“Are you serious? Are you sure? What happened?”
Kathy took her time reporting the details she’d read in the local Florida papers. His name was Scottie McRae. He was twenty-nine, twenty-six at the time of the murders, but he could have passed for early twenties with his longish sandy curls and rumpled, slouchy posture. He was a drifter with a long criminal record on the run from authorities in Mississippi. He said he picked Gainesville on a whim, because voices in his head told him that something was waiting for him there when he rolled through on his journey south from his hometown, Biloxi, on the run from the police after he shot at his grandfather. Betsy pictured the bus wheezing and groaning out of the empty depot as it started its journey through the deepest South, across the Panhandle into Fort Walton, Destin, Pensacola, Tallahassee, and on to Gainesville. He bought a ticket through to Sarasota, but, mysteriously, got off two stops early. For nearly seventeen hours, half of them in darkness, McRae must have considered what awaited him in the Sunshine State. Why Gainesville? Betsy thought. Maybe he couldn’t be still and quiet on that bus with his own thoughts any longer? Maybe he walked off of it and felt relief, with the last, pneumatic sigh of air before the doors clapped shut? With each dot on the map he passed, he widened the gap between the past and the present, between reality and the infinite possibilities of starting anew. He arrived in Gainesville on August 19, 1990.
The worst part of the story, Betsy thought, was that they didn’t even arrest him for murder. They picked him up for armed robbery after he held up a convenience store near Orlando. He only confessed to the killings to brag about them to his fellow inmates. The theory was that he wanted to be recognized, to be famous in the way that serial killers, not armed robbers, are.
Scottie had been cooperative, almost docile, with the Orange County jail authorities and in court during his armed robbery trial back in 1991. It wasn’t until he attacked a fellow inmate, biting his face in a fit of rage, that the warden started to believe that he was capable of any kind of real violence. Their interest in him was officially piqued, and when detectives from Mississippi started to reach out to law enforcement in states across the southeast to look for someone who fit certain behavior patterns of a man wanted for triple homicide, they started looking more closely at Scottie. Scottie, sensing the increasing scrutiny, must have loved the adrenaline rush it caused and wanted to add to the intrigue, because he started to run his mouth to fellow inmates about the women he assaulted in Gainesville. Eventually, state authorities dug out the blue duffel bag from the box of evidence they’d sealed and stowed away when they first arrested him. In it, underneath some white Reeboks and dirty clothes, were cassettes and a small tape recorder. Scottie made a habit of recording songs, his thoughts, letters he hoped to transcribe and send to his family, an attempt to finally be seen and understood by them. At the end of the one cassette still snug inside the tape deck, which was filled with long descriptions of the women he was following, was one simple but ominous warning.
“I’ve gotta go. There’s something I’ve gotta do.”
The attack in prison and the contents of the bag—including the disturbing tape—were grounds to bring him in for questioning. Three hours into the interrogation, he described in dispassionate detail carving the first victim with that foot-long blade. Then another, and another, until they had linked him to all five murders. The newspapers described it all. Kathy avoided the details specific to Ginny. But as she rattled off the information, Betsy closed her eyes and she was back in Gainesville, on the stolen bike, in Ginny and Caroline’s dark apartment. She heard someone clear her throat and opened her eyes to see Jessica standing at her desk, staring at her. Jessica mouthed “What the fuck?” and nodded toward the end of the hall, where the department head and a handful of other supervisors were returning from lunch.
Betsy straightened up in her seat.
“Betsy, I’m sorry,” said Kathy over the phone when her daughter fell silent. “But I think we should focus on the fact that he’s behind bars, and he will never hurt anyone again.”
Kathy agreed to fax the articles to Betsy, and she stood by the machine waiting for the slick paper to churn slowly out.
After work, Betsy raced to the newsstand to see if any of the papers ran the story, and in the following weeks she collected all the clippings she could find. Her mom sent her the manila folder filled with all of the articles she had started clipping back in 1990, and Betsy kept it in a drawer in her desk at home.