Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave (2002)

This is one of those true crime books that seem to want the pathos of the socioeconomic circumstances to do most of the heavy lifting, along with massive infusions of heightened language. It almost works, partly because it focuses so unapologetically on the American underclass and the details of their lives the rest of us would rather not know, but mostly because of the bleak Mojave Desert setting in a town dependent on a nearby Marine base. In 1991, two girls—one 21, the other just one day short of her 16th birthday—are raped, stabbed 33 times apiece, and left to die in the older girl's apartment. The crime is committed by a Marine with a history of bad behavior. He is caught and put away—it takes some time, but the reasons have less to do with systemic corruption, military and otherwise, and more to do with systemic grinding poverty. There's little question they got the right man. Sadly, there's also little question that the lost lives don't matter much, which is the greater tragedy here. Deanne Stillman runs down the family history of the younger girl over a few generations and it's all domestic abuse, early pregnancies, prostitution, and/or alcoholism. It's horrific in its predictability, especially the abuse. It's just expected that boyfriends will beat girlfriends, husbands will beat wives. The only questions are when it will start and how severe it will become. Stillman thus doesn't have that much to work with—the article on which the book is based is probably better. There's an awful lot of larding up going on here as Stillman attempts to blow up the impact of this into something more than it is. It might make an interesting movie because of its setting—maybe it's already been done? (I'm not seeing evidence of it.) Full disclosure: I have little sympathy for flag-waving patriotism, particularly among the underclass, even understanding they often have little other good choice. Debie McMaster, the mother of one of the victims here, started to lose me when it's revealed in her biography that she turned up at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations to hassle the protesters. But that's just me. As lugubriously as Stillman may do so, I suspect she has given a well-rounded, complete, and eminently fair portrait of the people she encountered working on this story.

In case it's not at the library.