Bendt Jensen, our Danish exchange student, Lancelot to Beth’s Guinevere. Everyone was in love with him.
Vishwas Singh, the kid we called Fizz—so named because freshman year he’d shaken a bottle of wine, like salad dressing, before opening it. When people laughed, screamed at him to stop, he said, confidently, “No, it’s beer you don’t shake.” He somehow still became popular, got elected class president our sophomore year. In one photo he’s holding a cigarette in each hand, arms out like a scarecrow.
Rachel Popa, Beth Docherty, and Donna Goldbeck, posing like Charlie’s Angels. Beth, like Bendt and Sakina John and Mike Stiles, is fresh from the Camelot stage. Sakina still wears her Morgan le Fay makeup, the long wings of eyeliner. The fact that Mike’s cast had just come off put a speed limit on the night; the group couldn’t have run down the trail either there or back.
Dorian Culler. There’s a shot of just him, leaning against a tree, eyes closed, long eyelashes against pale cheeks, mouth open to talk. He might have been good-looking, if he weren’t so terrible.
Asad Mirza—a devout Muslim back then, so there was at least one sober account of the mattress party.
A few other skiers and ski-adjacent people whose faces didn’t mean much to me anymore.
The kid taking the pictures was Jimmy Scalzitti—a skier who’d used one of the expensive yearbook Pentaxes for curtain-call shots of Camelot, also unhelpfully shown on the website. He then used most of the rest of the film in the woods. He must have started shooting only once he was drunk enough not to think twice about documenting underage drinking with a school camera.
The kids had built a flashlight bonfire, meaning they’d turned on their Granby-issued pocket lights and some bigger heavy-duty ones and arranged them like kindling in a big pile, illuminating the clearing.
I’d seen one of these shots before, the one they showed on Dateline: Robbie looking over his shoulder at the camera, Sakina and Beth leaning together laughing in the background, Dorian twisting his hands into some joke approximation of a gang sign. There are beer bottles in that shot, a few cigarette glows: the perfect visual encapsulation of mild teenage debauchery.
I remembered that the film was still in the Pentax, and still in Jimmy’s dorm room, when the State Police started nosing around; that was when Jimmy brought the film to Geoff and asked if he could develop it before his interview. “I just want to clear the air for Serenho,” Geoff told us he said. He asked Geoff if there was a way to cut any alcohol and cigarettes from the shots—but then the school promised disciplinary immunity for anyone forthcoming about drugs or drinking that night, so it didn’t matter.
Geoff told me he was keeping the negatives and making duplicates to hang on to. “Like—of course I keep them, right?” he said, and it seemed perfectly logical: What if Scalzitti threw it all away, and it turned out to be important? “Plus,” Geoff said, “it’s yearbook film.”
For some reason, Jimmy Scalzitti had turned on the timestamp, rendering the Camelot photos useless for yearbook unless Geoff cropped them, but making the shots of the mattress party tremendously helpful for establishing a timeline of the night. Or, more specifically—and a dozen online theories sprang from this, I already knew—Jimmy had only the date stamp on during the show, but somehow, by the first party shots, had toggled the timestamp on as well. A little too convenient, some people’s thinking went. Others argued that a drunk kid taking photos in the woods, in the slush and cold, had probably just messed up the switch.
I found myself leaving the Free Omar site and looking on Reddit for threads about the roll of film.
（If you care, Mr. Bloch: Fifty miles away, Omar was only then being allowed his second dose of ibuprofen. They finally changed his soaked gauze. It was too early for any signs of infection. He had not yet developed a fever.）
There were so many Reddit threads. I found, among other things, a theory that Thalia had been murdered at the mattresses by all nineteen kids, a satanic sacrifice. Another poster noted that Tim Busse’s eyes were buggy and bloodshot. That kid is coked out of his mind, NotYoPaulie82 wrote. Capable of anything. But that was just how Tim looked.
There was a long thread just about the splatter of mud up the back of Robbie’s ski sweatshirt, some people insisting it was blood. So you’re saying, reads a reply with hundreds of upvotes, that he not only killed Thalia and threw her in the pool in the TEN MINUTES between the musical and the party, but he did it BEHIND HIS OWN BACK? Ginger Rogers has nothing on this guy.
This was all based on the second party photo, a candid, poorly composed group shot. Most threads were obsessed with the timing and order of the pictures. The first photo from the mattresses, stamped 9:58 p.m., is of the ground, a blurred coat, some legs. After the mud splatter one, a 10:02 shot shows Robbie with his arms around Beth and Dorian, tongue out, a mad devil grin. In that one Robbie has his hat on, but in others you can see his hair shaved up the sides, long and floppy on top, parted in the middle. （“The penis cut,” Fran had called it. But in 1995 it was on trend.）
The show had ended by 8:45 at the absolute earliest. Let’s say fifteen minutes for the Camelot kids to shed their costumes; for Mike, at least, to wash the makeup off. A few minutes to gather friends who hadn’t been in the audience, for Beth to stuff a backpack with bottles from under her bed, for others to grab flashlights, cigarettes, lighters. Everything procured from the girls’ dorms, because the boys’ dorms were down on Lower Campus. The boys stood outside waiting for the girls. They headed the 1.4 miles from the theater up the Nordic trail to the mattresses no faster than Mike could hobble—about a half-hour trek. Then the first photos around ten p.m., party already in full swing. That’s where the Reddit responder got his “ten minutes” thinking. Someone might have had a few minutes to run off and do something, but not enough time to critically injure someone, change her clothes, get her into the water.
According to the state, within the time of the party Thalia had headed from the theater to the gym to meet Omar, to wait for him until he got off his office phone at 10:02 p.m. They believed she was dead before curfew. And I agreed: If she wasn’t back in the dorm by eleven, something had already happened. Thalia might have broken rules, but never something she’d automatically get caught for. She wouldn’t have missed checkin.
Most of the rest of the photos （twenty-one of the thirty-six shots were taken in the woods） were spread out over the next forty minutes; the last of these, at 10:39, shows Fizz downing a can of Pabst.
The kids who were there said in their statements that that’s when someone noticed the time. They scrambled back down the trail, Jimmy Scalzitti falling and twisting his ankle. The girls made it back to the dorms at five after, and the boys, who had to cross to Lower Campus still, and had an injured Jimmy and a still-fragile Mike with them, were twelve minutes late. They got heat from Mr. Dar, but they all checked in together.
Another Reddit theory went that Robbie killed her later that night, that the two of them sneaked out of their dorms to meet. He just seems the type, one person wrote. Spoiled kid, has a tantrum when something goes wrong. He finds out she’s screwing Omar, flips out. There were reasons this was impossible, one of which was that Mr. Dar, who’d been on duty in Lambeth, vouched that after checking in, Robbie stayed in the common room playing Madden Football till midnight, when he had to be upstairs in his room. And Mr. Dar wasn’t one to go to bed early and rely on the door alarms to keep kids inside. He would famously set up a card table on the stairway landing and sit grading history papers in his little panopticon till two in the morning.