Testimonials as to Austin Reed Sigg’s bizarre, emerging behavior, disguised as education for an equally weird career path, are pouring in. I mean, a few bits from a neighbor, or a crumb from a classmate of Austin’s, and suddenly a portrait of a monster is lumbering slowly into focus, in a foggy pond-like mirror of water, otherwise known as the media. A bedeviled, goateed, spike-haired portrait emerges, a Goth punk obsessed with switchblades, death and corpse deterioration, CSI, forensics, mortuary science; well, you get the picture!
I exaggerate not, Austin Reed Sigg was practically Beelzebub hisself, if we are able to process and confirm all this incriminating baggage; he morphed to the Dark Side a few years back and stayed there. Well, he actually got even worse, until he came to the crossroads of murder, which he traversed with poor, young, innocent Jessica Ridgeway. And now theories are spilling forth that Jessica became a sort of mad experiment with this aspiring young mortician, where he tried to outfox the cops by planting Jessica’s backpack in a paper bag, then placing it in the street of an adjacent suburb.
But why did Sigg leave his black Goth cross at Arvada Park, where he left a portion of Jessica’s remains? This implies, he possibly was anticipating getting captured! We hear he confessed to his mother what he’d done, so perhaps leaving the cross was a harbinger (a wail of his conscience) of his undoing. This suggests to me, he wasn’t capable of becoming a reptilian serial killer, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, unless I’m reading too much into this black cross bit of evidence.
Yet, what other crimes had he already committed (Was he Candy Man, I’ll repeat?) We know that last May, a lady jogger at Ketner Lake was nearly abducted by Dohastvath (Vath = monster), by using a chemically soaked rag. The lady got away, but some DNA of Sigg’s links him to the crime. Another woman can tie Austin to this Ketner Lake jogging path, one Christie Mueller, who suspected this young man (with frightening eyes and facial expressions) was up to no good. And there were others who could see a negative vibe emanating from this budding little criminal.
I’m able to gather an odd, yet coherent narrative, a mosaic of an emerging psychopath, from news footage, or fragments and piecemeal quotes, cited in local Denver chronicles, that tell me many people had a sliver or two of deviant behavior (they noticed from chance encounters with Austin), that they could hang their hat on, as a defense really, that they were privy to some fact that this guy was a weirdo, a maniac, a fruitcake, destined for formidable trouble.
But this always happens in such cases! These witnesses are merely back-peddling; they were clueless at the time, Sigg had them completely fooled. Or perhaps, they chose to look the other way, in complete denial of an emerging monster in the making. Why, for example, didn’t any of these acquaintances of Sigg’s notify the cops of their underpinning suspicions after Jessica’s body was discovered? I’ll suggest (maybe brazenly), it’s because Sigg had them completely cajoled with his juvenile pranks. They thought him a bit eccentric, a Goth, a mad scientist perchance, or even a genius who was simply too smart for them to comprehend!
This is one of the spookiest aspects of this case, that resounds with terror from a quiet, innocent suburb of Denver. Austin had several dozen people fooled about who he really was. Maybe even his family were clueless (up to a point). Freedom of expression or individuality can walk a thin, black line sometimes, with sickness or coagulating mental illness. But this is a free society, not Nazi Germany, where the Gestapo could arrest anyone for expressing reservations about Hitler. Turncoat or tolerance, you decide!
