Credit: Far Out / Public Domain

Alright, so, difficult question time. When someone is faced with cruelty their entire life, are they duty-bound to turn the other cheek?

Because obviously, you get stories like that of the famously kind and gentle Joseph Merrick, who almost seemed to understand why he was vilified and humiliated by pretty much everyone who came across him. Forgiving them is an almost superhuman act of Christian forgiveness. At least, that’s how the story goes. Perhaps the reality was different because one can imagine being warped by such cruelty, the way that Grady Stiles Jr was.

Born on June 26th, 1937, it’s arguable that Stiles had it a little easier than most, as at the very least, he was born to a family that shared his condition. Stiles, like many others in his family, was born with Ectrodactyly, a condition in which the fingers and toes are fused together at birth. Grady was the fourth child of Grady Sr (obviously), who also suffered from the condition and, to capitalise on it, made his living travelling with a carnival as a freakshow act. Grady Sr had four children. Two of which, including Grady Jr, had the condition and thus, the patriarch took them on the road with him as ‘The Lobster Family’.

This was the universe that Stiles grew up in, and sure, he had a support network and a community from an early age. In fact, the carnival he travelled with throughout his life, even lived in the same community when they weren’t on the road. These are the things his father never had as a child. At the very least, however, his father got to choose that he would make his living being the subject of the mockery of strangers. Spending hours a day living in squalor to be dehumanised by people for the crime of being born differently from most. This was something foisted on Grady Jr from birth.

It left him with a chip on his shoulder that everyone else in his family would spend the rest of their life paying for.

How did Stiles become a criminal?

Due to his condition, Stiles was only mobile with the help of a wheelchair. This, combined with a burly build, gave him a surprising physical strength. Tragically, this would be mostly used for harming his own family, as very soon after Stiles started a family of his own, he developed a drinking problem that would last the entire rest of his life. This grew into him terrorising his own family, so much so that his first wife, Mary Teresa, left him for another performer in the carnival, Harry Glenn Newman.

This probably didn’t help either Stiles’ descent into alcoholism or the bitterness with which he viewed the world. This came to a head in 1978 when his eldest daughter was set to marry a man he did not approve of. In a drunken rage, he shot and killed the poor man on the eve of their wedding. Stiles pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to house arrest and 15 years’ probation, since no prison in the country was fit to deal with his condition.

This seemed to the the wake-up call that Stiles needed. He tried to quit drinking, and for a while, he was successful. He even reunited with Mary Teresa, who had a child with Newman in the meantime. This period of serenity didn’t last, though, and his drinking wasn’t the only thing to come back in a big way. In fact, his treatment of his family got worse. So bad that drastic measures had to be taken. There are a few conflicting stories of what happened next, but what we do know is bad enough.

On November 19th, 1992, a 17-year-old sideshow performer at the carnival named Chris Wyant broke into Stiles’ home and shot him twice in the head with a semi-automatic pistol, killing him instantly. Despite Stiles being so despised by the community that all of ten people turned up to his funeral, with no one volunteering to be a pallbearer, this was still a crime. The investigation revealed that this was a conspiracy between Teresa and her son from her previous marriage, Harry Jr.

Together, mother and son had paid Wyant $1,500 to kill Stiles. For their crime, Teresa was convicted of manslaughter, Harry Jr received a life sentence for first-degree murder, and Wyant received 27 years for second-degree murder. Despite all this, it’s difficult to say whether anyone in this story deserved the fate they got.