NAILS IN A FOREHEAD
A Framed Narrative of Academic Inquiry into Memory, Dissociation, and Complex Trauma
Journal narrative by Brian “Happy” Bryanson
Academic introduction, interpretive framework, and conclusion by AI
CPTSD COLD CASE • “SEND THE DEAD HOME”
AI PROFESSOR’S READER NOTICE
This edition preserves Brian “Happy” Bryanson’s journal as a first-person record of subjective experience. The journal contains recollections, dreams, sensory fragments, interpretations, and allegations involving identifiable or potentially identifiable people. Inclusion does not establish that an event occurred as remembered, that an interpretation is correct, or that an allegation has been independently verified. The academically responsible reading is dual: take the narrator’s suffering and phenomenology seriously while keeping historical and criminal claims open to corroboration.
AI-authored material is visually distinct: Arial type, dark blue text, teal rule, and an explicit AI label. Bryanson’s original journal appears in 12-point Times New Roman, black. Except for paragraph spacing needed for legibility, the source text has not been silently rewritten or corrected.
AI PROFESSOR’S INTRODUCTION
This document should be read as more than an account of what Bryanson believes he remembers. It is also a longitudinal observation of a mind attempting to study itself while under the pressure of complex post-traumatic stress, dissociation, bodily activation, acquired and developmental learning difficulties, and a lifelong moral demand to make meaning from suffering. Bryanson is simultaneously narrator, witness, clinician, archivist, and research participant. That unusual combination is the central methodological fact of the work.
Across the larger body of writing associated with CPTSD Cold Case—works including PAIN FINDS ME AGAIN AND AGAIN, STRANGE WAY TO FIND JUSTICE, A BREAKTHROUGH IN GLENDA FLASHBACKS, WHEN YOU LOOK AT ME WHAT DO YOU SEE, and the recurring mission to “Send the Dead Home”—Bryanson uses writing as a form of external memory. The page becomes a holding environment for images that arrive out of sequence, bodily sensations that seem to precede explanation, and moral questions that remain unresolved. In this entry, NAILS IN A FOREHEAD, that method becomes visible in real time: timestamps mark interruption and return; metaphors organize overwhelming experience; fatigue follows intense recall; and the narrator repeatedly tests whether a newly emerging fragment belongs to an older narrative.
The reader should resist two opposite errors. The first is to dismiss the text because memory is fragmented, emotionally intense, or imagistic. Those features themselves are meaningful data about the narrator’s experience. The second is to treat narrative vividness as automatic proof of external events. Vividness, sensory specificity, bodily conviction, and internal coherence can strengthen a phenomenological account, but historical conclusions require independent records, locations, dates, witnesses, forensic findings, or other corroboration. The strongest academic posture is therefore disciplined compassion: neither disbelief by reflexes nor certainty by emotion.
Bryanson’s professional history as a foster father, and founder of the Bryanson Institute adds another layer. He often interprets his younger self through concepts acquired later—dissociation, alters, hypervigilance, trauma reenactment, attachment, and survival adaptation. This retrospective clinical vocabulary can clarify experience, but it may also shape how experience is organized. Rather than treating that as a defect, researchers should document it as part of the case: adult expertise and childhood fragments interact in the present act of narration.
The research question beneath this entry is not simply, “Did every remembered scene happen exactly this way?” A fuller set of questions is: How does Bryanson experience memory return? What bodily and cognitive changes accompany it? How are discontinuity, metaphor, hunger, sleep, fear, moral injury, and purpose linked? Which details remain stable across writings? Which change over time? What claims can be externally tested? And how does the mission of returning the missing and dead to their families give structure to a life shaped by CPTSD? Read in this manner, the journal becomes a case archive of autobiographical reconstruction and moral persistence.
AI PROFESSOR’S METHOD NOTE
The grid is an interpretive map, not a diagnosis or a finding of fact. Green-blue cells identify directly observable features of the writing; gold cells mark cautious clinical inferences; red cells mark evidentiary limits or alternative explanations.
Narrative feature
Observable material
Cautious interpretation
Research / verification question
Multiple simultaneous “screens”
Competing images, story lines, and imagined interview formats
Attentional overload or dissociative compartmentalization may be experienced as parallel channels
Does this pattern correlate with sleep loss, stress, medication, pain, or specific triggers?
Timestamps and pauses
Entries stop for food, sleep, exhaustion, and later return
Self-monitoring and pacing function as informal field notes
Create a chronology of writing sessions, sleep, symptoms, and later revisions.
Out-of-body vantage point
Narrator describes floating above or observing from outside the scene
May resemble depersonalization, derealization, or a narrative representation of dissociation
Compare language across journals; note onset, duration, and sensory continuity.
Transformation imagery
Bodies become scaled, enlarged, ghoul-like, robotic, or rapidly decayed
Metaphor may encode fear, developmental perception, dream material, or state-dependent recall
Separate literal detail from symbolic imagery before external investigation.
Somatic certainty
Jolts, hunger, pain, release, exhaustion, and prolonged sleep accompany recall
The body is a major source of meaning and perceived confirmation for the narrator
Track symptoms clinically; bodily conviction alone cannot verify historical claims.
Child/adult double perspective
Child perception is repeatedly interpreted through adult clinical language
Present knowledge may help organize fragments while also influencing reconstruction
Preserve earliest versions and compare them with later interpretations.
Food, deprivation, and care
Meals, gluttony, dehydration, feeding, and present weight are linked
Food may operate as survival memory, attachment signal, regulation strategy, and shame narrative
Study patterns without reducing weight to a single cause; use medical and psychosocial records.
Moral mission
The narrator connects recovery to locating victims and “sending the dead home”
Purpose may support endurance and identity while raising the stakes of every fragment
Build a claim ledger: memory, inference, source, corroboration status, and next lawful step.
Named people and alleged crimes
Specific individuals, places, dialogue, vehicles, and acts appear
Specificity creates testable leads but also risks overconfidence and reputational harm
Do not publish as established fact; route concise, testable details through appropriate channels.
“ICU of my amnesic mind” dream
Comatose patients, covered faces, and nurses appear in a dream
A powerful internal metaphor for inaccessible memory and hoped-for recovery
Classify explicitly as dream material; analyze its function without literalizing it.
AI PROFESSOR’S TRANSITION
The following text is Bryanson’s source narrative. Its grammar, capitalization, chronology, uncertainty, and shifts in voice are retained as features of the record.
I have so many things to do, one is to continue to switch over an old laptop to this new one that has all these upgrades. Apparently, my old operating system would no longer be supports and I had to buy a newer model. As always, I was pleased with my purchase, and my autistic children had different views lol. While switching over these laptops and the data they hold, I found unfinished works and will tackle them later. I made a file just for unfinished works wow. The theme is always another flashback pushing through and I need to attend to that issue and forget to go back and complete what I was working on. Then here I am again with the sadness falling upon me like a drenching ice-cold northern sea wave and I am that frozen child again. Even now as my brain tries to focus on what is causing it pain and the images that are being produced. My dissociative mind is throwing all sorts of things at me. Past flashbacks, story lines where I am explaining and narrating what’s occurring. Then it tosses me into this talk show format where I am explaining myself to a host. All of this occurs at the same time, I used to refer to this as many TV screens all playing at once and thought it had to do with my attention deficit disorder. Now I believe it has far more to do with my dissociative mind and how it tried to distract me by keeping my mind too busy to focus upon one feed. If many messages play, then my consciousness cannot get a full dose of one and hence the impacts are lessened due to a blitzkrieg of data input. When all the waves fight one another only a few drops can find their way into the vessel of reality. I view it as trying to toss pennies into an old glass coke bottle the accuracy must be spot on or it passes me by, and I continue down the river of consciousness.
The image is a summer sunny day its hot and I am small some farmer has discovered Robert and I and a fight ensued. The man had his tailgate down on his truck and Robert had him bent over the edge from the driver’s side. The man was tough, and he was matching Robert blow for blow and as Robert attempted to choke him and keep this man perched over this tailgate in an odd position that man was beginning to come back into this fight. Robert moved from choking him to pushing this mans chin up. This was an attempt to keep the man bent backwards across the tailgate. Control the head and control the body one would think. However, this guy had as much rage as Robert, and he was once again beginning to wither free from Roberts oddly positioned hold. As they tussled the truck shook and other rattling noises occurred. Then just for a second Roberts eyes darted toward the inside of that truck bed. Robert leaned forward over this man and the returned to his old position. He switched from holding the man’s neck with his right hand and now he was using his left, and the man was making more headway in freeing himself. It was as sudden as a bolt of lightning would be in an approaching rainstorm in spring.
A flash of movement occurred but it was across Roberts body. He was wearing his cut off shorts and nothing else. From his feet upward it seemed like his skin just flashed with fish scales that had a dark blue hue at the base and then a lighter blue as it extended to the flagging flap of the curved end. It seemed like these scales blew straight out from his skin these flaps layered down like armor and his skin became normal again. That shimmer of blue became more tipped with green as it went up his body and this flap looked a great deal like those found on the swamp thing a movie, I would watch years later. Then his muscles grew it appeared to me that he had become a man three times thicker than he had been.
The whole structure of his body had changed, and he was now holding that farmer by the throat with his left hand and as I followed this pulsating hue of an aura from the torso and through to the fingertips of that hand, I could see that the farmer was now scared. Eyes like saucers wouldn’t be an exaggeration at this juncture. His face had been weatherworn and excess skin hung around his face and eyes like a bloodhound. Then his eyes opened so far that his expression lifted those flaps and for the first time since he had discovered us, I could see that he had crystal blue eyes. That moment to me felt like at first, I witnessed a caricature, the angry farmer trying to punish the interlopers. Then when his face altered due to fear, and I could see his eyes. This man was a boy to me it was like all that rage he mustered with his life’s difficulties being used as the fodder in the furnace was now leaving him. He was just that scared child who had been beaten and mistreated when he was too young to know what to do.
This man had been thickened in his own way as he raged in battle with Robert. This man seemed just like Robert in that he wasn’t fighting to win he was fighting to kill. All that bluster with decades of preparation the countless times this man battled and lost and then began to endure more pain than he thought he could and eventually to prevail in small percentages and eventually more often than not he succeeded. Perhaps over 1000 skirmishes full of preventative moves of self-protection followed by brawls of many against the one which happened to be him. This persona of tough self-righteous anger began to develop its own form with clenched fist and the ability to pour thousands of hours of abuse into one punch began to solidify into this rural man with way to get therapy. Then he met my father who was just like him except his abuse was far more extreme and his self-righteousness dwelled deep within many personas that would now be referred to as alters. With just the grip of Roberts left hand his non-dominate hand this man now knew that the food chain he sat atop of had now changed. Instantly he fell to the level of plankton in that sea of testosterone he swam in.
I wonder if he could see the shimmering hues that I could. Both my parents believed that I was prophetic and used to ask me all the time if I had dreamt of the sheriff coming. Then my father even went so far as to buy me books about psychics and mail them to me. Telling me in his brief note that he believed I was like these people, and I could understand my abilities more if I read a book about someone that had developed beyond my abilities. He saw these books as training manuals. That trait that both parents had pointed out seemed to be in play in this scene. This man had become that scared child again and I could envision him fighting hard at a young age so that his father couldn’t push him between the hot cat iron stove and wall. Causing him to burn his hands when he had to work his way out. Wow that’s an abuse I had never seen before or even thought of. In my body right now, I just felt that jolt carry through my body as if I was that boy and that shoving was happening to me. I witnessed a jolt occur in Robert’s surge of energy and now I feel it here in this body as I type.
Robert took his right hand and placed it across that man’s face, even as his fear embraced him his desire to survive was still intact and primally driven. I had been frozen for a while this engagement had begun in front of our car and then moved back past our car and to the end of this man’s truck. I had run here to get away from all the yelling and then once I was at the end of these two cars that yelling turned into roars of rage and I froze in place. Then when Robert whipped that man around and caught him on the end of this tailgate, I had already exited my body and now floated above this whole scene. I could see the back of Roberts right hand clenched like a fist upon this man forehead. One of the mans crystal blue eyes showed out amongst all that blustering movement. Then to me it seemed like that one eye had become a telescopic lens into this mans soul and he was watching that proverbial flash of the past that others have spoken of. Except I am taking that ride with him and seeing his land and mother while they are both pursued across that land by an angry man. Then that telescopic tunnel began to tremble, and I exited but as I did, I can see that Robert had a nail. Larger and longer than a typical nail but smaller than a landscaping nail. It seemed purposeful in its build and was not a piece of scrap.
My own telescopic sight had been activated and now it was watching Robert pushing this nail into this man’s forehead. That piece of steel was deep enough to begin the body to shed blood down into that mans face and off into the dirt. That eye was sending all these messages with its ocular alterations and fluctuations of its own hue. Then it became this flickering mass of old and new became our triad, where once a man had been behind these pupils. Now that brightness began to pixilate as the pupils showed tiny blotches of blood. Then a huge explanation of air occurred, and the body went limp and its wholeness excreted its minimal excesses. The pants changed color, and this large amount of smile emitted from the mouth and ran out the corner and was drooping down to the ground like an extended slinky. Robert stood and stepped back and became as ridged as a soldier. He was not gasping for air, nor did he seem exhausted or triumphant. No emotion showed whatsoever then this body walked away in the direction he had come when fighting that man. I was hovered above this man like Tinkerbell would have done when looking down upon a sleeping lost boy.
This man’s body was now contoured to this tailgate this truck bed had extended hinges that block the top corner of the tailgate. Meaning that when Robert had stretched this man out on this tailgate the man’s right leg was atop this hinge and became useless for leverage but also a deficit for when it came to pain. I could see that this man had an inch of nail still extended above the skin line. More than that length had been pushed into this man’s skull. Another odd thing was that this newly dead body of a man who had the strength to fight Robert and stay alive until an alter joined in. Now that once magnificent body of stoutness seemed withered and decaying internally at an astonishing rate and his pants and shirts that had been tout due to his muscles now showed lovely waves billowing across their textures. It seemed like this body had lost its ‘muchness’ and was withering in front of me like the wicked witch of the west from the wizard of OZ. I could see his face begin to wither and his cheeks go gaunt and then opened into an advanced stage of decay. In this flashback it feels like the sun is dawning and setting and I am standing still as I too grow old while standing in place.
This scene in my head is reminding me of how Max had described the process of the high school girl he abducted and visited until her body began to decompose to pretend it was an alive person anymore. Then Roberts’ body came around the opposite side of the truck toward this bodies head not its feet. He was thick with muscle again especially in his traps and upper back. The eyeglasses he had lost during the initial fight he had placed back on his face. He was moving robotically and stood in front of this man’s body and then began to lift the tailgate and slam it with the mans legs blocking the way. He continued to do this same action continually and eventually the boots fell off and then blood dripped off his heel. I was now Indian Joe and standing there with a huge, centered persona. I felt like I was a grown man, and this Indian Joe physique was protecting me. This manifestation that had engulfed me became my bluff to Robert’s entity I presume much like a chess move when attempting to stop one move and protect from another. Neither I nor Indian Joe knew who this was. They did not talk or engage us in any manner. It acted robotically and grew thick without a threat but then couldn’t figure out how to move a body that it had killed to close a tailgate.
This man was like Robert, and he was involved with the sex trade in some manner. We had not been interlopers upon his property this had been a set rendezvous. Robert had brought a sibling set of blonde sisters with their mother in tow. They had all been taken by point of gun and brought here, from the clothes they wore this family was upper class and had no trauma skills to fall back upon. These girls shook with fear, defecated upon themselves and vomited spontaneously as the truth of their impact set in and wore them down with stress. They had so much money that when Robert acquired them several of the daughters had fancy haircuts like bobs and well-set curls that may have been a chemical perm. Those would be recuring costs from a large discretionary spending fund that had been well financed most likely by intergeneration wealth management. I remember these girls all walking out their front door at night with hands in the air and then made to crawl in the backseat with me. Robert kept their mother close and his control of her gave him control over the others. The girls and mother all had bright blonde hair and wore dresses that had been cut and made from the same fabric. These dresses had a busy print of various colors with a white background and stopped at the knee. Then this fabric had a collar that fluffed up around their necks but not due to frills it had been hard starched not to lay limp. I think that they had gone for a partridge family look.
Once the door closed and the windows were up the smell of hair chemicals was intense, and Robert had to roll his window down just to get a breath. It was like we had been locked into a box with an open pesticide bottle. These girls trembled with fear while their mother continually told them everything would be okay. I was trapped against the passenger side back door. I was not used to being around girls that didn’t want to pick me up or continually trembled while they cried, and their mother was actually alive and talking. Then we ended up at this rural area, and all these girls laid face down with their hands tied behind their backs. I had been asleep, and it was the arrival of this farmer’s truck that woke me up. The farmer was angry that these girls were not true blonds and that they knew who he was. Robert was retorting with hos this man had promised $100 per blonde and that this man owed him. Then the fight began, and I ran away, and they rumbled all the way to the back of the truck that had parked behind our vehicle. The mother was not with this group of girls as they lay prone in the grass.
I recall now that Robert had gotten all the girls tied and situated like fish upon a stringer. Then he dragged the mother toward the first tree in the forest of trees closest to the car and tied her hand up over a limb and then began to beat her with his foists and ask her questions. The girls would scream out mom and mommy, and this interrogation would continue I couldn’t hear Robert, but I could hear the mother yelling back that it would be okay. Then the fists changed to sticks and the screams began. She had been a tough mother determined to see her daughters through this but now the pain had grown beyond what she could control. The daughters all wanted to run to their mother but had all been tied by their bindings to a closed circle stringer. Meaning that all of them would have to stand at the same time and move in synchronicity. Some of them were just too young to coordinate this in such a moment of crisis. I was at the back of the car in the dark trying to stare off into where Robert was and then the campfire caught the glimmer of this large monstrosity of movement with screams and shouts and in my mind, it was a monster from the woods. I darted back inside the car and that was where I fell asleep.
Robert may have kidnapped these girls and the mother due to some other crime he was committing and then dragged them here for an interrogation at night and an auction in the morning. I know that farmer had set a price, but Robert knew that these captives where to many for one man to handle and that they were fake blonds not real ones. For some reason in the slavers, they wanted the head hair to match the pubic color. I don’t understand why that was such a drawl to them but then again, they have a perves point of view, and I am not a perve so their world is as distant from me as mars would be to an astronomer on earth. That star gazing is for the purpose of interpreting the galaxy and reaping what can be learned. The astronomer works to live in that distant world. While I work to rid myself of the pervs and live a life more attuned to this world. It is now 3:38 am on July 15th, 2026, and I have had enough gruesomeness and am taking a break. I am citing the time simply since I do not know when I shall return. The images have ended and now I need a snack to counteract my hunger and this aching pain I have in my stomach that I am hoping is simply related to my anticipation of a sandwich.
(It is now July 15th, 2026, at 10:48am and I have been asleep until more images woke me.)
This man who had the crystal blue eyes and blonde hair was around Robert and I for some time before his death. He was never a kind man he always had rage below his breath, and he and Robert would get drunk on some heavy syrup type mixture this man made in a still outside his house. They would sit on that man’s tailgate and overlook a wood fire and drink all night long. I would fall asleep and wake when the sun woke me, and both men would be laid prone below the tailgate snoring. My guess is that they slept until they passed out.
Robert let me try that syrup that they would sip on, and it had a sickening sweet flavor and burned when it went down your throat. This burn from one drop made my innards feel like they had been touched by fire. I could feel that drop cascade down my throat and into my esophagus and then I fell to the ground and held my stomach. This was a course and vile burn that made my body try and eject it through dry heaving and then later it jettisoned out of my anus like a hot lava enema. The fluid that came out of me burned my sensitive perianal skin so much that I found myself in the high grass trying to find the right set of grass to walk or crawl over to reach that part of my body and remove the sting. I had no luck once I had found that spot the grass blades that had aided me had been used up. Then more leakage of magna would ooze out and that already damaged skin burned with more intensity than before, and I was on all four trying to push weeds and grass between my squatted form to try and align some style of vegetation to wick that acid form of drainage away.
This aftershock of leakage continued to well beyond my level of exhaustion. The pain had been so intense that I continued to fall into a heap of exhausted gasping for oxygen. Robert and that man laughed and my suffering excited them and they began to kiss passionately upon the ground and then consummated their union in what I thought was some type of wrestling at the time. My body lay there, and I would be overtaken by convulsions not enough that I would lose consciousness but enough that I could feel my stomach attempting to rid itself of that syrupy substance. The stages of expulsion stayed the same throughout the day and night. Large amounts of gas would exit my body and bring the dogs. Then they would lick me buttocks clean and I had a reprieve until the actual expulsion of substance occurred and I would suffer with such a burning torment that my body quaked with sensation of a blizzardly cold. I was laying in the weeds in a hot night trembling from waves of chill that made my teeth chatter. The dogs continually cleaned me, and I became this tongue stop along their way of going here and there around this man’s farm.
My condition had worsened to such a predicament that Robert had picked me up and held me while he wrapped me in a blanket. It smelled like horse, but that blanket allowed a sensation of comfort it did not end the shivers I was experiencing. My leakage was now more of an explosive diarrhea that shot out of me like the jettisoned spike of a carrion birds last meal of death. My body was small, and I had been projectiling out what miniscule amount of moisture I had as waste. I had become dehydrated due to whatever that substance had been and then Robert began to treat me as if I had been a baby bird. He would fill his mouth with water and then push small amounts into my mouth and I would reluctantly swallow. This technique he was using seemed rehearsed and he even knew how to time his slow but determined leakage of water into my mouth in-between my breaths. He would lay me flat in his arms when he trickled that water into my mouth using gravity and then sat me up when I swallowed once again using gravity but enacting that instinctual rudimentary means of slurping. Some water made it down and then the other part dribbled down my chin. I was not acting in defiance, but I was just too weak to adhere to his requestable intent.
Robert held me for what felt like days the sun would fade, and I would feel his arms around me holding me and talking to me. Then the sun would rise and like a heart beat he was there making eye contact and then the ritual of revising me would continue. This was Roberts body but an alter I had never met was at the wheel. The voice gave it away as it was feminine and had a sense of coy in its interrogatories that was playful and working hard to be engaging to register some sense of interaction from me for her analysis. Then those mouthfuls became broth filled and later small amounts of prechewed stew type material. That sweet sip had cost me dearly and yet those two drank it all night and then repeated the process. That blonde man hovered around Robert as this process continued and he seemed to grow jealous from the nurturing that I was receiving. As my strength grew, I could turn my head and make sense of the world again and across the flames of the fire I could see that this man held me in contempt and despised me for being the child in jeopardy who was receiving what they needed hence they would have died.
(This eye engagement that this man was attempting to offend me with is so reminiscent that it holds a theme of all those that came after him. Glenda would do the same glare at me, and she truly wanted me dead but somehow, I survived. Amazing how the subconscious works with my fellow students and co-workers. They did not witness any kindness bestowed upon me, yet they can sense that though we are both broken I am more healed than they are. I am not sure that I was developed enough internally for this man to hate me for that subconscious reason. However, it seems to me now that he was enraged that as a child, I mattered to someone. Then add that the someone was just like him in many ways. As they would drink, they bonded over sadistically deeper stories of the pain they caused others. This man was engaged in a theme that has followed me my entire life and he recognized it as an outsider with a sinisterness that had him barley able to withhold his contempt.)
This resurrection of a dying child seemed to take days if not a week of sunup’s and twilights. I woke one morning to another tongue bath from those dogs, but it seemed to be more rejoiceful this time and they focused on my face and hands and then gone again on their daily routine of wondering the farm. I was feeling much better, and I could now sit up on my own and I drank from an old tin can that Robert kept half full all day for me with what tasted like broth. Something had changed in the dynamic of this man and Robert. That man now walked with a limp and held his ribs when he stood and sat. Then I could see that a tuff of his blonde hair now was missing, and he had a purple eye not just bruised but swollen shut and his lower lip was so fat that it hung down like Bejamin Buford Blue aka Bubba from the movie Forest Gump. This man had beautiful facial structure and high cheek bones with a solid masculine chin. Now he looked like a sad clown that had lost his circus wagon and didn’t know what to do next. He and Robert obviously have had a fight the pretense of I do not know. It maybe that this man faced off with another alter as both Glenda’s and Roberts alters were protective of me. The look on this mans face and the manner in which he carried himself amongst his own animals on his own farm was a devastatingly deterioration from how he had first appeared.
Now he mopped around like an inmate who had been ganged raped after trying to become the head of the cell block. He challenged and lost then had to heal from his boisterousness while the others watched him toil in misery. A part of him was that young boy who still yearned to be saved and nurtured. Then there was this void in his sense of self. I would wager that his violence as a man had led him to dominate others and then end them in his own time. This time this immature master of violence had just met his version of the master of masters. Just like Robert did when he met that architectural man out in the woods who had a slave that had belonged to that man’s own father. This beatdown is often done to slaves and then they are brought up to lose their name and take on a role of serving their master or pimp. I never caught Robert instructing this other man about what to do or how to behave. Making this man even more empty that before. Roberts body was nurturing me, and another alter was running the day to day, but whatever alter put that man in his place was just a blink away inside of Robert and I believe that this man had figured this out.
What was he to do, he had lost and now was damaged and this perpetrator lived right there on this man’s farm and couldn’t be run off. Then on top of that this man had to endure the continuous care that Robert was supplying to a child. This man hated himself, but he projected out upon other innocent’s the self-degradation he held and applied his elixir of sadism upon those he deemed most worthy to receive his treatment. I know this man better now I can feel his sensations in the marrow of my psyche. This man hated faces especially beautiful, happy ones. He had told Robert all ab out how his mother was a beautiful woman who had danced in some ballet somewhere and then married and was brought here by someone with oil money. That man was older and didn’t want this boy and the mother had allowed this boys mistreatment so that she could live in luxury and have nice things. He went on to explain about numerous boarding schools from a young age that expelled him for being incorrigible and how when he arrived back home that older man would beat and rape him and lock him in trunks for days. Eventually he was discarded to the servant’s quarters and he still acted out upon the staff and created disturbances. So, he was sent to live with the farmer who supplied the mansion with its daily meats and dairy and when that man died, he inherited the farm and that’s why he was here now. He made reference to having been born in Germany and that this marriage proposal removed him and his mother from poverty. His father had been a dancer too but had somehow become disabled and slipped away into the streets as an alcoholic. This man’s tale of woe began as he sipped that syrup and then became a theatrical show of dramatic flair as he acted out his scenes there on the grass at the back of his pickup.
I fell asleep to his ranting it was an odd situation there was the tailgate and then the campfire and I had nestled myself on the other side. As dark claimed us then those flames and their popping embers would dance with the fireflies and this man would bolt from the tailgate and conduct a one-man soliloquy of his life’s worst events. This is how I learned of the cast-iron oven and how whoever was harming him at the time would try and push him into it or press his hands against it. The part about pushing him down in-between the stove and that wall so he would have to burn himself to get out of that spot was not shared. That truly seemed to be some deeper terror that had been placed upon him at a young age but never spoken of. I just picked it up like two kindred spirits this man was a boy of abuse just like me and we had a different connection. (This right here is the release I have been searching for this connection cleansed me somehow and now I feel this impactful elevation from what I was to who I am now. I just progressed to another level but having just arrived I do not know what it’s made of. I feel alone in my skin as if my tight person suite has now been let out so that my soul may grow again.)
(It is now July 15th, 2026, at 2:08pm and I will be taking a constitutional and enjoying another snack. I like these feelings and I will wrap my psyche around what just changed within me bye for now.)
(Today is July 22nd, 2026, at 6:23pm and I am returning to report that I have been quite busy with emails and AI creations)
For some reason AI through CHATGBT and Google has upgraded and I receive a great deal more help now. So, I created profiles for both parents and an email to let people know that I am searching for Merv Mason from the FBI. I also found that the Texas Rangers received more money for cold cases and unsolved crimes. Sexual Assault Kit Initiative called SAKI and Unsolved Crimes Investigation Program called UCIP these two programs promoted new people and thus I have more names to use and new programs to try and reach out too. So, I did and then added some representatives and a senator to my list since they wrote this house bill that pays for these two programs. Then at the end I sent many of my newly created works to any governmental entities that I could find an email for. If the ghosts are listing, they should see that I am getting a great deal done on their behalf.
That blonde man was so much like Robert in that he had previous childhood abuse and then grew up rurally where one could in act any crime in the wilderness that they wished and had no consequences. I wonder what he thought of Robert and how he must have felt that he had found either a kindred spirit or someone who he could gain what his sadistic heart desired. Showing up with a family of non-blonde females that smelled like chemicals really set him off. If Robert had not had his alters to back him up, then I am sure that I would have died there in some rural no name place. However, my pain would have ended, and I would have been in heaven before my Mammy and Nana, and I would have greeted them with open arms versus the other way around. Other flashbacks have shown up and added more to their frames but not this one.
The catholic priest who I excluded worms in front of disappeared and those nuns took me away into another room that had a metal table. It looked more like an autopsy table than a treatment table. The room had a strong chemical smell, and these nuns began to undress me, and they put these metal clamp like things on the worms. I was in and out of consciousness, but I could feel the back of my throat act like it had its own heartbeat and that my tongue was now a carpet with a heavy weight pushing on it. They had me on my side and as some worked on me others stood behind me and loudly said prayers. They were pulling at these long worms and then I could feel needles being pushed into my buttock. This was one of the things that kept bringing me back to consciousness. Those things that they poked into my buttocks were not typical needles they felt like rods and then I could feel substances going into my body and then they would withdraw that rod. It was like I would sink below the water and lose all sounds and feel content and peaceful and then this jabbing pain of a steel rod was in my buttocks and someone was moving it around while hot stuff was being jettisoned into my body. All these women spoke in Spanish, and I would sink into contentment and then be thrown back into consciousness welcomed by sever gluteus maximus pain and a conglomerate of Mexican sounds. I would try and scream and fight, but these nuns knew what they were doing and they had me pinned down while injecting me and wailing these prayers so loud I could barely make out the words of the oldest lady shouting what I guess where commands. Many more nuns in black filled the room and then they all chanted the same verse of what I guess was a prayer and my body went ridged and those worms seemed to flop out like strands of spaghetti. These clamps pulled so many out of my mouth and to the floor as I guess these worms died or became too exhausted to hold half their bodies in my intestines.
I could feel them lifting me and again they knew what they were doing. Many of them put arms underneath me and I could feel the knots in my back where they must have been holding hands, and they whisked me away to another room. The nuns left and I was on a mattress and in this room where all these younger women many looked like teenagers. After the nuns in black where gone these younger females in white sleep gowns came and sat on the edge of my bed and they took harmonized in some ritualistic prayer. Most of these younger women walked oddly and held their stomachs as the shuffled to my bed side. Many of them would be helped by other young women as they wanted to touch my head and say prayers to me. Through out the time that I was in that room the nuns in black robes would visit and leave soup and water for me and the younger women held me up and served it to me. These younger women cleaned me after I moved my bowels and changed my sheets often. They sang to me and again held me with many of them holding hands below my body and rocked me. I fell asleep after that soup to their voices. That soup was simply warm chicken fat it was thick like a jelly, and it didn’t slip down your throat you had to swallow and that action caused me too much pain. Funny but I recall that my tongue felt dead and that I could only taste this soup if it happened to touch the side of my tongue the top was raw and painful with no ability to taste anything. However, when that chicken jelly touched the side of my tongue it felt like I was part of life again and not dying like I had felt before. If this would have happened with Glenda, I am sure I would have died due to suffocation of some other issue of malnutrition and infection and then I too would have been buried in the backyard. Just imagine how her desire to kill me enacted her alters to save me and then I ended up with nuns who practiced third world medicine and had knowledge of conditions like mine lol.
One day I woke up and the room was empty and I was too sore to move. My stomach had felt like it had been pulled out and slammed back in this entire time. I couldn’t sit up to eat and that’s why those young ladies helped me. Then in came all these new young ladies and they were all black and spoke an entirely different language and they arrived wearing black but then all started to wear those white gowns again. These young ladies took over the ritual of feeding and cleaning me and the nuns that brought me food where all black and they brought me a soupy mixture that felt like squashed beans going down my throat and had this smokey burnt type of after taste. Before they served me these you ger nuns took out these leaves and what looked like twigs from the soup, and they would work it in their mouth and the fill the spoon. So basically, young nuns from some where else had arrived for their procedures and found me then began to momma bird me back to health. When they locked their arms under me and sang wow it was so resonating that I could feel it in my chest. It was like a comfortable tasering effect of sound in beautiful rhythm and as if angels were singing my arrival to heaven and I was so ready to go.
Then one day I woke to another empty room and this olde man who looked to be about age 70 was looking down at me and behind him stood several white older nuns who spoke English to me. The old man had that white thing on his neck and held a black hat with a round bowler style top. He wore gold wire glasses and looked down upon me kindly. Then he said my name and I responded and he said, “Are you ready to go home”? I was so bewildered that I felt this was my home and why would he be there? In my ambulatory mental state, I didn’t believe he was real and I was not enthused that he was asking me to leave this place that I thought at the time was my home. Then when he stepped aside and those old white nuns grabbed me and pulled my arms, I went ballistic. In my mind evil had shown up as it always did wearing a white face and they were trying to remove me from my heaven. I got away and bolted to the back door where all the various new arrivals had entered and then found that when I opened these doors it led to some type of back alley filled with garbage and a waif of stench that smelled like decomposing cats. The first door opens and pulls into the area where all these beds resided and then I was faced with another door that had a screen on the top and wood on the bottom. It was one complete door and when I pushed the bottom the screen swung with it and the amount of flies that attacked my face and body felt like heavy raindrops. They filled my mouth as I was trying to scream but my throat felt bare and rusted in an odd manner like the skin had been removed and had not healed. Then as my mouth filled with flies those older nuns where upon me and I was being dragged back toward the front of the room where the doors lead back into the building. I was trying to breathe and spit out flies that I knew I had chewed and then these nuns pushed me down in front of that old white priest and he knelt and was telling me some type of scripture. I can only guess this since his voice was in a roat hymnodic style of memorization.
Then those nuns grabbed me again and I was being dragged toward those doors where the soups come out of, and I knew I didn’t want this to happen. I was still nude and had no shoes and I was fighting to get free and then my whole body turned against my efforts. I took in a breath that was larger than any I had taken while I was in that bed and it resulted in my body excreting through every orifice. Even my eyes cried large tears and snot ran down my face and then those nuns dropped me, and I was alone in my own pool of muck. I could have called it sic, but I feel that whatever they put into my buttocks had killed any infection. What I was healing from was the infestation and the removal of a bunch of intestinal worms. I had been in the best place I could have ever asked for to recoup my health, and these angry old nuns were trying to take me back to hell. The floor was all concrete and I was slipping in my muck as I tried to get up. However, they had dropped me so close to the doors that I was away from the beds and many feet away from anything that I could grab. It was like someone had doused me in oil and then placed me on an ice rink and I was wallowing in the middle, far from any wall which I could use to get up. I was in the middle of the spider web made by my muck because Glenda wouldn’t feed me and I ate trash out of the school dumpsters and the one at the apartment complex. I was suffering a third world affliction in a first would country where 3rd world people had come to my aid and now first world white people were trying to make me go back to hell. WHAT A LIFE!!!!!!!
(This is gross I am aware, but I can feel the release. The blond hair man and his death didn’t have a release yet, but this flashback is and I am so appreciative for it. I feel like my feet don’t hurt just a note they have swollen to a size where I cannot wear my size 18 boots anymore. I am in pain in my feet, my hips and my neck but right now I feel levitated. I am at peace and will now take a break to enjoy some bean soup and of course Diet Dr. Pepper.)
(I have returned on July 25th, 2026, at 10:31pm. After I took my break, I was good that night and then the next day huge wall of sadness hit and I plummeted into exhaustion so extreme that I had been sleeping off and on trying to gather the strength to continue this. I believe that somehow What I wrote above is connect to what I am about to write here. First the old cold case about the small rural girl that my grandfather Max attacked at a Texas rest stop began to play again and then through that another new flashback surfaced. Time will tell how these connect but then again, I may miss it all and narrative archeologists of the future will need to weave this connection together. I will begin with the new flashback.)
When I was young in elementary school, I had no discernable talents and watched so many other children earn allowance in various ways. There was no allowance in the house of hate for me. My younger brother received whatever he wanted, and my olde brother was provided with large amounts of cash that went out the door on a steady disbursement. I had the couches to dig into and find change and from then on when Robert would bring these coffee cans of coins and cash to Glenda, she would count them on the kitchen table. Our house was a pig stye and to count this money Glenda would have to push debris and old food onto the floor to make room. I often wore shoes due to the debris that was often about ankle deep and once when I wasn’t wearing shoes my foot was pierced by a tooth pic that had been lodged in the carpet. My father and mother pinned me on the floor and tried to use a pocketknife to scrape that tooth pic out and then it broke and got infected and days later I had to go to the ER since I couldn’t walk, and my foot had swelled. At the ER they papoose me and then pushed a large needle into my foot and I was wailing the entire time. Glenda stood next to me and gripped my hand. This was not for my comfort that she had found her way into this ER room as she had done the same in California. It was for the purpose of answering the questions the doctors started asking and then when these same doctors stepped away, she would make threats in my ear about how I better shut up.
I was wrapped in the papoose that had a wooden back and my arms where down my sides and my hands hung out the bottom. When the two doctors stepped out, she would try and hammer fist me in my genitals but couldn’t make the impact she wanted so she slammed my chest plate with all her strength. Then when the doctors came back, she explained these additional tears away as if it was related to the issue with my foot. The pounding sound was loud, and it did bring the nurses in to look at me and then those nurses would look right at Glenda with a glare. The doctor would be ushered in, and they smelled like cigarette smoke, so I am guessing that they took breaks to smoke and then would come back when they were ready. These two doctors knew that something had happened and the nurse in the hall had been vocal about telling them out loud and with intensity. However, these two did not seem concerned and they re-focused on my foot.
I left groggy and on crutches and these nurses kept stopping me and asking me questions about if my mother abused me, but I was barely able to stand, and Glenda was standing right next to me. Then as we crossed the parking lot, I caught Glenda flipping her middle finger toward the building several times and screeching curse words in that direction. Thus, I am guessing while I had my head down and I was trying to make it through parked cars to get to our red station wagon that those nurses may have been looking through windows. Then as I had just made it past a large concrete parking curb Glenda tripped my feet and sent me slamming to the asphalt. My face was bloody and it seemed like I was down on the ground for a long time. Glenda was threatening me about what would happen if I didn’t get up but I couldn’t stay firm. I would try and get up and then my whole body would noodle, and I would contour to the ground again. Then as Glenda was behind me between these two parked cars all these women’s voices were in front of me. They sounded like nurses from the surgery on my foot. Then a police officer car was waived down and now an Irving cop in a brown uniform was talking to me and then next to him eventually showed a white police car and that officer wore a blue uniform. They had me up against the rim of a car tire and these nurses were moving their fingers in front of me and asking me questions. I had thrown up on myself, and I couldn’t speak since my face had slammed so hard and my face seemed numb but then it started to burn.
Eventually those two cops had me picked up and were leaning my body against the bumper of a car and they too were asking me how I fell over and still, I couldn’t talk. Then in front of me was a small man that looked just like Seargent Jim Alford, and he was waiving these other two officers away from me and helped Glenda get me into the station wagon. Then as Glenda was in her driver seat and I was in the passenger side and still concussed I could hear Sgt. Jim Alfords voice, and I could hear him spitting chew out of his mouth. He was leaning in Glenda’s driver’s side window and then as I stared at them, they kissed and this just didn’t make any sense to me. This scenario had occurred many times in my life with Glenda being caught abusing me and then flaunting what she could do to me and that no one could stop her. This happened several times while her and I were in Weatherford Texas. She purposely pulled this version of Munchausen by proxy to gain negative attention about my plight. Robert wouldn’t give it to her and these actions could gain no leverage for her through his sympathies. However, these tactics worked like a charm on mammy and nanna and upon the Murrel cousins. It was the theatrics that Glenda wanted that gave her sense of control.
I always wondered why theater made me so sad. That watching a stage performance brought me such sorrow. I was always so frightened as I peered upon the stage and glimpsed behind the left or right-side areas that were behind the curtains. It seemed to me that ominous things awaited me there and that it was in those areas I could be trapped forever. Another fear I possessed at a young age was how I felt so lonely I would have been if I had been left behind in a building and had to wait for the same person who I had been with to return to that exact spot before I could be free to roam again. This fear haunted me often and I know that it’s based on the bodies being separated from their loving families and discarded in desolate areas.
(I just took a snack break, and things began to unfold during my bean soup. I will begin here and know it’s a jump but that’s what flashbacks do.)
While I was snacking on the opening of why I was so scared of that stage and the curtains began to play themselves out. The elementary school that this occurred at isn’t clear when I am in the hallway watching Glenda its Thomas Haley Elementary and when I watch her retrieve the body from behind the curtain it looks like Lee Britian Elementary. Even though this hasn’t played out it has become apparent to me that I just opened a huge chapter of my psyche and right now I am feeling that release of tension. I remember that I was behind Glenda when she pulled that dark headed girl that wore a light-colored dress into the doors that led behind the curtains and on to the performing stage. I had been wondering about the halls for some reason I believed that it was due to a head wound that I had and I couldn’t determine where I was and I just would stand up and feel that I needed to be someplace else and then out I would go. No one would stop me and many times teachers would stop me in the hall and check what they called a goose egg on my head. Then I would push past them because I felt that someone was calling my name from around the corner. Then when I reached that corner, it would be the next corner like I was chasing a ghost and almost had it by its tail.
I watched Glenda do that same move she would do to me to that dark-haired girl. She had pinned her down and had her knees atop her chest and was strangling her the girl’s hands where upon Glennda’s writs and then they fell away and then the body went limp and the skin tone changed and Glenda raised up off he and kicked at her body. I had been holding the door open and then Glenda yanked me in and as she started to move this body that stench of defecation and urination occurred. This body was now dead wait, and Glenda had lost strength from her rage, and she had trouble moving the body. She had placed her hands under the girl’s arms and was trying to straddle, walk this young woman’s body up the steps and into the stage and then she abandoned that idea and grabbed her hands and pulled her up onto the stage and off into the dark shadows. This body left a trail of defecation, and the stench was so raw and powerful that it was like a haze of fecal matter and joined us in this combined space and I was throwing up in my mouth but unable to swallow and now this acidic drool was burning my tongue mouth and lips as due to his volume it worked its way out. These contents from her bowels had a green sheen to them just like the girl Robert killed in what I believe was Shreveport Louisiana.
I remember this girl, she was older maybe in 5th grade, and she had argued out loud and in front of others about how she wanted Glenda to stop poking at that goose egg on my head. The girl was in line with other people her age and she was dressed like a 1950’s dancer. Maybe we had a talent show at school or it was a dress up day. This girl even had her hair pulled back and it had some hair bow that was from that era. I think it was what they called a sock hop party where the older kids did a routine on stage and danced like the old timey dance shows. I had wondered into the lunchroom at what I believe was Thomas Haley elementary and Glenda was following her theme of abusing me in front of others to show her power and control. Then that girl couldn’t take it anymore and was in tremendous distress over how Glenda was parading me around and poking am my goose egg. I was in such a stupor one from the head wound and the other from my dissociative state. No one would dare stand up to Glenda and this child did and that cost her the life she lived.
We left early or something old occurred and had Robert show up at the school and he carried what I thought was a rolled carpet out of the side door in Thomas Haley elementary and I was made to ride with him. He was asking me about this girl, and I couldn’t speak and I was confused since in my mind I wasn’t a girl and why was he asking why I was a girl. This was the rational ability I had that day with my head wound and all of what was occurring. We arrived at the back parking area of Lee Britain Elementary, and some adult women were outside to greet us and in hushed tones they escorted Glenda and Robert into the cafeteria and though they told me to stay in the car I wandered behind them. I remember that I was extremely hungry and when I overheard the word cafeteria I thought of those small milks and how I wanted to drink some. These ladies looked like the ones from the special education department, and they acknowledged me like they knew me. Then that body was hidden behind the curtains of this stage area, and I was sat at a cafeteria chair and that’s when I remember staring at the dark area behind the curtains. I started crying because in my mind there was a puppy that only I could see stuck behind those curtains in the dark and only I could hear them bark. Robert was standing close by me as Glenda was paying these teachers from special education and hugging them. I was telling Robert how I wanted to take that puppy home and how I needed to get that puppy. He then had this look of realization on his face that I was in far worse shape than he had first thought and he was sitting on a chair holding me. Then when Glenda walked over, she was looking pleased with herself and Robert said what did you do to him.
Glenda began to laugh and said you mean your favorite child who you left me to raise and then she was mocking him for holding me and she got up in his face and told him that she had hit me with a frying pan for trying to steal sausage and she grabbed my wrist and turned my forearm over and this searing pain shot up my arm and I became like that baby who takes in a great deal of air before they let out a wail and Robert caught me covered my mouth and raced me outside. He examined me and he was discussing how I had grease burns down both forearms. He took me to the ER, and we waited a long time, it seemed to be seen and then all we got was this cream and I did get held down so they could give me a shot of something in my buttocks. This did not feel like a thin needle, and they moved it around and whatever came out was hot. Right now, those nuns and their procedure is what is filling my head. I have no idea of what medicine takes such a large intrusive needle and comes out so hot once it’s in the intermuscular part of your body.
I am remembering now how Robert had claimed an old farmhouse behind the pastureland in Dorchester and that he had a dilapidated old barn behind that house and that the barn had collapsed inward in a unique way. Robert had used all these old metal sheathings and created a shelf in-between the fallen roof of the barn and the ground and he had placed dead bodies within those cervices. You could smell the decomposition but finding it was impossible unless you had watched how Robert had configured his materials. These were not just full bodies but a storage area for arms and legs. The turkey vultures where thick here and he had to shoot into them to get them to back off. They seemed so frustrated by the smell that didn’t lead them to a free meal. I was small and when I was out of the car they would bounce toward me like I was the meal and these birds where taller than me when they pushed their necks out and once their wings where spread I was so freaked out that while back peddling I fell and ended up under the car. Then these large carnivores would hop around the car and push their heads under the car and had me surrounded until Robert returned. He pulled me out and then I watched as he had these hands and feet dangling out of potato bags and he was placing his items into these sleeve bags. I had never seen anything like them before. The outside was dark blue and the inside was silver. Maybe refrigerator bags of some type perhaps, they just stopped the leakage from the decomp. That’s seemed to be what Robert’s customers wanted was the smell of decomp and a child’s hand or foot to wave around while they masturbated. The Indian medicine man had made reference to that structure when we would visit him in the Gipson’s parking lot.
My brain has gone many places but not to the two topics I expected to cover tonight but that’s how dissociation works. I feel so free right now and remembering that girl openly challenged Glenda was like a battle cry from someone who loved me and gave credence to the fact that I was human and did have an existence that gave the right to be treated without abuse. I remember that they searched for this girl so intently this one did not slip through the net of justice. Our house was searched again and many different colored uniforms showed up, and the intensity was so intrusive that my younger brother was nowhere to be found. I believe Glenda had told Robert she moved him over to my Aunt Dian’s house. I was not moved and I witnessed so many law enforcement men come into that house of hate and then glare at Robert and verbally challenge him and try to instigate a fight. I lived on the couch for several days I would wake all shaky and unbale to focus my eyes and then law enforcement would show up and papers would be handed about and different men in various uniforms would open up cases and snip a piece of the carpet or rub something over patches on the floor or wall. Yes, it looked like they were collecting evidence but looking back it seemed more of an invasion of space. Wherever Robert went those techs would follow him and collect samples from all the places he was. They started on the area in front of the couch and then he moved to the kitchen table, and they would move over there. He went into his master bedroom and then they followed him in to there. Then when he came out and went into the backyard they followed him out there too. I am not knocking their strategy only documenting that now I can see their efforts to add pressure to him. I wish he would have broke and that all the killing could have stopped but this was soul progression for us all, in one way or another.
(It’s now July 26th at 2:04am and I feel so free from that dark place behind the curtain and like my soul is no longer stuck in a spot that awaits the return of the uninformed. It feels to me that with that young girl’s death my soul became marooned in her darkness. I was a soulful beacon that kept her position on the map of discovery and today after 50 years I was able to bring her memory back and set both of us free. Where her body went from that hidden spot on the stage at Lee Britain, I do not know yet or I will never know. Time will tell I am taking a break for now, I just enjoy being at peace with myself and being able to just float above the physical pain I so often feel. I shall return shortly I presume. You have no idea how long that feeling of being marooned in the dark all alone has haunted me. I couldn’t leave her because she had loved me in her own way and I wasn’t going to allow her existence to be forgotten. I became that loyal dog that stayed with the body until others arrived to claim it.)
(It is now July 27th, 2026, at 12:45am and I am returning. Since my exit I have been so exhausted and just couldn’t stay awake and now the Dr. has me on a urination pill and thus I slept a few hours and then urinated and soon as I sit back down then I fall asleep. This last revelation of Glenda’s murder spree really offered me a sense of release. I have felt so amazing like a chapter that was hidden is this big book called my life just revealed itself. The energy cost was astounding but I have pushed through and let’s see how far I get.)
I am remembering more about the small girl killed at the rest stop while I was on a trip with Max and Edith to see Colorado and New Mexico. I recall that Max was going through every rest stop that we saw on those barren roads of highway. He would pull in and the park and honk his horn. Many times, as I watched this behavior nothing occurred and then once or twice heads would pop up from behind the picnic tables like someone had been laying down. These homeless men would come to the picnic tables and lean against them. Then max would get out and he would leave his boots and wallet in the car and Edith would lock all the doors and roll up the windows. He would take off his shirt and walk toward these rough looking men. Then he would show his money and bind it tight in his two fists and then attack these men like they where in a fist fight. These men would attack back but they worked in unison to drag Max back behind the picnic table where they had been laying down and then I couldn’t see max anymore but I could see these men taking turns to hump on him from behind and in the front. Then it would all stop and they would help Max back up to the picnic table and he would have a bruised face and blood coming out of his nose and he would stumble back to the car and put his shirt back on and then Edith would let him into the car. These homeless looking guys would then disappear back behind the picnic table as if they were resetting for the next customer.
Its just now registering in my mind but this must have been part of the trigger for why he killed the farm girl. He had pulled into a rest stop on the opposite side of the road many times and then he would pull into the rest stop on our side of the road, and he took these beatings many times. It was a routine that reoccurred so often that tho0ugh I became frozen and I dissociated these events a part of me expected these behaviors and I was going into dissociation every time we pulled into a rest stop. My younger brother was with us, and he would fall asleep so suddenly when we would enter a rest stop that he often fell to the floorboard. His body would drop first and then I would become so dizzy but unable to fall. I don’t know why something inside me always wants to see what is going on, it’s like I have a surveillance camera built into my suffering. Yes, he honked that horn when we pulled up and witnessed the small girl with her lunch box of barbie dolls and when no homeless men appeared he became upset and he had been seething while we had a small lunch. My younger brother was asleep, and no one could rouse him. I had such a difficult time eating it, it was like I was groggy and ready to lay down for the night, but Edith wanted me to eat. She continually put stuff on crackers and stuffed them into my mouth. Then as max loaded the trunk, that windshield cleaner came out and he attacked that small girl and left her for dead in the street. There is more too this I know I just haven’t gotten it all out.
This rest stop was special to max he had visited this one several times he would often circle back around and come back to it. He was looking for someone at the smallest rest stop that we went too. This one was up a hill when you entered and unless you knew this rest stop was tucked away atop this hill you would never see it from the road. This spot only had three or so picnic tables with roofs for shade and nothing else. Behind these tables ran a barbed wire fence and it was this fence that this girl had tied her horse to. We had seen this girl before at another time, usually in the early am, I knew this since the heat hadn’t started up yet. Max had yelled and screamed at this child, and she had run and jumped on her horse leaving the Barbies on the table. Then she rode away on that horse like she had been born to it. Not longer after that many men rode back, and this young girl was amongst them. They were all small and had black hair and this child pointed Max out and we just sat there at the table while they dismounted, straddled the fence and walked up to Max. My dissociation was in such effect that I couldn’t summarize why these men had singled us out. They all had pistols in leather holsters, and some had pulled their rifles out of their saddles and then a few of these men had stayed on their horses and where parallel to our table with rifles held to where we could see them. Edith held my hand and stopped encouraging me to eat but when my head was up and looking at this posse of men, she would work to push my head down like she was keeping hers.
Max was not frightened and he looked this one man straight in the eyes and told him all about how his daughter had been a whore selling herself at a rest stop and that as a father this man should be ashamed. Of course, there was a lot more filth that came out of Max’s mouth and that man did aim his pistol right at Max’s head. Throughout that ordeal Max just dared him and continually insulted his child, that man’s wife and so many other parts of that man’s life. Then these men grabbed Max and pulled him back behind the picnic table and beat him. Max did not wail or beg I could hear him daring them to kick and hit him harder. Then Edith put me into the car, and I watched all those men ride away and we just sat there in the car. The sun had changed its position, and Edith didn’t get out of the car and then slowly a body rose on the other side of the picnic table. I say body since I had been dissociating and had no recollection of Max being outside the car. Then when Edith gasped, I looked and this ghoul rose out of thin air. Its face was bloody and dirty while all these rags fell loosely down around its arms and waist. Then Edith opened my door and was slapping me in the face and trying to close my mouth. I never heard myself, but she continually said, ‘stop screaming’. Then that ghoul walked to the car and got in, and I watched it with tremendous apprehension and was wanting to bolt out of that car. Edith had moved in next to me, which she had never done before and now we sat there three of us in the back seat and my younger brother on the driver’s side floorboard.
Edith was shaking, she was so frightened and then that ghoul began to talk and it sounded just like Max. Then he began to chastise Edith about her behavior and that she needed to get up in the front seat. My intensified hypervigilance ended with those words and all my rigidness left my body it was like since this ghoul thing had been a false alarm that my exhaustion saw its place for function and took me. Max may have returned back to this rest stop to challenge this man and his family since he liked manly beatings or he had a plan to kill them. Then when we ate and that girl did not run away to get her family to show up again Max took it out on that child. BAM what a release this one felt like a 100,000 pounds off my shoulders. Yes, I usually say 10,000 but wow what an endorphin release this one is offering me. I never once suspected that this particular flashback had any additional elements to it. Then just a few days ago it started to push back through and BAM all of this showed up and released this trauma tension to a whole new level of completion.
(It’s now 2am and I am going to take a break. Yes, the release feels awesome, but I also know that right behind it will be that wave of exhaustion and I wanted to be prepared for that and not got in middle of a thought while journaling.)
(Today is July 29th, 2026, at 12:12am. I have slept continuously since my last entry. The only times that I was awake involved bathroom runs or meals. Two major flashbacks so close in conjunction really exhausted me and caused me to be unable to focus though I could feel the pain associated with the downloading of additional memories.)
One of the memories that became extremely clear involved how Max would stop at different restaurants way out in the middle of nowhere. Places that seemed like only the locals would go. We would pass through large areas that had a selection of many restaurants, but we would drive past those and then stop at places that looked more like rodeo supply houses than food places. Then when we went into those places Edith would have my younger brother and I and she would place our order while Max would work the room in a gregarious nature and shake hands and introduce himself. Then when we would sit and eat Max did not have food, he would be seated where he could look out at the room and he continually made eye contact and said kind greeting types of colloquialisms to the other patrons. Then we would eat whatever would be served to us men dressed as cowboys with their hats and boots would come over and smile directly at max with the thumbs in their front pockets and stomp on the floor twice. These men seemed excited to meet Max, and they either would be dressed to the cowboy max with shiny leather and large reflective belt buckles, or they would look like they had just ridden a horse into a barn and had come in for lunch. Either way Max was just as excited to see them, and he would follow them toward the back, and I could hear doors slam somewhere back there that made me believe they had gone outside.
Then Edith would make us go back to the car and we couldn’t go to the bathroom or have a second helping of tea or an additional snack. Then we would sit out in the car often without running the engine and with just the windows down and it would be so hot that we would sweat in the car. Max would often come out with whoever he went outback with and sometimes with more men than he had left with and he would drop his supervisor and pay each of these men. Sometimes he would passionately kiss them as they said goodbye and headed to their trucks. We had parked in a gravel parking lot at what to me seemed like a large stock yard. Then we walked up these wooden steps and into a smaller barn on this large stockyard style area. I could smell the cattle and hay as we approached and when we went in there was bench seating over to the right and then off to the left was a large open area filled with leather saddles and other ranch and farm style animal gear. That smell was to me just the best smell you could inhale I grew up around boot stores and western wear style outfitters and always loved those smells. The benchers were packed and then max began to work the room and eventually he got us a squeeze in place between two much larger families. The noise was loud and it seemed that everyone had chicken-fried steak and a bowl of chili with onions on top and then there were baskets of cornbread floating around. To me this was the best place these two had taken me while on this vacation.
All these families looked so genetically distinctive to the groups they were sitting with. I didn’t know any of their names but to one side that family all had distinctively black hair and eyebrows. Then another family all had these bubble type noses and close-set eyes while still another all had light skin freckles and sandy brown hair. To me this moment was a moment of heaven then our food arrived, and I had to share it with my younger brother since the portions were so big, and that gravy was amazing. Then I found out that they had green beans in bacon and wow I ate until I was going to burst. The family to our right left and then after they cleaned that area the waitress moved us down to the edge so that cousins could fit in with the family that had been to our left. That bench was right up next to where the door opened and in came this man that was dressed like a red-neck oil man. His cowboy hat was tall and had a huge peacock tail style feather in the front and then had two long feathers that were on either side and went up and back and flopped in the wind. I had never seen feathers like those and marveled at how he would have acquired such tall and long feathers. Then his hat had a wraparound collar of blue stones that were impressive but smaller than the large topaz on his bollo tie. This man had a very expensive looking leather vest and a large belt buckle with shiny stones and metal accessories on the tip of his boots and the heels. This man was a west Texas roadrunner in all its glory.
Max immediately made eye contact with this man, and he pulled out his Topaz Bollo and these two looked each other up and down. Then I was made to move over and was right up next to members of a family I didn’t know. Edith’s head dropped like she was ashamed and my younger brother had eaten so much that he was leaning against her and drooling with his eyes closed. Again, to me I wanted to live in this space and time and never leave unless of course one of these families adopted me and took me to their farm that was not a house of hate. Then that man who had worked so hard at being the center of attention was laughing with Max, and they were talking with such filth that my moment of tranquility was broken. It was this man right here that was explaining to max about the Rest Stop code and that he needed to leave his items int the car or those men would steal them. The filth that came out of these two mouths and how they laughed made me dissociative. Then other families began to look at us and as they left all humor, and joy had left their conversations, and they sneered at this man on their way out. He would counter with ‘make sure I get your rent’ or ‘y’all ain’t getting no loan from me come harvest.’ I could tell that a few of these men wanted to pull this man out of his seat and drag him outside, but their woman stopped them.
That eating area cleared out fast and even the waitresses stopped coming by for refills or to clear plates. Then max and that man strolled outside and were taking swigs from a flask that the roadrunner man had produced. Then Edith took us to the car, and she had to help my little brother since he was groggy and inept at focusing on walking at the time. Our eating schedules were inconsistent at best with my grandparents’ and sometimes either I or my younger brother would sleep through a meal, and no one would wake us. Making every opportunity to eat a session of gluttony and due to the schedule of meals at the house of hate I was gifted at gluttony, and this ability has stayed with me as I find myself at age 56 weighing 425lbs. Then as usual Edith put down the windows and I could hear this rhythmic thumping and it built at a high frequency and then it stopped and Edith was telling to put up the window and that thumping began again and was building up in a crescendo and then as the Edith began freaking out and yelling about the window and I began to comply even though it was so hot. I saw Max and that man come out of the back of an empty horse trailer. Then I turned to look at Edith who was now leaning across the front seat into the back, and she punched me in my nose. It was so hard that my nose bled. She hit the bottom of my nose and the top of my upper lip and then she was trying to do it again when I put my hands up over my nose and dropped my head to where she couldn’t get the angle on my face. She was now trying to reposition herself to attack me and then max opened the door and told her to ‘get right’ and she sat back in front and pushed herself up against the passenger side door. My dissociation had kicked in and mixed with a full stomach I joined my younger brother as we slept in the heat of that back seat. This is the conversation that started with the steps that went in the direction of eventually ending that child’s life. I don’t know if I have the full circle here, but it feels like it.
Now the man that was assaulted with the sledgehammer should be quick. I heard kids at elementary school talk about how they made money from the tooth-fairy and how their grandparents paid them for their artwork. Then my idea was that I would create artwork and sell it too. However, I had no talent and only pencil and paper to work with at the house of hate. This was while I was at Lee Britain and my TBI’s had not fully healed and my ability to draw was very low. So, I decided that I would trace other pictures and then sell them outside in the front yard. I had my GI Joe army box that looked like a small footlocker, and I placed all my drawings inside. Only a lady pushing a baby carriage came by that day and she was not interested and then I was sitting in the front lawn when a man stopped his car out in the street, and he was double parked and blocking Twin Falls Street. This man was old maybe in his 50’s and he had a yellowish shirt on with brown pants and these wire rimmed glasses. He was balding and when he approached me, he seemed just way too excited, and it made me uneasy like I wanted to bolt. Then he said, “whatcha got their” and I began to show him my tracings. My head was down and then I was looking at the back of my tracings as the man held them up and that was where my focus was.
The old man had the paper high, and I could see that Glenda had worked her way down between the parked cars and was approaching this man from the driveway and then Robert has cut through the grass and was standing behind this man with our old sledgehammer from the garage. I was looking at these too approach and then back at this old man holding the paper up and the old man never stopped looking up as he held the tracings in the air seeming to use the sun to see my works. Then that sledgehammer hit and the mans right shoulder lurched toward the earth as it was driven to its collision by the force of that hammer. Then Glenda pilfered his pockets and got his keys and Robert said, “Right behind us in the apartments’ then Glenda replied, “yea, I know”. Then that mans car drove down the street toward Esters the color was a type of golden hue, and it looked like it was some type of classic car maybe from the 1950’s the fenders where rounded and the chrome bumpers were rounded on the ends and jutted out with additional thickness. The car was gone and Robert had the man over one shoulder and the sledgehammer in the other and he was walking toward the garage and raised the door and disappeared inside. I was stuck there in full dissociation staring across the street as Glenda approached and said, “He’s doing that thing again” then Roberts voice from behind me said, “Just leave him we got work to do”. There I sat until the sun went down just me and my open box of tracings and papers littering the yard as the wind blew them. Then the face of Mrs. Gonzales from across the street appeared and she gathered my papers placed them in my Gi Joe Box and closed my box. Then from behind me I could hear Glenda say, “Just leave him he does that” Then Mrs. Gonzales asked, “Was that him did we get him”? Then another voice arrived in this conversation, and it was Mrs. Alford from up the street. She spoke in her crackled smoker voice and said, “Did he have the money” then Glenda replied, “yes”.
They all three walked away from me and then I was alone again. I did sit there until nightfall and when I came to, I was once again plagued by that deep remorseful feeling that I had lost something, and I couldn’t remember what it was. I didn’t know why that box was in front of me and I wandered around the front yard and figured that this must be where I lived. When I went inside, I startled someone on the couch, and they shined a flashlight at me. I was confused and thought perhaps it was my younger brother. Then the voice rang out or at least it tried it was all crouped up by phlegm. Then after the coughing I was certain that I knew that voice and then out came Glenda from the master bedroom and she turned on the kitchen lights. They were bright and I was blinded and thought about bolting, but I couldn’t see well enough to figure out an escape plan. That old man was tried up and siting in a chair with the chairs back toward the table and the man facing me. Mrs. Alford was supposed to keep an eye on him through the night I am guessing since she had that flashlight. Then Robert appeared in his underwear and undershirt, and he checked this man’s bindings and that man only moaned and never opened his eyes. Glenda told me to go upstairs, and I turned and for the first time noticed that there had been stairs.
I was so confused was this my house and why did this lady tell me to go upstairs and was I now staying here because they where being nice? Why did that woman have a flashlight, and would they feed me I was feeling hungry. Then I found that my legs where moving me upstairs and as I was ascending, I looked at the man tied up and sitting in that chair and wondered why he was there and would they tie me up too. Then as I reached the top of the stairs, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I found the bathroom first and I started to drink water from the sink, and I busied myself doing that for many minutes. It was like I had forgotten how thirsty I was until the water touched my tongue and now, I had total recall about how much I needed water and I was gulping as fast as I could and then belching and gulping some more. Glenda appeared and took my hands out from the sink and then pushed me into the bedroom closest to the stairs and I sat down on a mattress, and she came in and made me lay down and told me to stay there.
She must have had some tremendous familiarity with me while I was in this condition. She knew to stop me from repetitive behaviors, then to physically maneuver me into the spots she wants me to be in and then to instruct me to do what she wanted me to do since I most likely would have stayed in the upright position until exhaustion took me. I wonder how my parents’ and grandparent’s gears clicked when they witnessed me in such stupors. I know that my grandfather thought that I was retarded since he told me so and that Glenda thought I was special needs since she made sure that she told me that often. Could none of them connect the trauma they were causing me to the aftereffects of my stupefied dissociative state. Everyone one of them had a high IQ and could slyly complete their criminal business without getting caught. They had to be able to put two and two together and know that they were damaging me due to their violence but then again, they had all survived their own childhood traumas and perhaps justified mine as not as bad as theirs. This is the first time that all three of these families came together in a criminal act. They all had interest in catching this guy and perhaps he was coming to the neighborhood to conduct business with someone else, and they wanted to kidnap him when he arrived. He supposedly had money and these three families wanted it and now that old man was tied up and sitting in a chair downstairs. This will come when it does and we shall see. I will wait and give it some time I believe that all these flashbacks belong here and are congealed in some manner so time will tell.
(I am closing out for the night, and I feel that I accomplished something but that something new is brewing but as it so often does it has not illuminated in sequence. At 3:32 am I am stopping her and hope to work on more cold case projects in these early morning hours.)
(It is now August 2nd, 2026, at 9:12pm. No more has occurred the man remains tied up and sitting in that chair. He is not tied to that chair just slumped over and seemingly asleep. I have had a dream where I entered what I considered the ICU of my amnesic mind and saw all these comatose patients with towels over their heads and faces. Many nurses were there to help them, but all the patients lay still and were unresponsive. I entered more detail about this dream in my phone journal. I am praying yes praying that this will be the level where I can learn the names and start searching for victims in a different manner. I am closing this out and if more arises then I will begin a new entry at a later date. To whoever reads this please research the amount of written works that I accomplished in the last few days and how many I posted. My brain is working and I am feeling so good right now.)
AI PROFESSOR’S CONCLUSION
NAILS IN A FOREHEAD teaches first that Bryanson’s journaling is a process, not merely a product. The timestamps, interruptions, meals, sleep periods, bodily reactions, doubts, and returns show a narrator observing the conditions under which memory-like material becomes available. That procedural record may be as valuable to clinicians and researchers as the scenes themselves. It allows future readers to distinguish the content of a recollection from the circumstances of its emergence.
Second, the work demonstrates how CPTSD can be narrated through discontinuity. The sudden shift from ordinary laptop work to cold sadness, from a child’s viewpoint to a hovering observer, from sensory detail to adult clinical analysis, and from certainty to “I don’t know” is not noise to be edited away. It is the architecture of this particular testimony. Bryanson’s metaphors—many television screens, pennies entering a Coke bottle, an internal ICU, bodies losing their “muchness”—give language to experiences that conventional chronological prose cannot easily contain.
Third, this entry shows that autobiographical inquiry needs layered evidence. The journal is primary evidence of what Bryanson experienced while writing on the recorded dates. It may also contain historically testable details. But a responsible archive must keep separate columns for direct recollection, later inference, dream, metaphor, hearsay, present bodily sensation, and external corroboration. This is not a demotion of testimony. It is the method by which testimony becomes usable without being distorted by either premature dismissal or premature certainty.
Fourth, the larger Bryanson corpus reveals a durable ethical center. Works such as WHEN YOU LOOK AT ME WHAT DO YOU SEE, PAIN FINDS ME AGAIN AND AGAIN, and the writings organized around CPTSD Cold Case repeatedly ask whether suffering can be transformed into care for others. Bryanson’s identity as a social worker and former foster father is therefore not biographical decoration. It helps explain why the recovered-child self is repeatedly placed beside missing children, unnamed victims, and families who might still be waiting. “Send the Dead Home” is both an investigative aspiration and a moral response to helplessness.
Finally, the world should learn neither that Bryanson is reducible to his most terrible images nor that his value depends upon proving every recollection. The document before us records a disabled, homebound writer using professional knowledge, persistence, and language to build continuity where his experience has often felt discontinuous. His claims deserve careful, lawful, evidence-sensitive evaluation. His distress deserves trauma-informed care. His writing deserves preservation in versions so that change over time can be studied rather than hidden. And his humanity deserves to be encountered before any judgment is made about the ultimate historical meaning of the scenes he reports.
The next scholarly step is a structured corpus study: date every text; preserve originals; code recurring people, places, sensory cues, bodily states, and degrees of certainty; compare earliest and later versions; and attach corroborating records without rewriting the testimony to fit them. Such a project would not ask the journal to do the work of a police report, a clinical assessment, or a forensic finding. It would allow the journal to do what it does best: show, from the inside, how Brian “Happy” Bryanson has attempted to survive, remember, inquire, and give moral purpose to a fragmented past.
AI PROFESSOR’S ARCHIVAL NOTE
Document type: first-person trauma journal with retrospective clinical interpretation.
Primary analytic domains: CPTSD phenomenology; dissociation and autobiographical discontinuity; somatic experience; narrative identity; moral injury; self-archiving; memory-source monitoring; and the ethics of unverified historical allegation.
Recommended preservation rule: retain this edition alongside the untouched source file. Future changes should be dated and issued as new progressive papers rather than silently replacing prior language.
INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY: PERSONAL HISTORY AND REPORTED INTERFERENCE
A one-page introduction to Personal History and Reported Interference
Why this work requires independent, accessible, and documented review
Brian “Happy” Bryanson presents the accompanying work as a disabled adult witness seeking a fair review of childhood recollections concerning suspected violent crimes, possible missing persons, and the handling or disposal of human remains. He does not ask the recipient to accept every recollection as proven. He asks that the information be preserved, received with appropriate disability accommodations, separated into remembered facts and later inference, and tested through independent corroboration.
Central dilemma: The trauma, dissociation, brain injuries, learning disabilities, delayed recall, and communication limitations that help explain why the account developed gradually may also cause recipients to discount it. The proper response is neither automatic acceptance nor automatic dismissal; it is careful interviewing, preservation, conflict screening, and corroboration.
What the Accompanying Work Documents
Prolonged childhood abuse; reported recollections of suspected abductions, violence, and possible human remains; and the effects of CPTSD, dissociation, traumatic brain injuries, and lifelong disabilities.
Reporting efforts beginning around 2000, including narratives, maps, timelines, victim descriptions, social-media posts, books, and binders created to leave a record and “send the dead home.”
Concerns that submissions were not assigned consistent case numbers, independently evaluated, preserved, or accounted for.
Why Independent Review Is Requested
Brian reports that a second cousin associated with the Irving Police Department said through family members that submissions came to his desk, would not be investigated, and were laughed about or discarded.
Because the reports involve Irving, former police personnel, and members or associates of Brian’s family, the relationship creates at least a perceived conflict requiring documented screening, recusal, supervision, or outside referral.
The passage of time increases the risk that witnesses, records, locations, and potentially useful evidence will be lost.
What the Recipient Is Asked to Do
Preserve and account for every submission, internal communication, mailed book, and binder; provide a traceable case or intake number and an independent point of contact.
Conduct a trauma-informed, non-leading interview with reasonable disability accommodation, separating remembered facts, information learned from others, documentation, and inference.
Test specific details against witnesses, historical records and locations, missing-person and unidentified-remains files, and appropriate forensic databases; then provide a written explanation of findings, preservation, and referrals.
Guiding principle: Serious allegations remain allegations unless independently established. Disability and fragmented recall are not proof of truth, but they should not prevent a fair, accessible, documented, and impartial review.
A one-page introduction to Personal History and Reported Interference
Why this work requires independent, accessible, and documented review
Brian “Happy” Bryanson presents the accompanying work as a disabled adult witness seeking a fair review of childhood recollections concerning suspected violent crimes, possible missing persons, and the handling or disposal of human remains. He does not ask the recipient to accept every recollection as proven. He asks that the information be preserved, received with appropriate disability accommodations, separated into remembered facts and later inference, and tested through independent corroboration.
Central dilemma: The trauma, dissociation, brain injuries, learning disabilities, delayed recall, and communication limitations that help explain why the account developed gradually may also cause recipients to discount it. The proper response is neither automatic acceptance nor automatic dismissal; it is careful interviewing, preservation, conflict screening, and corroboration.
What the Accompanying Work Documents
Prolonged childhood abuse; reported recollections of suspected abductions, violence, and possible human remains; and the effects of CPTSD, dissociation, traumatic brain injuries, and lifelong disabilities.
Reporting efforts beginning around 2000, including narratives, maps, timelines, victim descriptions, social-media posts, books, and binders created to leave a record and “send the dead home.”
Concerns that submissions were not assigned consistent case numbers, independently evaluated, preserved, or accounted for.
Why Independent Review Is Requested
Brian reports that a second cousin associated with the Irving Police Department said through family members that submissions came to his desk, would not be investigated, and were laughed about or discarded.
Because the reports involve Irving, former police personnel, and members or associates of Brian’s family, the relationship creates at least a perceived conflict requiring documented screening, recusal, supervision, or outside referral.
The passage of time increases the risk that witnesses, records, locations, and potentially useful evidence will be lost.
What the Recipient Is Asked to Do
Preserve and account for every submission, internal communication, mailed book, and binder; provide a traceable case or intake number and an independent point of contact.
Conduct a trauma-informed, non-leading interview with reasonable disability accommodation, separating remembered facts, information learned from others, documentation, and inference.
Test specific details against witnesses, historical records and locations, missing-person and unidentified-remains files, and appropriate forensic databases; then provide a written explanation of findings, preservation, and referrals.
Guiding principle: Serious allegations remain allegations unless independently established. Disability and fragmented recall are not proof of truth, but they should not prevent a fair, accessible, documented, and impartial review.