What's the Matter with Lancaster County?
Another day, another horrific murder in Lancaster County. Or six of them, to be exact, in the village of Leola. The deaths of the Wise family come about six months after David Ludwig murdered the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kara Beth Borden, and fled west with her. If that was "Badlands," this is "In Cold Blood." And let's not forget the notorious Laurie Show murder in 1991, in which two Lancaster County teen-aged girls, Lisa Michelle Lambert and Tabitha Buck, got life sentences, and friend Laurence Yunkin went off for a few years as well. All over a teenage love triangle. Every county has its share of murders, but Pennsylvania's strongest Bible Belt county seems to have more that truly horrify the public.
Having grown up in the strongly Calvinist community of Holland, Mich., as a member of a minority religion, i.e., Lutheran, I suspect that what we're seeing in Lancaster County may have an inverse relationship to the strongly conservative/fundamentalist brand of Protestantism practiced by many non-Amish in the county. No, I can't explain that. It's more of a gut feeling. That sort of religious petri dish can produce people who feel estranged from their community. Some go on to do good things elsewhere, but others seeth and rot on the fringes of where they were born. Milton Hershey, as his recent biographer writes, didn't much care for the church culture of Lancaster County. He turned his energies to business and in many ways, left his community behind. But not everyone is that lucky.