Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered

by Karen Kilgariff

  After hours upon hours of driving, we’d reach our campground as dusk was falling, and we’d all pile out and stretch loudly and gratefully. While the journey sucked, the destination made it almost worth it. The smell of the forest, the pine trees and faint whiffs of the first campfires being lit, the seclusion and wildness of it all—especially after having spent the previous year in my hometown planned community that didn’t have a single tree that wasn’t planted without strict planning and not a weed in sight—hit my child brain with a little bit of awe. And I could sense something in my dad change, too. It was like I could see him morph from a suburban soccer dad with responsibilities who wore a fanny pack and lived in an all-off-white one-bedroom apartment into a kinda feral mountain man who could whittle things and lived off the land … and still wore a fanny pack.

  The first step to our camping experience was always to erect the tent. Sounds easy, right? No. It is not. It is stupid and I hate it. First of all, Dad’s tent was at least twenty years old. None of those modern tent luxuries like taking less than an hour to put up and not needing to forage for big rocks to hold down an even more ancient blue tarp. This pole went here maybe, that snap went there or there or there, cue one of the four of us throwing a tantrum and stomping into the forest to cry and scream our frustrations into the wilderness. The woods are a good place to scream in frustration. They’ve heard the frustrated screams of enraged family members since humans first existed, and they don’t judge or tell you that you were the one being a dick; they accept and envelop your screams and use the excess carbon dioxide you emit to grow. Everyone needs a little scream in the woods sometimes.

  Plus, kids wandering off alone into the wilderness—or anywhere, for that matter—was an OK thing back in the ’80s and ’90s. Kids were free to go off on their own into places like the fucking forest. Yes, small child. Go take a walk. Kids were expected to go figure their shit out and compose themselves. When they were ready to stop being an asshole, they could join the family again. I can’t tell you how many times I got lost in a forest as a kid because I was fed up with my sister or dad and decided to run away and live a life on the road or maybe make friends with Bigfoot or something.

  Eventually, I’d wander back in the gathering darkness, a little scared of what might be lurking in the inky night or watching me from behind a tree or camouflaged in the tree canopy, but also lured by the smell of my dad’s insanely delicious barbecued chicken cooking on the grill. The recipe is incredibly complicated and has been in our family for generations, but I’ve decided to share it with you now.

  Marty’s Famous Barbecued Chicken

  4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or whatever chicken part is on sale that day)

  1 jar of generic-brand barbeque sauce

  1 large plastic generic-brand ziplock bag

  •    Put chicken parts in the bag. Pour entire jar of barbecue sauce into the bag. Put bag into the dreaded cooler alongside the juice boxes and grapes for the 10+ hours you’re driving to the campsite. Cook over an open fire or small charcoal grill and hope that you don’t give your children salmonella, but if you do, it’ll probably give them character, so don’t worry about it too much. When your daughter asks for the recipe as an adult, break her heart by telling her it was just cheap chicken parts and jarred barbeque sauce.

  After dinner, my dad would let my brother light a bonfire even though my brother should in no way have been allowed to play with fire, and everyone would chill with a book or play poker until we got tired, and we’d all crawl into our scratchy hand-me-down sleeping bags side by side in the tent that claimed to be a four-person tent. The foresty sounds of the forest and the crackle of the bonfire slowly dying lulling us to sleep. The animals and serial killers tucking in for the night nearby.

  I was seven the summer we went to the Grand Canyon. One evening, after a long day of adventuring, collecting rocks, and heat stroke, Asher had yet to get back from a solo hike and it was starting to get dark. He was about ten years old, a scrawny kid who had trouble in school because he was so smart he was bored, so he found other ways to entertain himself that usually involved him annoying someone and getting sent to the principal’s office (see Kleenex story above).

  So it was dark, he was gone, and as much as I always swore that I hated him and wished he wasn’t my brother, I started freaking the fuck out a little, convinced that my big brother was dead, eaten by a mountain lion or hacked to death by an ax murderer.

  I was sitting close to the fire, my knees turning red from the heat of the flames, and I kept looking over my shoulder expectantly into the dark woods that butted up against our camp. I finally dog-eared the page I’d been staring at for twenty minutes but not actually reading. Leah was fidgeting with the hair wrap that she’d paid a local to braid into a lock of her hair earlier that day, trying to pretend she didn’t give a shit, but she kept looking toward the woods Asher should have walked out of by now, too.

  “Shouldn’t he be back by now?” I asked, my voice not much louder than the crackle of the fire.

  No one responded.

  My dad didn’t seem worried, despite the fact that he was a champion worrier. After a decade of parenting a hyperactive kid like my bro, I guess sometimes you forget that the bad things that can befall your wild kid aren’t just those things caused by that kid. Ya know?

  As I was just starting to learn from shows like Unsolved Mysteries, pics of missing kids on the back of milk cartons, and the death of my longtime school crush David R., who died suddenly that previous year of leukemia, bad things befell people all the fucking time.

  The first time I heard about NecroSearch was through an introduction to what is now one of my “favorite” murders—as in the one that’s broken my heart the most and that I’m sure will be in my mind and heart for the rest of my life4—that of Michele Wallace. NecroSearch is an incredible organization made up of “scientists, specialists, and behaviorists, who use the latest technology and the most advanced techniques to help solve ‘unsolvable’ crimes” and “provide assistance to law enforcement agencies in the search for and recovery of human remains” (aka a bunch of crazy-smart people who go to extreme lengths to help find bodies hidden in fucking forests and other insane places. I HIGHLY recommend No Stone Unturned: The True Story of the World’s Premier Forensic Investigators by Steve Jackson).

  It was an old episode of one of my favorite shows, Cold Case Files, where I learned about Michele and everything about her death stayed with me. Sweet baby angel Michele was a beautiful person—she was outgoing and ambitious, and had she not been murdered by the fucking trash-monster Roy Melanson during a solo camping trip in 1974 in the Rocky Mountains (accompanied by her trusty dog, Okie), there’s no telling what kind of positive mark she could have left on the world. Instead, she changed the face of cold cases forever. Twelve years after her scalp was found with the attached hair still in their signature braids (OMFG) on a trail in the same general area it was thought she had picked up a hitchhiking Melanson (who, unbeknownst to her, was a convicted rapist and also the fucking spawn of Satan), the NecroSearch team was able to find what remained of her skeleton using, among other fascinating techniques, forensic analysis of the leaves found on the scalp and hair, which lead them to where her body would most likely have been left. Prosecutors, who previously were worried about taking Melanson to trial without a body, despite a mountain of evidence proving his guilt, were now able to take that fucker to task, and he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, where I hope he got beat up a lot.

  This case not only started my fascination with cold cases but also marked the time in my life where there was no chance in fucking hell I was going camping or hiking in the forest ever again.

  That night when Asher disappeared, I was inconsolable. In my little seven-year-old mind, we were in a state of emergency, and the helplessness I felt that we couldn’t do anything to help find my brother made me feel like I was going to burst out of my own skin. I also wondered if
this meant that, should I go missing one day, no one would bother looking for me either, and as someone who already had a deep fear of being kidnapped, this scared me almost as much as the actual kidnapping did. It was up to me to sound the alarms at my brother’s absence, just as I hoped he would do for me if I ever went missing. Looking back, I think that my reaction probably made a little more sense than my dad’s calmness did, but hey, I’m not trying to tell him how to parent (yes, I am). In reality, knowing my dad and his deep-seated need for a sense of order and control, the eating over your clothes in the car and our immaculate campsite presented as proof, he probably was freaking out; he just didn’t want to show me and Leah and worry us even more.

  It was well past our normal bedtime when we finally had no choice but to lie down and try to fall asleep, and Asher still hadn’t come back. I could picture the feature on Unsolved Mysteries, the incredibly creepy intro music playing as Robert Stack described the eerie circumstances of Asher’s disappearance in his gravelly voice, telling viewers that perhaps they had a clue to unlock the mystery of his whereabouts. I’d always wanted to be the viewer that had the clue to unlock one of the mysteries, and now I would actually be on the side that needed a clue, begging the audience for information that led to the answer of my missing brother. Leah and my dad and mom would be there, too. I’d wear the blue dress with the big pockets that I wore the first day of school, and my tears would bring the nation to its knees … OK, to be honest, the prospect of being on TV might have gotten me just a little excited, but the excitement passed another two hours later when he still hadn’t come back.

  What I also learned from the Michele Wallace case for the first time in my true crime–obsessed history was that these cases weren’t just about the victim and murderer, the police and detectives, and the men and women who (hopefully) brought the bad guy to justice. That if I were going to delve into this with such gusto, I also needed to think about the victims in the periphery—about the lives that go on after the case is closed and the killer has been (hopefully) locked away—the victim’s family and friends whose lives are forever, irrevocably changed.

  You see, two weeks after Michele went missing, before there was even evidence that she met with foul play, or that she hadn’t just extended her camping trip, Michele’s mother killed herself. She knew that not hearing from her beloved daughter for even a couple of days meant that the worst had happened, and she couldn’t even wait to find out if her fears were valid. She just knew, and she also knew that she couldn’t handle a life without Michele. My heart broke for that woman, as well as Michele’s father and brother, who had to stay behind and live in this awful world where awful people like Roy Melanson would be allowed to go free for decades, to kill again during that time, and that these peripheral victims were powerless. I love staying up late into the night and watching or reading about real-life stories of the extremes of humanity and the evil that lurks in the real world. Those stories help me process my own fears and anxieties around death, but I have an obligation as an avid participant in true crime to remember that many people have to live in those stories, and it’s more to them than just a cautionary tale or a late-night thrill.

  I didn’t think I’d sleep with Asher still gone, but I must have dozed off a bit because shortly after the fire had burned its final ember, I heard footsteps crunching across the otherwise silent campground followed by the zipper on our tent being pulled and a swish as the door flap was pushed aside, then the sound of Asher slipping into his sleeping bag. I was so relieved! And so pissed! We were all awake in an instant, reprimanding him for being gone so long.

  “Asher! Where the hell were you?! I seriously thought you were DEAD!”

  He casually told us he’d wandered off the trail and gotten lost. “But I found a hiking group, and they led me back to camp,” he said, changing into his PJs inside his sleeping bag and then resting his dumb big-brother head on his Star Wars pillowcase.

  I think that was the moment I realized that I actually did love my gross, annoying, embarrassing, asshole of an older brother even though he once threw an open carton of applesauce at my face and his nickname for me was simply “bitch.” I wanted him to leave me alone, but I didn’t want him to be kidnapped by a family of bears or fall off a cliff!

  A few years later, Asher (still not dead or living with bears) and Leah (who had discovered boys and lost interest in being my friend) went off to high school. I was almost out of junior high, and my dad couldn’t have paid us to stay the night at his divorced-dad apartment every other weekend, let alone go camping with him. Asher was going to GWAR and Primus concerts on the weekends, and Leah was deep into an unhealthy high school relationship, and the “four-person” tent could barely hold two of us by then.

  In late summer 1994, I was fourteen, and when my dad pulled his beat-up minivan to the curb outside Mom’s place, I didn’t have to invoke Sibling Law to get the front seat—it was just Dad and me. Although I had adamantly refused to camp deep into the forest, having been traumatized by it from more years of those summer trips than I could count by then, I did agree to go camping on a beach, which sounded exotic and relaxing. We drove at my dad’s usual pace of six-plus hours on what should have been a three-hour drive down the California coast and across the border to a little campground on a beach in Mexico that felt less like a tropical beach and more like a postapocalyptic hobo camp with its beat-up trailers and pup tents and feral children running around clothed in the sickly greenish foam of the surf.

  All the camping tourists looked like they had come into Mexico to outrun something, possibly someone trying to cash in on a loan or from a warrant. We set up the tent with the sweltering heat of the sun beating down on us and on the hard-packed sand, and as my dad warned me not to open my mouth in the water, I was already daydreaming of an air-conditioned hotel room and sitting poolside. But it also just wasn’t the same without Asher and Leah there to drive us both crazy. After one night, we packed up and headed out for home early.

  We finished packing all our sand-covered gear into the minivan, and Dad steered around a pack of children as we headed out of the parking lot and toward the main highway that would lead us to the hours-long line of cars waiting to cross the border back into the U.S. That’s when lights flashed behind us, and the loud whoop of a police siren alerted us to pull the car over onto the shoulder of the crumbling street.

  “Be cool,” my dad joked through the tension as he pumped the manual handle to roll down his window and the police approached. A quick conversation ensued in stilted Spanish between my dad and the scowling cop, after which he turned briskly back to his squad car, and my dad, rolling his window back up, informed me that we were ordered to follow the squad car back to the police station for reasons that hadn’t been given to my dad, aside from telling him that he had run a stop sign that we were both sure didn’t actually exist. His always-composed, control-freak voice had a detectable hint of nervousness, which put me into full-on panic mode.

  At the station, my dad gave me strict orders to stay in the locked car while he went inside. He assured me that he just had to give them a little money and we would be fine, but he also warned me not to unlock the door under any circumstances. He’d recently told me of a high school friend of his who had just gotten out of a Thai prison after decades of harsh imprisonment over a possibly trumped-up drug charge and the mental havoc it had wreaked upon his life. So, convinced my dad was off to meet a similar fate, I was almost in tears as I watched him walk into the police station.

  The minivan became a sweatbox in less than a minute, but I didn’t dare roll down the window even an inch. Sweat beaded on my forehead and inside my training bra as I waited for what felt like hours but was probably twenty minutes before my dad came back and we drove the fuck away. Relief and fresh, glorious wind from the open window washed over me as we booked it for the border and he told me what had happened inside the police station. The police had indeed wanted money, a lot of money, for the alleged drivin
g infraction. In a move that took a huge amount of chutzpah, my father refused. Instead, he told them he’d give them a smaller amount of money to put toward their widows’ funds, donations given to the wives of fallen officers, but that his own father had been on the police force in Los Angeles and that if they didn’t let us go, my dad would make a phone call to the LAPD and there’d be hell to pay.

  After making him wait, the officers agreed to the smaller sum, and my father, his wallet a little lighter, was free to go.

  Here’s the thing: my dad’s father had been a barber who lost all his money betting on horse racing. My dad had been bullshitting on a level I didn’t even know he was capable of. I sat proud and stunned in the passenger seat as we waited in the long line to get through the border crossing into the U.S.

  A short time later, on a Friday night out with some friends and acquaintances, I was given a hit of LSD and took it without a second thought. I ended up staying out all night with these friends, crashing early in the morning atop some dirty blankets on the floor of some squatter compound as my high slowly wore off into some trippy-dreamed dozing. I hadn’t called home to let my mom know I’d be gone all night, figuring that her casual latchkey parenting didn’t necessitate such formal practices, even at my young age of fourteen. But apparently I was wrong. Because she called my dad, who called the cops, who of course wouldn’t let him report me as a missing person that early in my disappearance, but nevertheless, all parties were concerned about the whereabouts of a fourteen-year-old kid who was freshly out of rehab and prone to bad decisions.

  When I finally called home the next morning from a pay phone outside of a local liquor store that sold single cigarettes for a quarter, I could tell I was in deep trouble merely by the angry way in which my mom answered the phone. I headed straight home and was grounded for the rest of the weekend, which was fine with me, as I wanted nothing more than to sleep my drug hangover away forever.