In those earliest interviews, I was indeed the only one mentioning drugs. I felt increasingly sick; who knew what I’d started by trying to be relevant? They asked Thalia’s friends if she was on drugs, if she had a drinking problem, if she’d been suicidal, and they all answered no. But by the second round, as the questions centered increasingly on Omar, as they asked things like “If Thalia were looking to buy drugs on campus, who do you think she’d go to?” everyone seemed to warm to the idea. They couldn’t say she hadn’t been buying drugs, and everyone knew, they said, that Omar sold. The same guy they’d been mentioning from the start. Puja and Rachel and Beth; Robbie, Dorian, Mike, Marco Washington—they’d all brought him up.
It was still possibly true that Omar had followed Thalia around, that he’d “made her uncomfortable,” as Robbie said, or “sketched her out” as Marco said, or “kind of stalked her,” as Rachel said, or that he’d joked about tying Thalia to the weight bench, as Dorian and Mike and their ski friend Kirtzman all mentioned.
But it was also possible her friends had jelled their memories together, even subconsciously, in the days before their interviews, around a person who wasn’t part of their group, wasn’t a teacher or a student—someone who seemed enough of an outsider to have done a thing we couldn’t imagine one of us doing. As humans have intuited since the dawn of time, blaming the problem on someone outside your circle takes the problem far away. And it made sense that even Marco, a Black Granby student bound for Babson, would see Omar as fundamentally different.
By three a.m., unable to close my eyes, I was looking at timelines on Reddit. Reading everything I could about the details and circumstances of Thalia’s death no longer felt like a trapdoor to anxiety; it felt more like the single rope on hand as every life raft around me sank. If holding on tight meant staying up till the sky lightened, so be it.
By four a.m., I was back on Dane Rubra’s YouTube channel.
“Let’s talk for a minute,” Dane says in one early video, “about the 1975 murder of Barbara Crocker.
“Barbara Crocker is a young, beautiful Spanish teacher at Granby. She’s from Quebec, living off campus in the town of Kern. She goes missing in late April of ’75, and on May thirteenth her body is found decomposing in the woods adjacent to the Granby campus. Who goes to jail? Her boyfriend. Sure, okay. Usually the boyfriend does it. I’m looking at you, Roberto A. Serenho, Jr. Usually it’s the boyfriend.”
Dane disappears, is replaced by the same grainy photo of Barbara Crocker that ran in the Sentinel my senior year, when Rachael Martin wrote a did you know what happened here twenty years ago piece: Barbara’s long, dark hair parted down the center, glasses no one could ever have found attractive. She looks so much like 1975 that you can’t imagine what life she might have lived outside it.
Dane returns to tell us the case against Barbara’s boyfriend, Ari Hutson, was largely circumstantial, but then there was a mountain of circumstance: He had not only paid her end-of-month phone bill, but also signed a birthday card to her nephew, imitating her signature. Neighbors had seen him come and go from her place in the days after her death, days in which he did not report her missing. He was the only one who could have bleached her carpet, who could have washed the murder weapon and returned it to Barbara’s knife rack.
Here’s a fun fact Dane Rubra does not include: It’s not always the boyfriend. The actual statistic, if you care, is that worldwide, 38.6 percent of murdered women are killed by intimate partners. In some countries that’s much higher.
But if you’re looking at a young woman who wasn’t involved in illegal activities, who wasn’t on the streets, who wasn’t involved in sex work, had a support system, wasn’t robbed outside a nightclub on vacation, who had a serious boyfriend, or two—yes, someone she was sleeping with did it. Which is why it’s important for the police to know who she was sleeping with.
But in none of the State Police interviews did anyone suggest this might have been you. Your name comes up as one of the last two adults to see her, as a teacher she was close to. The police took little enough note that they consistently spelled your name “Block.”
And then they interviewed you, for all of seven minutes. You said the blandest, vaguest things possible. They did ask where you were that night, but only in the most perfunctory way, and after all you had your alibi—you cleaned up, you talked to me （there was my name even, from your mouth）， you got straight home to your wife and kids. They were more interested in whether Thalia’s grades had been sliding, whether she’d seemed distressed. You said, four different times, “She was a great kid.”
Dane Rubra says, “Let’s grant that Crocker’s boyfriend kills her in a crime of passion. But Granby doesn’t want a crime scene messing up their reputation. What gets into the papers is the body being found in the New Hampshire woods. Eventually it comes out that it’s near campus.” Dane shows a series of maps and argues the body was found on campus, that the school got the DA and coroner to move the official location fifty yards.
“What I’m saying,” he says, and he should wipe the sweat off his forehead, “is the pockets are deep, and the conspiracies run deeper.”
#6: ARI HUTSON
We all know there’s a man who lurks at the edge of the campus, who lives in a lacrosse goal in the woods. Everyone knows someone who’s seen him, and we’ve assigned him various names—Lurch, the Hermit. Fran and I joke he’s the one adding notes to the Kurt shrine. According to one story, he’s a Granby student who left school one credit shy of graduation. Geoff Richler says, “He’s out there trapping raccoons. Them’s good eats.”
The story that sticks: He’s Barbara Crocker’s convicted boyfriend, out of prison, returning to the scene of the crime. He has an apartment in Kern but camps out at Granby in warmer months. Ari Hutson was released in 1989; it isn’t impossible.
I’ve found photos of him online, featuring a mop of friendly hair and a scraggly beard. In one, he wears a striped turtleneck and laughs with someone at a party. To be honest, I can see the appeal. In a 1975 way.
On March 3, he’s in the dark by the gym when Thalia appears. She’s there to wait for you. She took off fast after curtain call, but you have things to oversee, percussion to lock up, stage managers to talk to.
By the time you get to the meeting point, Thalia’s not there. You try the front gym door and it’s open, which it shouldn’t be. You look around inside, not wanting to call her name, but everything in the building is dark.
You go home to your wife and your kids. The next morning you look for Thalia at brunch, but it’s the weekend and kids sleep in, so you’re not worried, only irritated, and you wish you could call her. You think of ringing the Singer-Baird pay phone, asking for her in a disguised voice. Maybe you even do it, but the girl who answers just tells you Thalia isn’t in her room. You’ll see her at dinner, and if not, certainly you’ll see her that night for Camelot.
Of course you don’t tell the police she was there to meet you. You don’t tell them where she might have been standing when someone came across her. You don’t tell them that you know she wasn’t sleeping with Omar. You know the older guy her friends heard about was you. You don’t tell the police anything at all, except to give your own alibi and tell them what a lovely girl she was, what a promising student. A great kid, a great kid, a great kid.