Who Killed Cricket Coogler?

From the Duke City Fix archives:

Her real name was Ovida and she was only 17. She was a pretty waitress who got a nickname for wearing heels that chirped out a rhythm of wood on concrete when she walked. March 31,1949 was the last night of her life. Four rabbit hunters found her battered body on Easter Sunday out near the cemetery in Mesquite, 12 miles south of Las Cruces. She'd been raped, beaten and run over by a car.

The Silence of Cricket Coogler: A Political Murder, is a documentary produced and filmed in New Mexico in 2000 by Cine Productions, a local company. Here's a You Tube short.

The story is almost quaint in comparison to the murder, femicide, rape, and  general violence in the border region today.  Eileen Welsome describes a violent land dispute in a  place called Lomas del Poleo in Mexico near Sunland Park- a stones throw from Anapra where The Mecca was located in Cricket’s day. 

Asking who killed Cricket in an annual headline was  regular practice when New Mexico Governor Ed Mechem was in office.  He ran on a promise of finding her murderer. They never did.

So the movie is my new Spring tradition.  Meting out a tiny and distant fraction of the violence of the world at a time in order to think about it more carefully.     Along with watching big dog destroy the easter bunny, I remembered Cricket. 

Comments

[laura]

Maybe you've already seen this, but Jeff Berg just wrote a story in Desert Exposure about New Mexico's history of unsolved murders. You can read it online at:

http://www.desertexposure.com/200804/200804_unsolved_murders.php

I also wanted to mention a great novel I just finished reading. It's called "If I Die in Juarez" and it's by Stella Pope Duarte. Here's hoping this beautiful novel will bring much-need attention to the murders of young women in Juarez.