Post by The Hannahverser on Apr 17, 2016 0:01:21 GMT
She Who Rises from the Dead
I wasn’t there when they lowered the casket into the ground in May of 2013, the day the ground had thawed enough to bury her. Such is the, forgive the pun, cold, hard truth in northern climes like Moosejaw, Saskatchewan where temperatures can drop off the scale quicker than you can catch the next flight out. I was, however, there when they forced that same casket up out of that cold, hard ground in early December of 2015, and just as shocked as everyone to discover that the woman they’d buried wasn’t the woman they’d declared dead a year and a half earlier.
My name's Chad Donaldson, and I've been trying to make a documentary about Katarina Hevensky for the past two years. You can probably guess that since you're reading a document as opposed to watching some well-compiled footage that my production company and I are still trying; still waiting for a chance to conclude a story that began when the world first got a glimpse of Ms. Hevensky when she wrestled under the ring name of Heaven, and picked up steam on February 24th at a live event for the Epic Wrestling Organization. The night scripted professional wrestling went off script. The night a mid to low card performer was turned into the stuff of unsavory legends.
They don't allow that tape to be shown. Not that match, anyway. Archival footage is non-existent aside from the rare bootleg. But you don't forget a thing like that once you've seen it. A live, honest-to-goodness live taping of a rape taking place at a venue promoted for children as well as adults. No one saw it coming. It's one of the other reasons it's so difficult to keep the ball rolling on my documentary. The first editor on the project quit because he didn't want to "make a snuff film". But that's what's compelled me to keep chomping at the bit to get this thing in the can.
The whole reason they buried her? That's the beginning of the story of my documentary. Or it's the prologue, or the prequel. She wasn't dead. The body they buried, they discovered at the autopsy, had already been dead for years and belonged to a woman named Rachel Brower. Rachel's actual grave site belongs in Grimsby, Ontario. A city in a whole other province of Canada. This body had been purposely transported halfway across the country to act as a stand-in for a woman who wanted it to seem like she had died.
Maybe she had. Psychologically, you know? The initial mass humiliation endured in the ring the night of February 24th was the start of what could only be a nightmare for that young woman. Nobody knows where she was taken after the lights went out. Her opponent, a man calling himself The Sociopath disappeared with her after he'd already preyed on her in the ring. He didn't show his face afterward for months to come. Months. Heaven never showed her face again.
As far as anyone knew, Heaven's last public appearance was at that small funeral in her hometown of Moosejaw, Saskatchewan attended by few family friends and a very distraught mother, who watched her casket get lowered and buried in the ground. Her death was ruled a suicide. Alcohol. Driving. Snowy road. The partially burned, but conspicuously protected note confirmed the coroner's pronouncement.
The mother? She never agreed to an interview. After her daughter's death she changed her name back to her maiden name, Sevigny, to avoid nosy reporters and documentarians like myself. She "wanted nothing more to do with wrestling". Her husband, one of the founding members of a famed wrestling school in the Canadian west called "The Dungeon", died of a heart attack in the ring while wrestling well past his prime. Wrestling, it would seem, while being in the family bloodline, undoubtedly ingrained into young Heaven's mind from a very young age, hadn't been kind to the landed Russian immigrant family. I never pressed Ms. Sevigny for comments.
The trail was barely fresh at the point of that funeral. I hadn't really been pursuing it all that actively. Not until vague reports that Heaven, Katarina Hevensky, had surfaced as a backstage personality for a wrestling company out of Arizona called Evolution Wrestling. What was even more interesting? When the mask came off a menace named Deus at an Evolution Wrestling event, the wheels started turning ever faster. Heaven hadn't died. She was evidently alive and very much kicking ass as a whole other persona in Arizona.
Why fake your death? After a year and a half of hiding, what had she become? All reports of this Deus character led me to believe I was hearing about the Sociopath version 2.0. Was it even possible anymore that this Deus was the same person the world had met in 2013, and called Heaven, who by all accounts was more than ready to take the ring by storm? As intriguing as it all was, the trail went completely cold before I could even follow-up. Deus disappeared from the ring.
This unexpected reappearance led to the sudden upheaval of the earth in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. Mother Hevensky, now Sevigny, didn't attend. I spared no expense anyway. I had to know. A court order later and I had the unexpected news I have yet to fully bare to Heaven's mother. Her daughter never died. Or, at least, if she did, she rose again to fight another day. Not transformed. Transmogrified. Deus, they say, was something hellish. A monster.
But if Heaven didn't stay dead. Would Deus? Fascinating, no? For my part? I'm waiting. Where will Heaven show up next? What form will she take? Deus? Or something worse?
I'm crossing my fingers for something worse.
Makes for a better documentary.