IF YOU’D LIVED IN AN EARLIER TIME, who would remember you? Your name would be known only to students of esoteric crimes, your face seen alongside Lizzy Borden’s on dust jackets designed to attract a very specific readership who know exactly what they want from the books they buy. Maybe some singer in the early nineties might have splashed your mug shot on a T-shirt and worn it to the MTV awards, but probably not. For every iconic pair of murderer’s eyes staring blankly into a police photographer’s lens, there are unremembered dead in small towns across the country going back centuries. Murder seldom inspires much lasting interest beyond the houses it strikes. You used to have to really work at it to make a name for yourself.
But this is a new era. Americans have been more or less glued to their televisions since the Tet Offensive; that was four years ago now, and nightly drama coming out of the nation’s capital has only intensified the bond between average people and their screens. Print reporters have always known it’s good to have somebody on the inside; their colleagues in broadcast news are learning as they go. KSBY’s office in San Luis Obispo started sending crews around to talk to people about the missing teenagers yesterday; the head of the news department heard about them from a station clerk he knows. Occasionally he’s sent her movie passes to the Fremont; these cost him nothing—they’re a perk. They have netted him a huge score this morning.
The news van captures your face in the back of the car as it leaves the parking lot. The anchor describes your “evidently expressionless face” to his viewers as he wraps the segment, but what expression suits a person whose keep has been fatally breached, whose safe harbor, until days ago a place of idle peace, now suffers its second invasion in the space of days— a parking lot teeming with strangers, a chatter of voices.
“We’ll have to wait and see if there’s more beneath the surface,” he says, handing the broadcast back to his colleagues at the station. “Back to you.”
“‘More beneath the surface,’” echoes his counterpart, her cadence dark, suggestive, and inconclusive as she pivots to camera two to change her tone. “And you can be sure KSBY will be there to cover it. Meanwhile, more details on the historic agreement signed this week in Moscow, and, for those, we head over to Tom Brokaw at the national desk. Tom?”
* * *
MOMENTS LIKE THESE are notoriously hard to reconstruct—the mundane aftermath of a signal event whose import isn’t yet clear, the muddy beginnings in which legends are conceived. Whole histories got wiped and recorded over by TV stations all the way up through the late 1970s. But I got lucky. Frank Haeny’d worked on missing-kids cases locally for years, and in the course of his work he’d learned that there’s no such thing as an insignificant piece of evidence. He Mirandized you personally through the grating that separated the front seat of the car from the back—and then he asked Quinn for a second outside the car.
“Get her processed, get her some food, tell her we can talk about all this later this morning,” he said. “I need to make sure nobody does anything stupid here.”
Quinn blanched; he didn’t want to be alone with this woman whose shining eyes gazed exhaustedly out through bangs plastered to her forehead by blood.
“I’ll be practically right behind you,” Haeny said, taking a reassuring tone. “Just dotting i’s here.” With that, Quinn nodded and got into the cruiser; the report indicates that a junior officer named Thaler rode along with you in case there was any need for corroboration of details later. Per Quinn’s report, neither he nor Lieutenant Thaler spoke to you during the ride down to the station. The sun would have been rising above the bay by the time you got there. The report indicates that you sat down in the first chair you saw inside the station, and that you slumped there, and were slow to respond when asked to get up.
At Oakside Court, Detective Haeny went back and forth between your apartment and the parking lot, keeping an eye on clean procedures in the one and the camera crews in the other. He knew it was better to make friends with them than to antagonize them; you never know who you might need to call for a favor later. When the crowd had thinned down to a few stragglers, he waved all the newspeople over to him; there were three of them left along with their crews, lighting rigs and fuzzy boom mics in hand. They’d been interviewing bystanders for at least half an hour.
“I know you have to get your broadcasts together,” he told them, “but when all that’s done I’d appreciate it if you could get all of what you just got here to me.” He made a circling measure in the air that indicated he meant the footage they’d just shot, and then he handed out business cards. “I’ll get it back to you.”
The oldest of the camera operators didn’t like the idea of just handing his footage over to the police; he never called the number on the card, and anything he shot is lost to history. The other two did as they were told. It was from this raw footage that I was able to assemble an account of the genesis of the White Witch. I got it from Detective Haeny, and I wondered aloud to him why no one had ever reported on it before. “No one ever asked,” he told me.
Neither the prosecution nor the defense used any of the unaired tape in court. Several of its principals were in fact called to testify, but their voices got lost in the squall. By the time you came to trial, the tales people told had, through repetition, assumed shape. Confusion gave way to conjecture; friends would ask one another how something like this could have happened, and would keep right on asking until they came up with an explanation that could be passed along. The cautionary tale that came to stand in for the facts of the case belonged to the familiar type of legend in which the greatest possible menace to a community lies just beneath the skin, its portents only readable, in retrospect, by those lucky enough to have survived its eruption.
* * *
GARY LOGAN (NEIGHBOR): Well, I didn’t really know her much. At all, really, I guess. I live downstairs. She’s a lot younger than me. Most of the people here are younger than me but I like it. I’m retired, always wanted to live by the water. No old folks’ home for me! Anyway, we just said hello sometimes. One time she helped me with the groceries because she saw I had three bags. There was nothing really different about her as far as I could tell. She seemed nice.