Life of Crime: The model and the creep

I watched a Dateline: NBC on Friday, March 1, about Oscar Pistorius. For any of you who have been living in a cave, Oscar, from South Africa, is an Olympic athlete with two prosthetic legs. His nickname is “Blade Runner.” Until he killed his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day he was held high in public esteem. He was a hero. But as we found from watching Dateline, Oscar is an insecure person. He worries a lot about being a victim, especially when not wearing his legs. He had a gun and claims he thought his girlfriend, who was in the bathroom in the middle of the night, was a prowler. He shot through the bathroom door, killing her. He claimed it was a horrible accident, but he was arrested for first degree murder. In a strange twist, because of some problems with the police investigation, Oscar is currently out on bail.

Pistorius’s girlfriend-victim, Reeva Steenkamp, was a blonde beauty, a young model and star of a reality TV series in South Africa. Any man would be proud to be seen with her. Oscar, as it was revealed in the program, has problems with anger and jealousy. My feeling is that despite his achievements and fame he might have felt vulnerable in the girlfriend department, maybe that his girlfriend would find someone else who wasn’t missing parts of his anatomy.

I think Oscar is just one of a long line of men who have been in love with a beautiful woman and then felt compelled to do things they would not normally do.

This story from a 1951 issue of Life isn’t quite so dire as the Oscar/Reeva saga. As you will read a man fell in love with a beautiful model and lavished her with expensive gifts. When the truth came out it was discovered he was an embezzler who had spent most of his ill-gotten funds on her. For this she called him “a creep.”

I don’t know what has happened to either of the two principals in this story since it broke 61 years ago, whether they are still alive, or whether they both eventually found their soulmates. Beauty fades over time and I wonder how a woman who has had men falling at her feet feels when one day she realizes they are not only not falling at her feet, they are passing her by without a second look. Or how a guy feels when he’s had the intervening years between youth and old age to think about how at one time a woman made him crazy. That’s the part I know about.

Copyright © 1951, 2013 Time-Life