He’s the spitting image of everybody’s favorite professor: easygoing, good-humored, insightful, inviting. But the tenure track, he decided somewhere along the path to a master of arts degree in maritime history, wasn’t for him. Once you’ve spent enough time inside the academy, it can be hard to imagine life outside of it; but Derrick Hall has never been short on imagination.
“I was working on my thesis, working really hard, when I had this realization: I didn’t want to be talking about all this stuff in the abstract. I wanted to be next to it. I’d be revising a section on distinguishing between two types of anchors and there’d be doodles all up and down the margins. I realized I was most interested in the stuff I could see with my own eyes, this stuff I could really get close to.”
We’re standing on the dock out in front of the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Beaufort, a wooden-shingled building on the Beaufort Sound; it’s just a week or so into the off-season, the middle of the week. Derrick looks out at the docked catamarans and cruisers gently bobbing in the water; the calm of the view is intoxicating,
“Can’t get much closer than this,” he says.
* * *
BEAUFORT IS MY THIRD STOP; my trek to the heart of Devil House enters crucial waters here. Derrick had arguably the closest connection to the property, having frequented Valley News before its decadent days, and worked inside the building when it was still a functioning store; he spent many long afternoons within its walls after Anthony Hawley abandoned it wholesale as a kiss-off gesture to his landlord. When I asked Angela and Seth for information, there were several limitations already in place: they only ever knew so much, and neither ever stood at the center of the storm the way Derrick did.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” he says when I suggest he’s the best authority I have encountered so far. “Seth’s memory is amazing. He calls me up once a month, we have it on our calendars, and his recall for details—you met him, right? So you already know.”
We both laugh; Derrick’s natural, easygoing manner is immediately comforting. I feel like success, on whatever terms he might define it, was always awaiting Derrick, wherever he ended up.
“But I know what you mean,” he continues. He pats the dock, dappled by the shadows of the pines; he has an office inside the museum, but it’s windowless, lifeless. Dockside, it’s peaceful. “I’m the man, right? They didn’t charge any of us, but I was the guy they wanted.”
There is a very long pause; there’s a shift in the tranquility of the water and the shadows on it, one that I think I see Derrick try to wish away.
“I was the guy they wanted,” he says again, and the mood lingers.
* * *
THE MOOD LINGERS because Derrick was, in every sense, the guy they wanted. The killings at Devil House hit Milpitas hard, resonating with a deep and menacing tone; River’s Edge, the movie dramatizing the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad just five years earlier, was due to hit theaters next year; it was already on the festival circuit, and, around town, people were talking. There was burgeoning local resistance to sensationalism of all stripes, and front-page images of the ratty storefront with caution tape around it provoked immediate and bitter resentment. “People felt like, Why should we have to go through all this again?” is how Derrick puts it. “Everybody wanted to fix the problem as fast as they could. Simple explanations are what people want when they’re scared.”
The simple explanation that would have scratched several itches was that a cabal of Satan-worshipping teens had sacrificed a couple of innocent victims to the devil for kicks. Stories like this had been generating high Nielsens ever since the Manson killings in 1969; a small industry had grown up around cult coverage: pockets of evil sewn under the skin of the suburbs. Hidden infections waiting for the right host. There’d been the Ripper Crew in Chicago, and the unsolved Jeannette DePalma case in New Jersey. Father Gerald Robinson in Toledo and Ricky Kasso on Long Island. Whole legacies of grief, texture-warping events in the life of a community. Milpitans, collectively, decided that one was enough, and the police department—with, Derrick suspects, the help of some outside advisors, though he’s unable to offer anything more concrete—developed a strategy to quash interest in the case beyond the city limits.
The first peg of the plan was to lock down all photos of the crime scene. Photographers gathered all the evidence that might be needed, and then the cleanup crew arrived: the police themselves, but also several trusted helpers from town. In one day, they scoured the inside, took down the sign out front, and threw a tarp over the roof to cover the gigantic portrait of the ghoul. Overnight, one of the most sensational crime scenes imaginable became an unremarkable remodeling project in progress: orange cones, drab scaffolds, thirty-gallon garbage cans. It looked like plenty of places by the freeway in any small California city, and the absence of a focal point for cameras went a long way toward dampening out-of-town enthusiasm about the case.
The next thing they needed was a suspect, or so they thought. As soon as they had a suspect they’d be in a position to fast-track the whole affair. But they were wrong about that, Derrick insists. “They’re very, very lucky they never arrested me,” he says. “My mom and dad worked very hard to give me the best chance they could, and they were mad as hell about my little secret life inside the store, but they stayed focused. They told the police to charge me or let me go, and then they hired a lawyer, and they didn’t blink at the price tag.
“If there’d have been an arrest,” he says, “that’s all the national media would have needed. A name on the logs, a kid with a face to splash onto the pages. Without that, what do you have? The same thing I get from recovered ships’ quarters. Salvaged relics. People look at them once and maybe they have some kind of reaction, but minus the story behind them, hardly anybody cares.
“But in town they didn’t know this yet, and it was very hard for a few weeks—”
He stops; he looks worried, or frightened. Is he trying to compose himself, or searching for the right words?
“It will be hard for you to understand what it was like during that time for me,” he concludes.
* * *
THE MILPITAS POLICE DEPARTMENT interviewed Derrick at least eleven times over the course of eight days. It was his senior year; according to Derrick, he kept his mind on his coursework inside all the cacophony. “I was pretty focused on college,” he insists. “There’s nothing wrong with Milpitas, but when it’s the only place you’ve ever known and you start to get the feeling there’s a whole world out there for you, you lean pretty hard into taking your shot.
“And it was exhausting,” he continues. “Just absolutely exhausting. I think they brought me in for follow-ups twice in a single day at least two times.” He’s right, and errs generously; on three occasions over this span of time, his presence was requested for an interview at the police station twice in a single day—the second day after his initial interview, three days after that, and once again a week later. These interviews grew more confrontational as public pressure increased, and Derrick remembers wishing he could make a public statement of some sort.
“Just something, anything,” he says. “I mean, when you’re the one in the crosshairs, it’s like you don’t have permission to be going through what everybody else is going through. And that’s just an awful feeling, because you are going through that. You just have to do it alone. My dad tried to help, my mom tried to help, I’m lucky I’ve always had a very supportive family, but in the end it was just me. I couldn’t call Seth and I couldn’t call Angela, and Alex was gone again and the police didn’t even have him on their radar, thank God, and I was—you know, when you’re a kid, and you hear adults talking about whether they slept well or not, it’s like, what are these people talking about, you know? But suddenly it’s me, I can’t sleep at all, and I want to just say something to clear the air. To clear the air, and for me personally, just to be seen.