george grindell ’s only employee in his garage was his daughter, gretel. she did not work union hours.
when gretel was working her often long hours in the garage she wore baggy, oil-stained men’s coveralls and kept her long hair coiled up under an old fashioned trainman’s cap.
gretel was small and thin, neither good looking nor ugly. she was what an earlier generation might have described as “mousy.” she had no friends, male or female, and almost never ventured into town or anywhere else.
when she was “off work” ( though subject to be ordered back to work by george at any time), she liked to let down her long brown hair, put on an old fashioned white dress, and sit in a rocking chair on the porch of the rundown house beside the garage that she and george lived in.
at the time of the murders that annette walker davis’s book described, gretel passed her time on the porch lknitting, and listening to an old transistor radio, tuned so low, because of geirge’s complaints, that she could barely hear it.
in her early teenage years, gretel had obtained a guitar, and would strum it on the porch. george never flat out forbad her to play it, but wore her down with constant remarks like, you play like shit, and, if you can’t play better than that you should fucking give up. when a couple of strings on the guitar broke, gretel did not replace them, gave up the guitar, and took up knitting .
george’s harsh treatment of his daughter attracted the notice of the town people, and some heads, especially of women, were shaken at such old fashioned parenting. but nobody really was all that sympathetic to gretel, who was regarded as unfriendly and even “stuck up”.
darker speculations as to george’s relations with gretel can well be imagined, and surfaced when george was questioned about the murders. george was never accused of anything in this regard, any more than he was about the murders, but annette walker davis in her book pronounced it “virtually certain’” that he was sexually abusing gretel.
eleven year old janey had never read or heard of such things before, and was horrified.
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