Not to make light of something as heinous as this, but it does lend yet more fuel to a view about society and our assumptions about people that I’ve held for quite some time:

For at least two days, neighbors at a city apartment complex noticed an acrid aroma, black smoke and leaping flames coming from two barbecue grills on the balcony of a second-floor apartment.

What, neighbors at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on in the unit where 27-year-old Timothy Wayne Shepherd lived? What was he burning at all hours, for days at a time? The answer turned their stomachs.

According to law enforcement officials, Shepherd dismembered, and then burned the body of his former girlfriend, Tynesha Stewart, a 19-year-old Texas A&M University student. Nothing remains of Stewart’s body, Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas said at a press conference Saturday.

“I just don’t know what to think about it,” said Louis Evans, whose balcony faces Shepherd’s in the quiet tree-lined enclave in northern Houston. “I thought he was a nice normal person. I guess you never know what your neighbors are doing.” (emphasis mine)

You hear that a lot about gruesome murderers.  “He was quiet, kept to himself”, “He seemed normal to me”, etcetera, etcetera.  You ask me, the “normal” people are the ones to watch out for, quirks are a sign of humanity. The vanilla types are more likely to have a body in their fridge than your wise-ass neighbor who likes death metal at 2am.