EVEN IF YOU DON’T KNOW Angela West, there’s a good chance you know her work, if you attended any but the most cloistered of American high schools in the early 2000s. Those splashy notebooks whose iridescent colors displaced the Pee-Chees and Trapper Keepers of generations past? Angela was first on the scene with the style; fresh out of college, she took a job with a design firm in Boston, and her first assignment was for Mead in Pennsylvania. “Cross-branding was really big—licensed designs—but they wanted their own line of splashy covers so they wouldn’t have to pay the Hollywood studios or the Lisa Franks,” she tells me with a laugh. “At the same time, everybody’s afraid of getting sued, so they wouldn’t tell me, you know, Do something Rainbow Brite. We’d sit in meetings and they’d dance around the point until I gave them a nod and told them I thought I had it, and then I’d scare up a knockoff Rainbow Brite with enough wrong to make for plausible deniability.”
Mead sold a huge amount of notebooks with her charming if generic fantasy horse outline gracing the cover; it was her idea to print the design as a gold or silver silhouette, and it was her proposal that they be printed on neon covers instead of the simpler tones that were Mead’s bread and butter. She insists that they’re nothing special—all in a day’s work—but their success helped her up the ladder in her trade. By the mid-nineties, she’d started her own company; she had a keen eye for good new talent.
“I knew some super-talented people in high school. None of them went on to work in design, but just being around them—” She breaks off, looking for the right word. “If you see good things early, you know what to look for later.”
* * *
ANGELA LOOKS SURPRISED when I ask her whether she remembers which of her friends, if any, might have triggered the alarm at Monster Adult X: the piercing siren whose keening wail got someone in the neighborhood to call the police, who, on the grounds of possible imminent danger, then entered the property, where they found the bodies of Marc Buckler and Evelyn Gates surrounded by pornography and paraphernalia, all of it repurposed to look like the inside of a haunted house. “We never triggered any alarm,” she says. “That wasn’t the idea. We just wanted the landlord to freak out a little when she tried to sell the place. Maybe ask herself, you know: ‘Whose place is this, really?’ So we stayed up all night with scissors and paints and markers and glitter and felt-tip pens, and then we left, and that was the last any of us knew about it.”
There’s a short break in the flow; she’s seeing whether I’m skeptical. She has cause to wonder. She and her friends were the focus of an intense investigation that brought together the police departments of three cities—Milpitas, San Jose, and Charter Oak, a small town at the other end of the state, where Marc Buckler had grown up—and spanned six months, resulting, finally, in no arrests.
“That was all any of us knew,” she says again.
* * *
SCISSORS, AND PAINTS, and markers, and glitter; felt-tip pens, and, possibly, a sword. That’s the item missing from Angela’s account of the night she spent inside the store with her friends; according to the timeline established by detectives, sometime after the redecoration of the store but before the morning of November 2, 1986, two people were murdered on the premises of the adult bookstore whose doors had been shuttered for at least a month. One of them was the owner of the building, a local slumlord named Evelyn Gates; the other, Marc Buckler, an aspiring real estate investor from Southern California. Their skulls were split, and their bodies had been badly mutilated, the sort of repeated insults to a corpse that experts in criminal science call “overkill.” Seventeen stab wounds is the threshold for overkill. Evelyn Gates’s corpse boasted twenty-nine discreet insults. The probability that her attacker meant to express some degree of personal animus was high.
“We didn’t really know the details,” Angela recalls. “Everybody said they knew, you know. The gossip mill was grinding night and day. Night and day! We almost had to laugh, Derrick and Seth and me, some of the stories people told. Things we knew about the scene, things we knew for a fact were made-up. But we didn’t laugh, because it was serious, and we were scared.”
They were scared because they knew pressure on local police to make an arrest would be intense. Just five years earlier, in a case that had made headlines nationwide and was later turned into a successful movie, a disturbed local teenager had murdered his girlfriend and shown her bloated body to their mutual friends. The small town that would later become an outpost of Silicon Valley had no intention of becoming the focus of national news for a second time; the local department consulted with experts, contacting investigators from Long Island, and from Boston, and from Oklahoma City—any place that had seen occult-related crime, any crime whose details had been lurid enough to attract the attention of the national press. “I thought they’d arrest Seth for sure,” Angela tells me. “They would have arrested Alex, too, if he hadn’t disappeared again, but as far as I know, we were the only ones who knew he’d come back to town.”
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.”