The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  By this point in the movie—just about ten minutes in—I could see that we were going to have to pack up. But as we started to gather our things, the movie took another turn. Witherspoon gains control of the situation by pulling out her boyfriend’s gun. She asks Sutherland if he believes that Jesus Christ is his personal savior, then shoots him in the neck several times. Then she throws up, steals his car, and leaves him for dead on the side of the road.

  I don’t think he actually dies, but to be honest I remember little to nothing about the rest. What I remember is the moment in the small dark theater, right before Witherspoon pulls out her gun, right before we stood up to leave, when my mother leaned over and whispered to me, Let’s give it one more minute—maybe something different is about to happen.

  American Taboo

  THE FIRST E-MAIL I receive from 48 Hours Mystery comes a few months before the trial from a producer who addresses me as “Mrs. Nelson,” unwittingly conjuring up an identity held but fleetingly by my mother many years ago. In his e-mail the producer says that he hopes I will consider working with them, as he feels strongly that “my family’s story of struggle and hope” has great relevance to their audience.

  I ponder this phrase for some time. I wonder if he is imagining my family as the kind to print up T-shirts with Jane’s picture and a “we will never forget” slogan on them, as I have seen some families on these TV shows do. I wonder if he read the article in the Detroit Free Press in December 2004 in which my grandfather likened the reopening of Jane’s case to “picking a scab.” I wonder what he would think if he knew that after the January hearing, when Hiller asked my grandfather what he thought of the court proceedings thus far, my grandfather said he found them “boring.”

  I agree to meet the producer for dinner at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  THE NIGHT before we meet I stay up late perusing the Web site for 48 Hours Mystery. I learn that 48 Hours used to focus on “human interest” stories of varying degrees of social importance—the international sex trade, the pros and cons of the “Subway Diet,” the risks of gastric bypass surgery. But as ratings for investigative journalism plummeted and ratings for true-crime shows began to soar, “48 Hours” became “48 Hours Mystery.” At times they attempt to take on deeper topics within the “murder mystery” rubric—a recent show, for example, investigates the topic Who Killed Jesus? and stars Elaine Pagels.

  As I scroll down the long list of show titles I feel my spirits start to sink. There are a host of stories about missing or murdered girls and women, with panic-inducing titles like Where’s Baby Sabrina? Where’s Molly? Where Is Mrs. March? Others feature high-profile cases—JonBenét: DNA Rules Out Parents; Is Amber Still in Love with Scott?: Her Father Says She Has Never Gotten Over Him, while others strive for a more poetic effect: Dark Side of the Mesa: Did Michael Blagg Murder His Wife and Daughter? I try to imagine the title they’ll choose for Jane’s show but come up dry.

  I FIND the producer on a street corner on Broadway, talking outside the restaurant with some of his college friends, all of whom graduated just a couple of years ago. I’m surprised—I had imagined dinner with a slick patrician, a hard-boiled veteran of the TV business. The surprise is apparently mutual: when we sit down, he tells me that I look way too young to be a professor, and he’s taken aback that I’m not married. I have no idea why he thought I was.

  We are meeting early in the evening because he has to fly to Los Angeles first thing in the morning to cover the Michael Jackson child molestation trial. I am not very interested in the Jackson trial, but I try to make small talk about other famous trials. I bring up Gary Gilmore and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song; he says he hasn’t heard of Norman Mailer, but will definitely look him up. He orders us a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and appears perplexed when it arrives. I thought I ordered us a red, he says, decanting with a shrug.

  Over the wine he asks me if, while writing Jane, I felt as though I were channeling my aunt. I say no. He looks disappointed. I try to explain that Jane is about identification, not fusion. That I never even knew her. That in the book I don’t try to speak for her, but rather to let her speak for herself, through her journal entries. And that although I have tried to imagine her death, there’s really no way of knowing what she went through—not only because I don’t know what happened to her on the night of her murder, but because no one ever really knows what it’s like to be in anyone else’s skin. That no living person can tell another what it’s like to die. That we do that part alone.

  Our entrees arrive—stylish piles of monkfish—and he shifts gears, says it’s time for the “hard sell.” He says that although 48 Hours Mystery strives to entertain, it always keeps a serious social issue at stake. When I ask him what the issue might be in this case, he says this episode will be about grief. About helping other people to mourn. He says that my family’s involvement could really help other people in similar situations.

  All those viewers who thought they lost a family member to a famous serial killer, then are told 36 years later that DNA from the crime scene matches both that of a retired nurse and a man who was four years old at the time and grew up to murder his mother, I think.

  With less graciousness than I’d hoped to display, I ask if there’s a reason why stories about the bizarre, violent deaths of young, good-looking, middle- to upper-class white girls help people to mourn better than other stories.

  I thought it might come to this, he says good-naturedly but warily, refolding the napkin in his lap.

  After dinner we walk a few blocks up Broadway together and pass one of the gigantic, brightly lit Barnes & Nobles that now sprawl around so many New York City street corners. He lights up with an idea—he says he’s going in to find the Mailer book I told him about, which he will read on the plane to California tomorrow morning. Good idea, I say, not mentioning that it’s 1,056 pages. He beckons me into the store, says he’ll buy me anything I want, on his CBS account.

  I know I should decline. But a wicked you’re-using-me-so-why-shouldn’t-I-use-you feeling has already taken root.

  We browse for a bit on our own, then reconvene at the cash register. I have James Ellroy’s 1996 “crime memoir,” My Dark Places, in my hand.

  My Dark Places is a sinister, engrossing book about the 1958 murder of Ellroy’s mother and his subsequent sexual and literary obsession with vivisected women. I had furtively skimmed this book in various bookstores while working on Jane over the past few years, but had always felt too ashamed to buy it for myself. It seems the perfect memento for this evening.

  In parting the producer hands me a sample videotape of his show, which I deposit into my plastic Barnes & Noble shopping bag.

  I take the train back to Connecticut the next morning and stuff the shopping bag under my dresser as if trying to forget a one-night stand I’d prefer never happened. The bag sits there for over a month. When I finally pull it out, I stack the book and videotape on top of each other on my desk in the Ponderosa Room, where they sit untouched for several more weeks.

  The label on the videotape reads: American Taboo: Who Murdered a Beautiful Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga?

  At long last, one night I pull my TV out of the closet, curl up on the couch, and insert American Taboo into the VCR.

  The show opens with a photo of a truly gorgeous brunette chewing playfully, erotically, on a long piece of grass. Then a true-crime writer who has written a book about this woman, whose name was Deborah Gardner, appears against a mountainous backdrop, and explains why he became obsessed with her. He says it had something to do with the combination of her beauty and the horror of her 1976 murder. He then quotes Edgar Allan Poe, who once declared the death of a beautiful woman to be the most poetic topic in the world.

  I’m taken aback: I used this same Poe quotation in Jane.

  The show then vacillates between more lovely photos of Gardner and photos of her blood-splattered hut in Tonga, where a fellow Peace Corps volunteer stabb
ed her twenty-two times. (He is later found not guilty by reason of insanity in a Tonga court.) The camera whirls around her hut in a restaging of her murder, first from the perspective of her deranged killer, then from that of a panicked, dying Gardner, fighting hopelessly for her life. There are several stills of the long, serrated hunting knife apparently used to do the deed.

  I can’t make it to the end of American Taboo. I try on a few other occasions, but every time I end up symptomatically falling asleep, or shutting it off in despair.

  THE SHOW about Jane, which will air on Thanksgiving weekend, 2005, will be titled Deadly Ride. I won’t watch it either, even though my mother and I will ostensibly be its stars. People will assure me that we brought some dignity, some depth to the genre, and to Jane’s life, and I will be glad. That was the point of participating, as they were going to do the show with or without us. But I don’t want to see the crime scene photos flashed over and over again on TV, nor do I want to think about millions of Americans flipping by Jane’s corpse under its bloodstained raincoat while channel-surfing at their in-laws, up late, still stuffed from Thanksgiving dinner.

  IT TAKES ME even longer to crack the Ellroy memoir, but I manage to finish it in one sitting. As with American Taboo, there are some discomfiting parallels.

  Ellroy’s mother died when he was ten. Exactly thirty-six years later he decides to research and write about her long-repressed murder. Eventually he is able to reopen her case, which he works on with a homicide cop from the LAPD.

  Ellroy also suffers from murder mind, but his turns him on. The titular “dark place”—the fantasy that nearly drives him to insanity—is that of fucking his mutilated mother. Her amputated nipple thrills me.

  Despite all his hard work on the case, Ellroy’s mother’s murder remains unsolved; at the end of the book he provides a contact number for tips. I’ll learn more, he promises his dead mother on the last page. You’re gone and I want more of you.

  It’s a disappointing ending. Not because the case doesn’t get solved, but because Ellroy never seems to grasp the futility of his enterprise. Instead his compulsion to “learn more” just smashes up against this futility with increasing velocity. He knows that no amount of information about his mother’s life or death will bring her back, but somehow he doesn’t really seem to get it.

  I don’t get it either.

  I’ve never had the desire or need to bring Jane back—I never even knew her. And while the unsolved status of her murder may have once haunted me, now a man has been arrested for it, is being held without bail, and will soon be brought to trial. And yet, daily, while in faculty meetings or paused at traffic lights, I find myself scrawling lists of potential avenues of further inquiry. Should I visit Leiterman in prison? Interview members of his family? Find Johnny Ruelas? Spend more time with Schroeder? What on earth for?

  Conventional wisdom has it that we dredge up family stories to find out more about ourselves, to pursue that all-important goal of “self-knowledge,” to catapult ourselves, like Oedipus, down the track that leads to the revelation of some original crime, some original truth. Then we gouge our eyes out in shame, run screaming into the wilderness, and plagues cease to rain down upon our people.

  Fewer people talk about what happens when this track begins to dissolve, when the path starts to become indistinguishable from the forest.

  Photo #3:

  A close-up of the entry wound in Jane’s lower left skull. Her hair, thick and red with blood, has been pushed aside to expose it, as if to isolate a tick in the fur of an animal. Around the hole is a bright-red corona of flayed skin which the examiner calls a “contusion collar.” The diameter of the wound is very small; a .22 is not a big-caliber gun.

  A speck of white light from the medical examiner’s laser pen dances in and around the wound for almost twenty minutes. At first I think the puckered hole looks like a sea urchin. Then I think it looks like an anus. The lingering close-up makes me feel like doing something perverse—I feel like standing up and starting to sing. I imagine the courtroom suddenly sliding over into musical farce, a self-help spoof I would title “Circling the Wound.”

  Murder Mind, Redux

  THROUGHOUT THE winter of 2004–2005 the biggest local story in Middletown, Connecticut, was the impending execution of convicted serial killer Michael Ross. The execution was scheduled to take place a few towns away, and was to be the first execution in New England since 1960.

  Ross’s killing spree bore many similarities to the Michigan Murders. He started out in 1981 on the campus of Cornell University, and over the next three years killed eight girls and young women; John Collins had been a student at Eastern Michigan University, and many of the girls he allegedly killed were students at either Eastern or the U of M. Unlike Collins, however, who to this day maintains his innocence from prison, Ross pled guilty. Also unlike Collins, Ross was convicted in a state with the death penalty, and in 1987 Ross was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

  Over the next eighteen years on death row Ross filed a variety of appeals—to be castrated, to be retried, to be executed. But as his execution date in January 2005 drew near he refused to file any more. In court after court he and his lawyer insisted that he was mentally competent, that he knew what he was doing. Like Gary Gilmore before him, Ross was fighting to die. I want no gravestone, no reminders … I just want to be forgotten, he said in an interview posted on the elaborate Web site he maintained from prison.

  On this same Web site, Ross described his mental state—which is clinically (if broadly) classified as “sexual sadism”—as follows:

  I guess the easiest way to explain it is everybody’s had a tune in their head, like a melody that they heard on the radio or something. It just plays over and over again … I have that & no matter how hard you try to get rid of that melody, it’s still there. And that kind of thing could drive you nuts. But if you replace that melody now with thoughts of rape & murder & degradation of women …

  This description chilled me to the bone. It was an excellent description of murder mind.

  On January 23, 2005—the Sunday before his Wednesday execution date—the Hartford Courant was thick with Ross. I saw its front page through a cracked, graffitied newspaper box on Main Street, in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts that served as a kind of halfway house for the town’s many vagrants. The Dunkin’ Donuts was adjacent to the local theater, which was now featuring the horror movie Saw. Its poster featured a woman’s severed, bloody leg, alongside the tagline How much blood would you shed to stay alive?

  I went inside to get change, bought the edition with a fistful of quarters, and sat down at the counter to look at it.

  The front page bore several large color photographs of four girls and young women, with this text underneath them:

  These [victims] were snatched by a man who first made small talk with them, then forced them into his car or into the woods. He has admitted to raping all but one. After the rapes he forced them to roll over on their stomachs. Then he would straddle them and strangle them from behind.

  I knew these kinds of articles well. A few years back I had spent a long, sweltering summer printing out dozens of them from microfilm in the basement of the New York Public Library in service of Jane. I blasted through reel after reel of the Detroit News, keeping my eyes peeled for the row of photographs that signified the dead girls. Invariably I would get moored up in the wedding pages until I realized my error: Not dead, just married.

  Although over thirty years apart, the Detroit News and Hartford Courant articles kept to a similar script. They both paired a “she had so much to live for” sentimentality with quasi-pornographic descriptions of the violence each girl had suffered. The main difference was that the ‘60s articles used a more modest lexicon: “violated,” “co-ed,” etc.—and that they were sandwiched in between articles about the war in Vietnam instead of the war in Iraq.

  How does one measure the loss of eight young women? asked the Courant. There is no way to kno
w what they would have done with their lives—the careers they might have pursued, the people they would have loved, the children they might have had.

  I know that I am supposed to care about these questions. Especially as the author of Jane, in which I bent over backwards to pay more attention to Jane’s life than to her death. But somehow they instantaneously make me not want to read on. How does one measure the loss of anyone? Is measurement a necessary part of grief? Is a life less grievable if its prospects for the future—here imagined as a range of career options and the potential to bear children—don’t appear bright? The people they would have loved—that was a nice touch. But what about the people they already had loved? Or what if they hadn’t loved anyone, or no one had loved them?

  More to the point, I knew that this tally of grief, along with the brutal physical details of Ross’s rapes and murders, was supposed to do more than bring tears to one’s eyes or sell papers. It was also supposed to drum up support for the long-dormant death penalty in Connecticut, and in New England at large. The “Commentary” section regularly rehashed the most heinous aspects of Ross’s crimes before immediately reminding the reader, The vast majority of people in this state and country continue to support the death penalty for certain types of murders—i.e., for this kind.

  So despite the fact that the so-called “Blizzard of ’05” had just dumped two feet of snow in the Connecticut region, in addition to bringing subzero temperatures and wind gusts of hurricane proportions, I was planning to attend the overnight protest march and vigil at the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut, where Ross was to be executed in the dead of night.