Evidence for Case #002-160297
Agency: Zootopia Police Dept. Precinct #2
Collected by: Officer Quill
Date: 02/16/1997
Description: Confession Letter disguised as a school essay that the suspect gave to his Psychology Teacher.
Location: Barry Boghorn High School.
Letter reads as follows:
On the Hipocrisy of Stars
by Finnick1
I hate names. Always have, always will. First of all, you can't really choose it, and no matter if there's a legal way to change it, a lot of people will still abide by calling you by your original name. They're used to calling you that, so why should they change? Why should they change for you? More importantly, why should they change for me? That's why I've decided to not go through the hassle of legally changing my name, so I will just change it now, and beat the hell out of whoever calls me by my old one.
Crazy change, right? Well, it wouldn't have crossed my mind at all if this school wasn't full of bullies like you, Mr. Woolson2. How do I start with you? Graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Psychological teachings, but due to several infractions committed while living on the school campus, you can't put a single one of your rotten paws in it. I want to know how much money you bribed the principal to get in? How much money did your grubby little hooves have to shell out before they could let you teach here? How much money did you pay afterwards to excuse your predator students coming home from school with all kinds of wounds on their bodies? Probably not much, considering the principal is a prey herself3.
I don't mind accusing you this way, because I don't expect to be going back to this school. I don't expect to be going back to any school at all. You will never truly understand the pain you've caused me. The pain that all of your faculty has made me go through. Well, I'm done taking your punches. I will either die by your hands or escape your clutches and die by something else.
I still remember that day. That sick day where you beat me senseless for using my prescribed painkillers for my bone pain. You knew, asshole. You knew I had gone through a poisoning accident a few years back, but all you did was use it as part of your sick mental and physical cruelty. You made me drink a milkshake filled with cigarette ashes and then pretended you were giving me an incentive for being so well-behaved.
I will never forget the way you used my name either, my number one reason for changing it. You enjoyed how awkward you made me feel. You said my name in such a way that made me shiver. It made me so afraid to hear my name come out of your mouth, because that only meant bad things were about to happen to me. You took advantage of my previous forays with the school system. I get it, I was a bad kid, but so were the teachers. They didn't give me a chance. They just saw my profile and immediately they treated me so horribly. I was forever destined to be the problem fox, the one no one wanted to associate with. How do you think that was gonna help me? If scum is still treated as scum, it will know nothing else. You don't want to reform me. You just want to fear me. And boy, I bet it's so easy to fight your fears if it is against a kid that is only about 1/5th of your size. You relish in the fact that you will always be stronger against a small fennec fox. Your crazy power-trip fantasies come alive when you destroy the life of a powerless predator whose only crime was to be born.
I know so much about you, Mr. Woolson. Enough evidence too, for the cops to bust you and leave you in prison for eternity. But I don't think that's enough punishment for you. Not at all. Not so much because of what you did to me, but what you did to her.
Her name was Milla. Milla Vix4. She was the only person in this terrible school that treated me well. Her and my other friend. Milla and I did everything together. We did our homework, played pranks on the teachers, even got in close calls with the law. We were tight, and we would have done anything for the other. We loved each other.
Do you know what love is, Mr. Woolson? Frankly I don't think you do. Love is not something that crosses your mind most of the time. Now hate…hate is a word you so adore. There's nothing you hate more than teaching us predators, nothing you hate more than watching us live normal lives, nothing you hate more than seeing us alive.
The day it happened went by pretty normal, as far as I could tell. I hadn't seen Milla around, though, which was strange. She usually called me whenever she wanted to skip school. It was one of the activities we enjoyed doing. Our form of escape and control. But today, I saw nothing from her. I knew she couldn't be home; she hates her home. Her mother, well, she isn't exactly a role model, and Milla would always find every excuse to be away from her. I helped her out most times, even letting her sleep in my father's van whenever he wasn't around. So, not seeing her at school, it brought all kinds of alarms into my head.
It was 3pm. Everyone was ready to leave, but I stayed behind. I knew she had you for her last period, so I went to check. Your door was locked, as it usually is. But I knew you were there. I could smell your rotten stench in the air. I could also hear another voice inside, but they weren't speaking. They were just whimpers, moans, all the like. Someone was in there, suffering. I feared the worst.
You probably know the whole story. After all, you probably remember this interaction. Instead of bolting through the door like I should have, my own fear made me stop. I knocked instead. I think that was the worst decision I've ever made in my life. It took no more than 2 minutes for you to open the door, and there you were, looking as innocent as you could but knowing you were guilty of something. I knew you were guilty. I could smell it in you. The fear, the excitement. You told me if I needed something from you, but my mind came up with nothing. I did not want to go inside that room. My instincts told me so. Not even as I heard the soft sounds of claws scratching a surface.
They were quick, hurried, and constant. The sounds did not stop, and I couldn't focus on anything else. I should've asked you what that was. There's many things I should've done that day that I didn't. And I will forever hate myself for that. That's my second reason for abandoning my name. The old me wasn't brave enough to act. The old me was a goddamn coward, and that cost him dearly.
Milla was found two days later, dumped into a trashcan on the other side of Sahara Square. I was able to look at the police records, and found many interesting things. She had been strangled by what looked like hooves, she had been bitten and beaten all throughout her body, but the most damning evidence of all, were her claws. Bloodied, all of them. Some of them were mere inches from coming off her fingers. I knew the scratching sound I heard wasn't a coincidence. You killed her. You destroyed the life of someone dear to me, and I wasn't going to be a coward anymore. So, I got to work.
Ever since I was in your class after that day, I paid no attention to your lectures. Whenever I could, I inspected the room for clues. Soon enough, I noticed one of your cabinets was gone. I looked inside every other surface, and none of them had any sort of claw marks. I knew you had done something with it.
I went back to the crime scene and rummaged through the trash, but found nothing either. You were smart enough to dump it somewhere separate from her. It made my job harder, but I wasn't giving up. I looked for months across the entire district for the most inconspicuous places to dump a cabinet. The ports in the district are highly frequented, so you couldn't have dumped it into the ocean either. All of those months of searching, and nothing. It wasn't long before I figured that maybe you weren't that smart. So I checked the storage room at the school, and lo and behold, there it was. It was one of the first items in the pile. You didn't even bother to try to hide it.
I opened the small cabinet, and there they were. Blood and claw marks, and an instant punch of her scent. That was when I cried for the first time since her death. I also cried with happiness. I had found you, fucker. And you were gonna go down. I took a lot of pictures of the cabinet with my phone, and collected a sample of the blood with a Q-tip, saving it in a Ziploc bag.
If I were to get you arrested, I would send that evidence to the police. Don't worry, I still will, but I need to have my fun. I need to cause you pain, just like you have caused me. I've spent weeks planning this, to finally have my just desserts, and today is the day. I know your schedule. You read and grade all of your essays at lunchtime, and there's no one else in the halls by then, so it's easy for a small fox like me to sneak away and go back inside. As soon as you finish this, a knock will be waiting outside your door, and I will greet you with Milla's bat in your face. I feel it's fitting to use something she owns to whack your brains out. I've sealed the windows shut, and have made contingency plans to keep you inside that room until I am able to get there, so don't worry, Mr. Woolson, I've saved you the trouble of walking your fat ass away from your chair.
Now, you're probably not wondering what was up with the title of my "essay" but I will tell you anyway, because why not? The concept of stars is hypocritical. People have these made-up fantasies about those floating light objects in the night sky as something graceful, powerful. Something to attribute positive things to. You did a good thing in kindergarten? You get a star. You become famous in a sport? You're a star, etc. But when I found out those objects of light were just planets that had been dead for thousands of years, that's when the irony of it all hit me. They are just a farce. A faint attempt of an object in space to be noticed, to be looked at in death. An explosive end of something that no one knows the beginning of.
I'm a star. No one is interested in my beginning. Oh, but I bet they will be interested on my end. It will certainly make for a great story. But I've accepted that. If I have to become a star and have a death that creates a light that travels for thousands of years in order to be noticed, then so be it. I'd rather die covered in light than become a stranger.
So, Mr. Woolson, there's only one last thing, and this whole issue will be over quite soon5.
Open the door.
[LETTER ENDS]
OFFICER'S NOTES
"Finnick" is the name the suspect has given us. He refuses to give out his real name, and we are finding it difficult to track him in the records department. Either laziness from the staff in Records, or an attempt by the suspect itself to hide his identity altogether. There's also the slight possibility that they never gave him a birth certificate, as he was born in poverty to parents that are less than cooperative with us. They've agreed to cooperate, but they still wouldn't give out the suspect's actual name.
Charlie Woolson, a name many of us have had the displeasure of knowing. Born 1978, he disguised himself as a psychology teacher to prey on innocent predator children. Unfortunately, the suspect did give us quite immense amounts of evidence against him that finally led to his arrest warrant on the same day of the incident.
The suspect points out the principal of the school, Ms. Applewood. We cannot confirm if she had anything to do with Woolson's many abusive behaviors(and eventual murder), but there is a clear case of ignorance in the entire school, with plenty of the staff pointing out that they always knew something was wrong, and brought it up to Ms. Applewood many times, but completely dismissed it due to her more relaxed demeanor. Plenty of teachers also let us know that she wasn't at all discriminative against predator students. More investigations will be carried out on the school in the coming months.
Milla Vix. Female fox. 15 years old when deceased. The victim was found on the other side of the district on a garbage bag along the Riverwalk. Cause of death indicated strangulation with hooves. As the suspect points out in his essay, she had plenty of bite marks, mostly on the anterior side of her body, with the majority of them being in her chest area. Other places of interest include cuts on her legs and arms, as well as a black eye, possibly from being punched by Woolson. The DNA contained in the Q-tip that the suspect kindly provided matched perfectly with the blood of the victim, all but confirming Mr. Woolson had indeed locked her in it, explaining her broken claws.
Many things are elusive about what happened that day, due to the uncooperative nature of the suspect when giving those details. But through our investigation, we determined that there had been quite a struggle between the fox and the ram. Books were knocked out of their shelves, tables were flipped over, and obviously, a lot of blood, most of it belonging to the unfortunate Mr. Woolson. But, in a turn of events that I am sure the suspect did not expect, another fox had heard the ruckus and stopped him from carrying out the kill. This act, committed by 13-year old Nicholas Wilde, undoubtedly changed the course of this investigation. With Woolson relatively alive, we could confirm most of the evidence. He was very cooperative; all he wanted was to 'get away from that bastard hellish fox' and so we made true of his wish. This was also a life-altering change for the suspect. Since he did not commit murder and was acting against a public menace, his sentence was fairly reduced to just spending two years in juvie. Plenty of investigation is still ongoing, but we can settle the matter of this 'Finnick' to rest, and hope that he recovers from such an event. I really don't want to have to arrest him again.
[END REPORT]