And, of course, he wasn’t perfect. Because he had apparently been having an affair with his co-worker, Sally Fredericks.
She was a geography teacher who had organised the camping trip, just as she had every year since starting at Wendt Middle School. She was two years older than Daniels, a fitness fanatic who had, the year before her death, run the New York City Marathon. She was typically skinny for a long-distance runner. In the photos that accompanied the news stories I found later, Sally wasn’t classically beautiful or conventionally attractive, but there was something about her. The trace of a wry smile on her lips; an ironic twinkle in her eye. Everyone described her as clever and cool and kind. And the students and colleagues she’d left behind had seemed genuinely devastated by their loss – as had her husband, Neal.
‘So what, they snuck off into the woods together to have sex?’ I asked, glancing up at the trees that rose behind the Butlers’ cabin.
‘Yep,’ David said. ‘I guess it was too good an opportunity to pass up. A warm night. All the kids asleep, or so they thought. It must have seemed exciting. Romantic.’
‘It happened a little way from here,’ Connie added, pointing up the path with her stick. ‘There used to be a nature trail there, with a clearing further along the trail. The perfect place for a midnight hook-up.’
‘Nothing like a bit of al fresco fun,’ said David, winking at his wife.
She grimaced. ‘Don’t get any ideas, buster. I don’t want any bugs biting me on the butt.’
‘But I wouldn’t blame them if they did,’ he said, kissing her. ‘It’s so biteable.’
She slapped his chest and rolled her eyes, but she was pleased.
‘How were they killed?’ I asked, marvelling at how the Butlers had paused halfway through their gruesome tale for some flirtation, as if they were teenagers enjoying a scary movie rather than a married couple recounting a real-life crime.
When I looked it up afterwards, I found that the Butlers had remembered the details as if they themselves were the pathologists who had examined the bodies and written the reports. Actually, it wasn’t hard to picture David and Connie at the morgue, in scrubs and surgical masks, scalpels and saws slicing and grinding beneath artificial light.
Eric had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy object, probably a rock. He had died of blunt force trauma. The pathologist noted that he had been struck three times on the back of his head, which had shattered his skull. They speculated that the murderer had first struck Eric while he and Sally were having sex, with him on top. It would have been dark and they were busy; they wouldn’t have heard their assailant creeping up on them, weapon raised.
Sally died by strangulation. A makeshift ligature, probably a belt, had been tied around her throat and tightened until she choked to death. Marks on her fingers indicated that she had struggled and attempted to claw at the ligature around her neck.
The traces of semen and saliva on and inside her body belonged to Eric. There was no evidence that she had been raped, although there was bruising on her arms to indicate that she had been pinned down. The pathologist wrote that this bruising could have been caused during consensual sex, but it seemed most likely the murderer had held her down before strangling her. Perhaps he had intended to rape her, before changing his mind or being unable to do it.
As David and Connie told the story, a question formed in my head. It was horrible, yes. But murder was not uncommon, even double murders. Why was this slaying so notorious?
Why had it brought all these dark tourists flocking to this place?
I was about to voice the question when Connie said, ‘Here’s where it gets weird. At the centre of the clearing is this huge, flat rock. The bodies were left lying across the rock.’
‘Head to toe,’ said David.
‘What?’
‘They’d been laid out so his head was by her feet, and vice versa. But that’s not the weird part.’
‘There were symbols painted on the rock beside their bodies,’ Connie said.
‘In their own blood. Or Eric’s blood, I should say. Sally wasn’t bleeding.’
Now I was beginning to understand the murders’ gruesome appeal. ‘What kind of symbols?’
David’s eyes widened with excitement. ‘The horned god.’
‘And the triple goddess,’ said Connie. Unlike her husband, she said it in an almost reverential tone. Serious and unsmiling.
I blinked at them. ‘What are they? Satanic symbols?’
‘It’s more pagan,’ Connie said. ‘They’re two of the primary Wiccan deities.’