We were the only ones who knew. She means herself, and Derrick Hall, a college-bound senior known to all as a bookish kid who kept his cool, and Seth Healey, a class clown raised by a single mom. Their connection to the store would have been difficult for the authorities to establish; but teenagers imagine that authorities have mystical powers of insight, and know, too, that when adults are looking to pin something on a kid, almost any kid’s a potential target. The three of them spent several weeks waiting for a shoe to drop, feeling both relief and dread as suspicion gathered around a transfer student from New Mexico.
“I didn’t know him,” she says of Siraj, the child born to college-graduate spiritual seekers from back East, around whom the community’s suspicion gathered. “Nobody really knew him. But I didn’t think he could have done it, for a lot of reasons. It felt like everybody was looking at Siraj because he was so weird, because he was new, because he had a strange name.
“But none of us wanted to say anything. We had our whole lives ahead of us,” she concludes.
I say she sounds worried, and she says it’s not worry, it’s guilt.
“Or shame, maybe,” she says. “We didn’t do it. But neither did Siraj. Sometimes I wanted to say something, but—our whole lives, like I said. Just our whole lives.”
* * *
BUT IT’S THE WE DIDN’T DO IT I’m here to learn more about, not Siraj, whose story has been told and retold; so I have to press her further, even though it’s clear to me, having interviewed dozens of people whose experiences mirror hers to greater or smaller degrees, that she’s reached the point in the conversation where she’d usually shift to the after-all-that stage: her life beyond the moment when it felt threatened by forces beyond her control, the self she became when the waters of chaos ebbed. Communities where these types of crimes occur form bubbles, and the air inside gets humid; when the membrane finally dissolves, people who lived inside emerge with stories they can keep, or tell.
“Usually it’s Siraj they want to ask me about,” she says when I ask if she feels the case is truly cold. “I tell them I didn’t know him well, and I hope wherever he wound up, he stays there and they never find him, because I know he didn’t do it.”
I tell her that my examination of the evidence—the interviews, the crime scene photos, the ephemera I’ve collected—concurs with her claim: that there wasn’t any real case against Siraj; that the gaze of suspicion with which the community began to regard him, which grew so intense that his father moved the family to Menlo Park, was miscast.
“That doesn’t do him a lot of good now, wherever he is,” she says. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be the guy who ‘everyone knows’ killed two people so savagely that it made the paramedics puke? That was another thing everybody talked about, how people at the scene had to see a psychiatrist about it.” This, of course, is unverified lore of the sort that crimes like this produce voluminously, without aim or effort; some of it sticks, and that becomes the story for future generations.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be that guy, I say, but it seems to have been hard enough on him and his family that they’ve placed themselves entirely beyond the reach of the radar. It’s my job to track people down and get their stories, but I’ve been unable to find the family after several years’ searching. I also wonder what it would be like to be the guilty party, knowing that the authorities and the public are all looking in the wrong direction.
“It probably wasn’t even somebody from town,” she says in response, in a tone that tells me she’s quite certain neither one of us will ever know the name of the person or persons who killed Evelyn Gates and Marc Buckler, and who never faced charges for the crime. “I think about that sometimes, about how anybody could have just pulled off the highway and done this and gotten back into their car, and no one would have ever known.
“It’s a scary thought,” she concludes, and then she looks over at a showpiece clock on her mantel, with, I think, an almost theatrical ability to convey her meaning without having to say it out loud.
SETH
“Welcome to the cage!” are the words that greet me when I enter Gym Rats, presently celebrating its fifth year in business by offering six-month memberships at half off. It’s located in a strip of modular buildings off the Golden State Highway in Fresno, abutted by an auto shop on one side and a place called Import/Export, Inc., on the other.