonio, Texas, which has more than twice the population, recorded fewer than half as many murders. So, by any measure at all, Memphis was absolutely falling apart, but Eliza Fletcher decided to make a life there anyway.

After graduating from college, Fletcher moved back to Memphis. Both sides of the family had lived there for more than 100 years. She married a man she’d met in church. He grew up there too and they had two little boys. She began teaching pre-kindergarten at a local girls’ school. {snip}

{snip}

Meanwhile, in Memphis, seven miles across the city, lived a man called Cleotha Abston. Like Eliza Fletcher, Abston also grew up in the city of Memphis, but he could not have been a more different sort of person. Judging from his long public record, Cleotha Abston devoted his life to preying on people weaker than he was.

{snip} At a young age, Abston was arrested for, among many, many other things, stealing, aggravated assault weapons charges, carjacking and rape. In 2000, he was convicted of kidnapping a local attorney at gunpoint downtown and forcing him into the trunk of his own car. {snip}

He was released years before the end of his prison sentence. Nor was he in any way sense reformed by his experience behind bars. Abston was well known in his apartment complex as of last week for his sexual aggression and his perversity. He terrified his neighbors, but no one from any part of the justice system seems to have intervened.

Early last Friday morning, Eliza Fletcher and Cleotha Abston met for the first and last time.. As her husband and two young children slept at home, Eliza Fletcher went for an early morning run through her neighborhood. Cleotha Abston followed her, stalking her every move from a black SUV. According to the indictment, as Fletcher jogged by, Abston leapt out, beat her bloody, smashed her cell phone, then dragged her into his vehicle. Within an hour, Eliza Fletcher was dead. She’d been sexually assaulted and murdered. {snip}

{snip}

In the hours after Eliza Fletcher’s disappearance, Biden voters on social media seemed to dismiss the crime on racial grounds. “Why are we paying so much attention to the kidnapping of an attractive, privileged White woman? That’s racist.” Others seem to blame Fletcher for the atrocity committed against her. “Why was she jogging at that hour, anyway? In Memphis? Come on.”

The point they’re making was clear: “Everyone knows the rules. Eliza Fletcher violated those rules. You can’t go outside his certain hours in certain places in America, obviously, and if you do, if you violate the rules, you run the risk of being raped and murdered. That’s how things work in this country. So, adapt. Accept it. Move on.”.

{snip}

The good people who lived in Memphis a century ago would never believe what has happened to the city they built. They would weep if they saw it. That will be the experience of every American before long. Our entire country will be Memphis if we don’t put a stop to this insanity right now with as much force as is required.