It was like that for a while, and then it wasn’t: if we get lucky, we emerge from our valleys. One autumn there was a movie in theaters called River’s Edge. A time of moral panic was in ascension, and River’s Edge, though a good and complex movie, heralded the rising of the curve. It was about a teenager who strangles his girlfriend to death and leaves her body in some brush by a river; his friends, who all knew the dead girl and numbered her among their own, see her body with their own eyes but tell no one.
Any teenager who sees River’s Edge begins registering objections as soon as Samson tries to purchase a lone can of beer instead of a six-pack, but most viewers will overlook a botched detail or two in the service of having their biases confirmed: the youth of today have no values; moral rot consumes them. There is, among the public, a perennial urge to believe the worst about the generation that will eventually replace them.
I knew about this urge firsthand: Diana Crane’s case had been hot currency on the playgrounds of San Luis Obispo. Those days had been on my mind. Browsing in a Montclair mall bookstore recently, I’d seen, prominently displayed, The White Witch of Morro Bay, by Gage Chandler. The byline seemed to sort of float in the air in front of me when I saw it. I’d only ever met one person named Gage in my entire life. It had to be him.
I couldn’t afford the hardback, so I made a mental note to check out a copy from the library. But I was not, at the time, a person often found browsing the stacks. Various other errands on which I spent my days had a tendency to erase any other thought not directly connected to them. So I didn’t think about The White Witch of Morro Bay again until a few years later, when they made the movie. It premiered on a Friday night after an extensive ad campaign of billboards and thirty-second TV spots around Southern California. By Monday morning everybody everywhere was talking about the movie based on a book by my childhood friend.
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THE OTHER THING I knew about River’s Edge was that the crime that had inspired it took place in Milpitas, the small town where I’d lived for two years as a child. I remembered reading about the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad; I was fourteen years old when it happened. Milpitas had receded into the mists of childhood. Still, sitting at the dining room table in Claremont, leafing through the Los Angeles Times and feeling sophisticated about it, I wondered: What if, in some imaginary timeline in which staying in that house had been not only viable but safe, we’d stayed? Would I have known these kids who’d seen the body of their friend and agreed to keep it secret? What might I have done—turned tail and run to the cops, or stayed safe with the pack?
I wrote poetry as a teenager, endless poems—the poems themselves were terrible, but writing them made me feel powerful. I’d sit at a manual typewriter in my room, staying up late, lighting candles or incense, and generally cutting quite a figure. The day I read the newspaper story about the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad, I wrote five poems, all from the imagined perspectives of her friends—the Circle of Five, I’d dubbed them; there was an Arthurian echo in the story for me, friends who hope that their bond will protect them from the wiles of the world.
I threw these poems away twenty years later when I ran across them in a folder full of old writing, of course. Their only value was to connect me to my younger self, and my need for that connection was dwindling. I did not hear about the other Milpitas murders—the ones at Devil House in 1986, the ones that occurred just as River’s Edge began making the festival circuit—until many years later. The town had, of necessity and in a very short period of time, developed a reflex for dealing with eventualities. They knew to turn away inquiries. People had learned how to say “No comment.” They circled the wagons.
A little research reveals that the case did get a drizzling of national coverage, but these years were busy times for ugly spectacles. In Southern California alone, the McMartin preschool case started staking its claim on the top of the news hour as early as fall of 1984; Richard Ramirez, meanwhile, was drawing pentagrams on the walls of tract homes in Monrovia, and in Glendale, and in Monterey Park. In the Aztakea Woods of Northport, Long Island, there was Ricky Kasso, high on blood and angel dust, heaping dry leaves over the mutilated body of his friend, Gary Lauwers. I remember hearing about Sean Sellers in Oklahoma, stripping down to his underwear before shooting both his parents with a handgun; and about Robert Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, who kept logs of the tortures he inflicted on his victims across extended periods of time: days, weeks.