[A sixty-year-old man with messy hair and bags under his eyes. He seems slightly deranged.]
“They said I killed a girl… But I didn’t remember doing it.
Someone had strangled her near the river and dumped her body in the water. A family on a picnic found it floating downstream later that day.
The police came home looking for me at midnight; they took me to the station, they questioned me about the girl, who, yes, I had seen that day because we had a date… we had met online.
I told the detectives I left her at a café two hours after I met her because I got a call for a job… I used to be a plumber.
The police asked more questions and took lots of samples. And a few hours later, I stopped being a free man for the next twenty-four years.
During the trial, I couldn’t believe the evidence the police had found. My fingerprints around her neck, my DNA at the crime scene, her skin under my fingernails…
And, like I said, I didn’t remember killing her. I still don’t.
Why shouldn’t you believe me? … After all, what would be the point of lying? I already paid for the crime!
Anyway, I was going crazy during the trial. The more evidence the plaintiff put forward, the more obvious it became that I was guilty, even to myself.
I ended up accepting it. I had killed her and, somehow, forgotten all about it. It’s happened before. A kind of selective amnesia triggered by deep feelings of guilt… at least that’s what the prison shrink said.
I changed my plea to guilty. According to my lawyer – who was an ass by the way – that strategy saved me from a life sentence.
I was thirty-five when I got locked up. I’m almost sixty now. I got out yesterday.
The first thing I did was to visit the place where they found the girl’s body.
I did it because my biggest fear, the heaviest load I carried while in prison, was not knowing for certain if I had done it. What if everyone was lying? What if it was a conspiracy?
I needed to know.
And I was hoping that place would help me unearth some buried memories, force me to remember. Because I still wanted to believe I’m not a murderer, that despite all the evidence, I couldn’t have killed that girl…
But nothing happened when I got there. I still couldn’t remember a thing.
Well, something actually happened, something that surprised me because I had never felt it before.
I felt like killing someone.
So I waited until eventually this woman came jogging by. It was easy to strangle her. She wasn’t very strong. There was no one around. I dumped her body in the river and then came here… I’m waiting for the police to arrive now.
I have a good defense this go ‘round. After all those years paying for something I don’t remember doing, I needed to do it. I had to know how it feels to kill someone… and make sure I remembered it this time.”
Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!
Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016