Greetings! This is the first installment of They Who Feed on Shadows, my weekly nonfiction series. These essays explore family, power, and the failures of the American justice system. Each episode pulls from lived experience and is pieced together with memory and evidence, told as it truly happened.
A new episode will arrive every Saturday. Please subscribe to follow along and thank you for being here.
Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.
Do you remember those lavender dusk summers that heralded the genteel darkness of night rising across the American prairie? When the skyscrapers of Brookdale were still a faraway jungle of mythic jazz and glass? I want to ask the cops this as Jane and I step from our truck. I want to tell them that once upon a time this place was filled with a song of the whippoorwills cooing in stereo at the edge of a one-lane starry road. Bobcats roamed. Coyotes patrolled the salt-lick under the persimmon tree. We learned to fear the copperhead coiled like a poison serpent beneath the fractal rays of the sun.
Raventon Road has always dead-ended where your leather-wrapped steel toes stand now. It cut through the ghost-signal deciduous forest like a glorified smear of gravel, purpose and tar. There was no pavement, and you should know it wasn’t always this windy in Westvale, boys. I used to ride my pony straight into a 1987 small-town vortex come Friday night. You could set a metronome against the andante clip-clop of horse shoes moving across the soft asphalt abdomen of the hills. I’d grab a slushy at the first sign of civilization, a 7-Eleven glowing like a neon quasar two miles down Elderpine Drive at the town’s eastern edge. I’d ride on south to the dawn of strip malls and tie my pony to a wood pole outside Videoland, soon headed home with a 3-day return VHS tape tucked into my saddle bag. That’s the way the red-tailed hawks used to arc across this cobalt bowl of sky and time.
The place where you stand used to be heaven’s analog.
We are not the trash you see laid before you now.
But this is what greets me.
Late April of 2025.
The untamed meadow grass is already taller than a soldier, taller than your spinning LED fantasy club, meaner than the best-laid plans of my forbearers. The March daffodils have bloomed and perished, and the grand wooden gates my father built have collapsed under the entropy of ordained law. Their skeletons have been chewed to death by wind, rain, and the fibrous claws of winter’s paralyzing hymnal. The split rail fence is defeated, its cedar spine crushed. Shotgun splatter and bullet holes and avant-garde graveyards of lichen are all that remain of his NO TRESPASSING sign. Only the hickory tree to which it is bolted seems immune. It has eaten the metal and choked down the fine, hard lines of our fleeting halogen eternity.
I want to hug my wife and cry for all that has been taken from us.
But there is no time left for that crap. There is no time.
This is the present.
A bald sergeant in Oakleys confidently approaches me with a body camera wedged between the armor plates that cover his heart. “Are you Mr. Monroe?”
My mind rereads the email I received from Detective Piolar an hour earlier: “Hi Jude, Officers have been sent out to check your mother's welfare and have some questions. Could you please give me or the officer on scene that was trying to reach you (Officer Jansen) a call as soon as you can?”
These words and a phone call brought me home. I had not stood on my family’s land in four years. The police believed my mother’s boyfriend and caretaker was hiding in the house.
One of her former psychiatric patients, Mallory Stroud, called in a welfare check earlier that afternoon. Ms. Stroud had been sending me text messages like this since January:
“Hi, I used to see your mom in the 90’s for bulimia. Your mom could be dead... This man is abusing her. I am sick. Is she eating? I forgot that your last name is Monroe. I asked Dr. Blackmoor the last name of her husband and her kids. This guy turned into the devil! He stood over me and said... are you going to cause me problems? I freaked out and took off. Does he own weapons? She is being forced against her will! Your mom defends him out of fear. She is sitting in a chair in a dark cluttered house just waiting to die. He carries a huge zip lock bag with a TON OF CASH???! He stood at the door watching me leave. Does he drug her!?”
For Jane and me, this is not news. Actually, my mother drugs him. And of course, he has weapons. Nineteen assault rifles. You can’t say that to a former patient, though.
I snap back into the moment, “Yes, officer, I’m Jude Monroe.”
“Mr. Monroe, I’m Sergeant Jansen. We believe your mother’s associate is inside the house, a Mr. Dale Colgrave?”
“That’s him.”
“He’s not responding when we knock. I understand you reported there are firearms in the home?”
“There are. He keeps them in the front bedroom closet by the chimney. It’s the room with a view of the driveway.”
“And he has made threats against you in the past?”
“He told me in 2021 he was going to put a bullet in my forehead if I came out here again.”
“Have you been asked to keep out of the house by your mother?”
“No.”
“Did you bring the keys?”
“Yes,” here you go.” I hand him the keys to my family’s estate.
The officers behind him are younger, coalesced around a Brookdale Police F-150 and two black-and-white Ford Explorers. The kid among them appears like he just graduated from the academy. He has round glasses and curly brown hair. The day is hot and bright, and the boy squints constantly. He looks surprised to find himself standing there wearing armor and a Glock 17 instead of clutching a PlayStation controller in his parents’ basement.
The sergeant speaks for his crew, “All right.” He nods at my wife, “Ma’am.”
Jane extends her hand, “I’m Jane Monroe.”
Unlike the kid, you can tell the sergeant has seen some shit.
He shakes Jane’s hand efficiently and repeats himself, “Ma’am, Mrs. Monroe. I’d like you and Mr. Monroe to pull your vehicle back to the entrance to the property and remain out of the line of fire. One of my officers will call you when it’s clear to come up to the house.”
I grew up here. There have been pastoral days. And there have been days echoing with the sound of fully automatic Uzi’s, the screams of armed lunatics, ambulance wails, and squawking squad cars lining our quarter-mile private drive.
Jane wasn’t around for all that, but she knows the drill. She met my mom in the early days of our romance.
We exchange a glance and look back at Sergeant Jansen, “I guess we’ll wait at the turnaround.”
Jane adds, “Sergeant, Jude’s mom, Sylvia, told me that Dale Colgrave would blow away anyone who came over this hill that he didn’t like.”
Sergeant Jansen pauses, 2:23 afternoon sun gleaming off his Mr. Clean head. “When was this?”
“2021,” says Jane. “Right after we got married.”
“Okay. Let’s have you two go back to the turnaround.”
Jane and I reverse our truck 200 yards down the driveway and pull off to one side of the asphalt circle my father installed. He built the circle so the curious would have a place to turnaround when they arrived at what used to be the gates to our property. It served that purpose. The turnaround also became a weekend make-out spot for kids from Flintwood Northwest High. One of my Sunday chores used to be picking up the beer cans they left behind, those hot summer night talismans of an auto-reverse good time soundtracked by Steve Miller and Aerosmith.
We get out of our Toyota Sequoia and open the liftgate to wait for the call. Before sitting down, I walk into the center of the turnaround and peer at the roofline of the house poking over the trees and tall grass.
Jane admonishes me, “Babe, get out of the line of fire.”
Jane is my whole world now. She is my family. Along with our rescued pit bull, Sadie-Blu, back at home in our Foxhollow bungalow by the lake where the lawn is still mowed and the tiger lilies bloom.
I return to the truck, lean into Jane, and hold her hand in mine. Only then do I feel strong enough to look around. The meadow is encroaching on the pavement. The limestone boulders that lined the turnaround’s edge have already been buried in graves of tall grass. A poison ivy vine is wrapping itself around a CCA 2x4 leaned against the section of split-rail that hasn’t collapsed yet. The board is warped and looks like it was abandoned hastily in a fit of well-intended repairs that never quite made it. A wheeled 55-gallon Waste Management recycling bin lies on its side covered in residue. Ensure shake containers and old dog food cans lie beside it, spilled and unrecovered. It’s obviously been there at least a year. Maybe two?
Five silent minutes pass as we chat in the familiar, protected tones of a husband and wife.
Ten minutes pass.
Fifteen.
“What do you think is going on in there?” asks Jane, becoming impatient.
I shake my head, “Nothing good.”
My iPhone rings. Once, twice.
“Answer it!”
My breath is measured as I hit speakerphone, “Hello?”
“This is Officer Jaymore. We found your mother. She’s alive.”
“Dale Colgrave?”
“We’ve separated them. Officers have him outside on the driveway. You can come up.”
“Thank you.”
I disconnect and look at Jane. She smiles wistfully. A strand of blonde hair blows across her face as she hops down from the truck in a black sundress. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Jane brushes the hair from her green-lensed aviators, “You ready for this?”
“Definitely not.”
Welcome to They Who Feed On Shadows.
To be continued…
This is heavy, raw, and beautifully told. Memory stitched with evidence, grief sitting beside grit. What I love most is how you show that the past never really leaves, but it just waits for us in the weeds, in the splintered wood, in the silence before the phone call.
Can’t wait to follow along.