This is the story of a small town in Northern California, a town plagued by a serial killer who is raping and murdering young women and teenage girls, some as young as 14. He picks them up off the street and takes them away and their bodies are found on peaceful lake shores, under overpasses. He leaves them along the ritzy road, Hilltop Drive, that runs parallel to the river that splits the town. This street divides the mansions on the high side of river with views of the water and the flood plain on the other side populated by the less affluent, from the suburban neighborhoods on the other side.

In the preface, the author talks about how this is his second book about a serial killer who operated in this town. And he was shocked, shocked to discover that this small town, Redding, could have two serial killers.

I wasn’t shocked.

I lived in Redding in 1978, while these serial killers were operating.

Redding is, I like to say, the armpit of the world.* It lies at the very top of the central valley and the summer winds carry the smog from the southward cities and the smoke from the rice fields north, where they are trapped in the V formed by the mountains and hang over the city for days. The people I met there were strange: we attended the Catholic school and, from what many of the kids told me, their parents were alcoholics and child abusers. The people who ran the school were certainly crazy: the monsignor announced at our graduation mass that my entire class would be going to hell.

We weren’t going to hell. We were just 8th graders. He just didn’t like that we had written a letter to the editor of the local paper claiming that he shouldn’t be running the school. A letter that, as far as I knew, was never published. Instead, it was given to the monsignor, who used it to bully and threaten us as if we were victims of the Spanish Inquisition. What a pig.

The public school where I attended 9th grade had a gang problem. Girl gangs. They used to meet on the playing fields and go after each other with bats and chains. These girls were California girls, with long straight swingy hair and big eyes. Slim girls who looked good in jeans. Girls who were nice to me in the school locker room. And they were fighting on the ball field with weapons. Good thing we didn’t live in the big city where bad things happened.

At the time I lived there, this town had the highest per capita rates of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, bigfoot sightings, and alien abductions. (Don’t ask me to footnote that. I looked it up for some reason while I was in high school doing research on something else, and remember it only because I was so surprised.)

The areas that the author describes in the book – the shores of Lake Shasta, the fairgrounds, the nearby towns of Anderson and Red Bluff, the skating rink – these are areas I remember. We lived three blocks off Hilltop Drive in that suburb I mentioned above.

I could have been one of his victims.

He cruised along, looking for girls walking alone, at night. He grabbed them, pulled them off the street, raped them, beat them, and dumped them. These girls were strangers to him. He picked them because he could take them unobserved. Because he could wreak his anger on them and then leave them behind.

I don’t remember hearing anything about these murders while I lived there. My parents didn’t warn me about walking alone. My friends’ parents didn’t warn us. Nobody said anything at school. It was the late ’70s, kids walked alone and rode their bikes. No one knew where we were. No one worried until it was too late.

One day, a friend and I went to the mall – the new mall on the outskirts of town, too far to walk home, not the old mall downtown where we walked after school – to hang out. My mom said she’d pick us up at 7 pm. She didn’t show up. Around 8 pm – the mall long closed, the two of us sitting on the curb by the dumpsters waiting – my friend’s dad showed up unexpectedly to pick her up. He was worried, he said, that she hadn’t come home as planned. She wasn’t in trouble, he just wanted to make sure her ride had worked out okay. Would I like a ride, too, he asked casually. No, I replied, my mom was coming; she’d worry if I wasn’t where she expected me to be. So he drove off. Leaving a 13-year old alone at a closed mall on the edge of town with two serial killers at work.

It was a different time then.

Finally around 9:30, my dad showed up. My mom had been in an auto accident – the horse trailer had become unhitched while she and my sister were driving back from a pony club meet. No one had been hurt and the horses were okay, but it had taken her a long time to re-hitch the trailer and drive on to the stables, and then she had to get the horses calmed down, and then she had to drive 20 minutes back to our house, and by the time she had finally arrived home she had forgotten about me altogether. I think my friend’s dad had called my house around 9:15, just to make sure I had gotten home okay. And that’s when my parents realized I was still at the mall.

At the time I was more pissed than anything else. The light by the dumpsters wasn’t that good and it was hard to read my book (I always had a book with me). I was cold and hungry and bored. And mad that they had left me there. And I felt guilty that I was mad since my mom couldn’t help being in an accident. And felt stupid for not letting my friend’s dad drop me off at home. What I did not feel was scared.

I should have felt scared.

This book brought up all those feelings again. I felt scared for 13-year old me, so vulnerable and forgotten, so at-risk without realizing it.

This is often how the victims of serial killers feel. The girl on her way to the Circle K. The girl just trying to catch a ride home. The girl sitting by the lake with her boyfriend. The girl just sitting in her apartment, minding her own business. The girl just leaving work after locking up. The girl just playing by the sidewalk with her baby cousin. The girl waiting for a ride.

They don’t realize they’re at risk. They don’t realize they are vulnerable. They’re mad. They’re happy. Their feet hurt. They are maybe a little tipsy. Or their heads are full of schoolwork, daydreams about their future.

And then something strikes them. They undergo horror and pain and fear. And then they’re gone.

And what are the killers feeling? Who cares, really. Who cares that the guy in this book was in a disfiguring car accident, that relationship with his wife was strained, that he was jealous of the attention that their baby received, that he was depressed and in pain, that his other girlfriend left him to move back to Montana. This guy was nothing and the reason he killed girls was so that he could, in his mind, feel like something. In his mind, that justified it.

If you couldn’t tell already, this book got under my skin. It was well-written, marching through the crimes, then jumping through the murderer’s life to date, then back to the murders. I have a problem when I read these books: I can’t help but think, Why didn’t someone realize that this guy was trouble? He often disappeared at night and arrived home in early hours, disrobing and showering before entering the house, detailing the car. He said creepy things to his girlfriend, and to girls that he met, to friends. Things like, I was a suspect in a murder up by Whiskeytown. (Whiskeytown Lake, another lake north of Redding. They hadn’t found a body there when he said it, and still hadn’t when the book was written.) Things like, how easy it was to drive up next to a girl, grab her by the hair, and pull them into your car, to drive with one hand on the wheel into the middle of nowhere…

And yet no one put the pieces together.

Sometimes I read books about serial killers and you really don’t see it coming. You have no clue who the murderer is, like Zodiac. Or when they catch him, people say, He was such a nice guy, like that guy in, I think it was Idaho but maybe it was South Dakota. He seemed so normal. I had no idea.

But sometimes it seems like someone should have seen it coming.

Okay, I can’t keep writing about this. I’m too close to this one. I need to go read something light. Maybe the history of executioners or the fall of Detroit or nuclear fallout in Nevada during the ’50’s or the black plague or something.

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^{*After 9th grade we moved to the northwest corner of Washington state. It was tradition there that, after you graduated from high school, you went on an epic West Coast road trip. One of my friends got ahold of a van and told me he was driving down I-5 to Baja and then back again. I said, Look, gas-up in the mountains and, when you get to Redding, put the pedal down and drive through as fast as possible. Don’t stop for drinks or gas or anything. He didn’t listen and his van broke down and he got stuck there for a week. I warned him. Many years later, I helped my sister move from LA to Eastern Washington. I drove her and her car, and her husband drove the moving van and towed their other car. Just north of Redding, the towed car threatened to detach itself from the van. I’m telling you, this place is cursed. My apologies to Susan and Annie and Robert and Jenny & Lisa, and to you, if you live in Redding and like it. You will be happy to know that you will never have to deal with my disgust with your town because I am never coming back there.}