^ surveillance photo at Upham’s Corner, Dorchester, showing Amy Lord, in gym clothes, getting out of passenger side of her Jeep to withdraw money at ATM per her kidnapper’s orders.

Just when we in Boston have had about all that we can stand of murder most foul, of murder trials, of murder testimony and murder graphics, our city has awoken to the happening of yet another murder — one more than foul; a murder beyond explication. Amy E. Lord, a 24-year old gal living in South Boston — reputedly one of our safest neighborhoods — was, it appears, kidnapped by two men (the police think it was two — but see update at the end of this report), forced to withdraw her money at ATM’s, then stabbed to death and her corpse dumped in scruffy woods several miles away, in Boston’s Hyde Park section.

Lord grew up in Wilbraham, a flat-land suburb bordering Springfield, a once-booming, former mill city 100 miles west. She had moved to the “big city” — for Boston is that, to kids living in our state’s back areas — to make her way in the world; and was, it seems, doing so, as a web designer; not spectacularly but in an ordinary, tech-savvy, 21st century way. “If you had a daughter, you would want her to be like Amy,” her grandfather Donald Lord is quoted as saying. A great many daughters are, indeed, like Amy must have been. That is what most unsettles us. Murder beyond foul is not supposed to happen to daughters like Amy Lord.

Her killer or killers did not stand outside a seedy dive in Boston’s Theater district looking for streetwalkers to hijack — some killers do do that. The killer(s) did not break into a millionairess’s loft in the tony Back Bay, looking for jewels and riches — some killers do that, too. Nor were they, it seems, sexual predators on a rape spree — that, too, more than once happens, depressingly. These killers weren’t terrorists, or athletes night-shifting as gang-bangers, or big name mobsters — all of which are on trial, or soon to be on trial, right now in our city, living through our time as America’s Grand Central station of high-profile murder. Amy Lord was none of this. Nor were her killers. They, appear to have been as ordinary as she. This is what unsettles us most.

They (or he) wanted money, ordinary money; probably for drugs — an ordinary craving. They found an ordinary girl, forgetting, or not giving a damn, that ordinary people, too, have families and friends who care about them. People in crisis, like streetwalkers, have advocates. Millionairesses have big money lawyers and influential relatives. Attack a streetwalker or a millionairess, and you will face heavy, institutional retribution. This is known. But attack an ordinary person ? Who is there to defend her but her ordinary family ?

So might think the killing mind, if it thinks at all when kidnapping, robbery and murder pushes it to act.

They kidnapped her at an ordinary time — 56AM — when many tech-ies are already awake and up, getting ready for work, which in many tech companies begins at 7 AM. They robbed her by ATM machines — as routine as money gets.

The robbing of ATM kiosks was over at 6,47, the BPMDtells us. 47 minutes. Not much longer than savoring a latte at Starbucks.

Everything about the murder of Amy Lord ws ordinary, as ordinary as life is good, which it ordinarily is, for most of us, even though it has its stressful stretches — and these stressful times are ordinary too. But that murder should be an ordinary part of an ordinary life, that is the shocking thing, the inexplicable, the frightful. It is not merely hyperbole to say that Amy Lord is us. She WAS us. Her murder murders a part of us too.

Let us grieve….

—- Michael Freedberg / Here and Sphere

UPDATE at 12.45 PM : Police have now concluded that it was only ONE man who kidnapped, robbed, and killed Amy Lord, and that he beat her seriously inside her apartment building before ordering her into her Jeep — which he hijacked — to withdraw money.

 

UPDATE # 2 :  Boston Police still are not ready to make an arrest, even though they have a suspect in custody in another South Boston mugging that occurred the same morning. It is thought that said suspect is involved in the Amy Lord murder.  This morning the suspect, one Edwin Alemany, age 28, was found mentally incapable of attending an arraignment. He is now at Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, undergoing the standard 21-day psychiatric evaluation.   (This update at 8.40 P,M. 07/25/13)