As Google’s mission statement says, “Don’t be evil”, but we must quantify the search for good in the study of evil. For Evil itself is merely Live backwards, and the quest to both end and begin Life acts as a bookend on our quotidian musings.

In Africa, bathing the dead is a religious ritual accompanying death, and with large numbers of orphan children left to the ravages of continent-wide diseases that are killing off most of the parents, the connection between income and a child’s life becomes clearer.

Perhaps that is why a Seattle father tried to drown his child for insurance money. For on Wednesday he was charged with exactly that by Seattle police, themselves frequent arbiters and observers of life and death.

As the firefighters pulled three-year old Ashley McLellan from the pool in 2003, the unreal dichotomy of life and death was exposed in the figure of her father, who stood there calmly, unscathed by water’s clean touch, not asking if she would live.

Joel Zellmer perhaps was going back to this primal state, and his history of dating single mothers, convincing them to get insurance on, and then harming their children, through trials of fire and water, showed his struggles with parenthood and the demand for money. This included burning the hands of one child (fire), holding a hot cup to the lips of another so that it blistered her lips (fire and air, the very breath of life, transfused through the cup (earth) in liquid form (water)).

King County Sheriff’s Department will not be pursuing charges in the other cases which happened as far back as 1990.

For little Ashley, Zellmer told emergency workers a tale, suitable for those sitting around a fire between the huts of a tribe in Africa: While her mother worked, Ashley opened a sliding glass door to a deck in order to eat a cake provided by her father, then descended as if unto Hades by a flight of stairs, there to cleanse her hands in the Stygian depths in an unlit, uncovered pool. All this while the temperature approached that of the underworld, 39 degrees, and for a girl with a fear of the dark. For is not the transition to death that of a child in fear?