There was a link for donations, an email address for tips.
There was a page labeled “A Prayer for Thalia.” It read: We pray for the soul and family of Thalia Keith, beloved daughter and treasured child of God. She left earth too soon. We pray for her spirit to guide us to truth, and to justice for herself and Omar. There was that same photo of her, the one cropped from the tennis team shot.
Another page gave the details of the case. I hadn’t gotten this far last time, but I had an hour till Fran would pick me up—we had plans to eat out, while Anne stayed home with the boys—and I’d rather read the website than the seven texts Lance had sent since he’d written me back that morning asking if we should block all the Jasmine supporters tagging the podcast.
I started clicking, skimming. Here were transcripts of the initial trial, made in preparation for the failed appeal. Here was Omar’s recanted confession, with footnotes pointing out inconsistencies.
After a short list of evidence entered by the defense in court—you could click through to see Omar’s office phone records, for instance—came a much longer list of documents and items entered by the prosecution, plus ones handed over during discovery. This included all the photos from the mattress party—presumably proof that nineteen of Thalia’s closest friends were accounted for all night and didn’t need looking into. What horrible photos. Red-eyed students washed out by flash. The kind of shots that, these days, you’d instantly erase from your phone. But here these kids remained, forever drinking in the woods, forever overexposed. I couldn’t imagine what good the shots did Omar’s case, why his family would put them up online, but then this archive seemed comprehensive.
I recognized almost all the kids.
Robbie Serenho. He’s in many of the night’s photos, in his gold Granby Ski sweatshirt, jeans, Red Sox cap.
Bendt Jensen, our Danish exchange student, Lancelot to Beth’s Guinevere. Everyone was in love with him.
Vishwas Singh, the kid we called Fizz—so named because freshman year he’d shaken a bottle of wine, like salad dressing, before opening it. When people laughed, screamed at him to stop, he said, confidently, “No, it’s beer you don’t shake.” He somehow still became popular, got elected class president our sophomore year. In one photo he’s holding a cigarette in each hand, arms out like a scarecrow.
Rachel Popa, Beth Docherty, and Donna Goldbeck, posing like Charlie’s Angels. Beth, like Bendt and Sakina John and Mike Stiles, is fresh from the Camelot stage. Sakina still wears her Morgan le Fay makeup, the long wings of eyeliner. The fact that Mike’s cast had just come off put a speed limit on the night; the group couldn’t have run down the trail either there or back.
Dorian Culler. There’s a shot of just him, leaning against a tree, eyes closed, long eyelashes against pale cheeks, mouth open to talk. He might have been good-looking, if he weren’t so terrible.
Asad Mirza—a devout Muslim back then, so there was at least one sober account of the mattress party.
A few other skiers and ski-adjacent people whose faces didn’t mean much to me anymore.
The kid taking the pictures was Jimmy Scalzitti—a skier who’d used one of the expensive yearbook Pentaxes for curtain-call shots of Camelot, also unhelpfully shown on the website. He then used most of the rest of the film in the woods. He must have started shooting only once he was drunk enough not to think twice about documenting underage drinking with a school camera.
The kids had built a flashlight bonfire, meaning they’d turned on their Granby-issued pocket lights and some bigger heavy-duty ones and arranged them like kindling in a big pile, illuminating the clearing.
I’d seen one of these shots before, the one they showed on Dateline: Robbie looking over his shoulder at the camera, Sakina and Beth leaning together laughing in the background, Dorian twisting his hands into some joke approximation of a gang sign. There are beer bottles in that shot, a few cigarette glows: the perfect visual encapsulation of mild teenage debauchery.
I remembered that the film was still in the Pentax, and still in Jimmy’s dorm room, when the State Police started nosing around; that was when Jimmy brought the film to Geoff and asked if he could develop it before his interview. “I just want to clear the air for Serenho,” Geoff told us he said. He asked Geoff if there was a way to cut any alcohol and cigarettes from the shots—but then the school promised disciplinary immunity for anyone forthcoming about drugs or drinking that night, so it didn’t matter.
Geoff told me he was keeping the negatives and making duplicates to hang on to. “Like—of course I keep them, right?” he said, and it seemed perfectly logical: What if Scalzitti threw it all away, and it turned out to be important? “Plus,” Geoff said, “it’s yearbook film.”
For some reason, Jimmy Scalzitti had turned on the timestamp, rendering the Camelot photos useless for yearbook unless Geoff cropped them, but making the shots of the mattress party tremendously helpful for establishing a timeline of the night. Or, more specifically—and a dozen online theories sprang from this, I already knew—Jimmy had only the date stamp on during the show, but somehow, by the first party shots, had toggled the timestamp on as well. A little too convenient, some people’s thinking went. Others argued that a drunk kid taking photos in the woods, in the slush and cold, had probably just messed up the switch.
I found myself leaving the Free Omar site and looking on Reddit for threads about the roll of film.
(If you care, Mr. Bloch: Fifty miles away, Omar was only then being allowed his second dose of ibuprofen. They finally changed his soaked gauze. It was too early for any signs of infection. He had not yet developed a fever.)
There were so many Reddit threads. I found, among other things, a theory that Thalia had been murdered at the mattresses by all nineteen kids, a satanic sacrifice. Another poster noted that Tim Busse’s eyes were buggy and bloodshot. That kid is coked out of his mind, NotYoPaulie82 wrote. Capable of anything. But that was just how Tim looked.
There was a long thread just about the splatter of mud up the back of Robbie’s ski sweatshirt, some people insisting it was blood. So you’re saying, reads a reply with hundreds of upvotes, that he not only killed Thalia and threw her in the pool in the TEN MINUTES between the musical and the party, but he did it BEHIND HIS OWN BACK? Ginger Rogers has nothing on this guy.