Accusations

Trigger warning: mentions of substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and murder

“Did they ever find the guy who did it,” Jack asked, breaking the quiet tension in their luxury rental car. He was referring to the double murder that happened here in his wife, Susan’s, hometown of Greenville more than 25 years ago. Two teenagers, James and Allison, were brutally murdered one night while parked in James’s car on a gravel road. James’s girlfriend, who was not Allison, was initially thought to have been the assailant. The press called it a “lover’s lane tragedy.”

Susan rested her head against the passenger window, thinking about the question her husband, Jack, had just asked. Before she answered, she thought about the days after the murders, and the first time she heard someone say the unimaginable. She remembers two ladies whispering loudly in line at the grocery store about “you-know-who being the killer” and “she’s just like her daddy.” Susan spun around and shouted for the old “hags” to “shut the hell up!”

“Yeah,” Susan finally answered, “some lowlife drifter that died before he got the chair. My dad was one of the EMT’s who was called out to the scene that night. He said the carnage that man did to those kids was an act of pure evil. It still haunts him to this day.” Susan continued to stare through the rain-covered windows as she continued speaking, “but the damage was already done. The rumor that she did it destroyed Kasey, literally. Her life was ruined afterwards.”

Heavy drops of rain pounded against the car as the couple made their way silently toward the cemetery.

“And I couldn’t help her.” Susan began to sob for the first time in days, as the shock at Kasey’s death finally gave way for unencumbered tears.

Jack reached over and squeezed Susan’s hand in his own, knowing words were useless at this moment. After a bit, Susan looked over at her supportive husband - his blue-grey eyes looking away from the road just long enough to give her an assuring smile.

The smooth, wet pavement underneath the tires of the SUV suddenly turned to rough, muddy gravel. Susan recognized the sound of the changing roads, because Kasey and her used to sneak out and smoke cigarettes in the cemetery.

“We’re here,” Susan said, barely over a whisper.

Jack parked on the grass alongside a dozen or so other cars and grabbed an umbrella from the backseat. He hurried around to the passenger side and helped Susan out of the vehicle, keeping the umbrella above her and paying no mind to the rain bouncing off the shoulders of his suit jacket. Susan smiled slightly, knowing how very lucky she was to have Jack.

There was a tent covering the gravesite and a mahogany coffin was perched above the six-foot hole. A couple dozen people meandered around the chairs under the tent, speaking in hushed tones and avoiding the rain. Susan noted how few many people had showed up to the graveside service, but she wasn’t entirely surprised. Kasey’s home life was less than ideal, and far from safe. Kasey would spend the night at Susan’s a lot. Kasey also lost touch with a lot of people after the trials, including her best friend and practically a sister – Susan.

In the small crowd of barely recognizable people, Susan found her parents already seated towards the back of the rows of chairs. She walked over to them and embraced them with a long, warm hug. Kasey’s parents were not in attendance. Susan wondered if they even knew.

***

Kasey Carlson grew up the oldest of three kids in a house on the edge of town that wasn’t suited for a family of two, let alone five. Her parents were cruel drunks who had no business being parents at all. They would vanish for days on end to who-knows-where, leaving behind no note, no food, and no money to get food. Kasey began working odd jobs around town at the age of twelve so she could feed her two brothers and herself. She went around town asking people if she could do work or errands for them for some cash. She would run errands, put away groceries, clean bathrooms, anything for a quick dollar. She even did housework for Mr. Wilson.

John Wilson was Greenville’s designated “creepy old man” that every small town seems to have. Kids would dare each other to ring his doorbell or open the fence to his overgrown backyard. It was a right of passage for the youth of Greenville. Kasey needed money and didn’t seem bothered by the rumors about him. Susan once asked her what she all did for Mr. Wilson, but Kasey just shrugged and said, “whatever he wants, I guess.”

As Kasey got older her home life got worse. Her parents leaned on her for money and punished her when she didn’t have any. Eventually Kasey started showing up to school with bruises on her arms, but when teachers questioned her about it, she just said it was from “running around and being a kid.” She started wearing long sleeve shirts to school every day, and the questions stopped.

When Kasey was sixteen, her father was arrested for beating a man to death in a bar fight. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in a maximum penitentiary upstate. Kasey never went to visit him, not once. The day cops came to her house was the last time Kasey ever saw him; she didn’t even attend the court hearings. She knew what he was capable of - she experienced it firsthand.

Her mother was just as bad, and despite her father being gone Kasey knew she still wasn’t safe. She tried to be away from home as much as possible. When she wasn’t working at the local gas station, she was involved in every school activity possible – cheerleading, track, debate, school newspaper – anything that kept her away. And Kasey excelled at everything she did, not because of hard work or tenacity, but because of spite.

Kasey’s impressive resume as a top athlete and stellar student had colleges all over vying for her attendance. She was offered early acceptance and a full-ride scholarship to the state’s biggest university, which she happily accepted. Her mother, unsurprisingly, could not care less about Kasey’s achievements.

It was the summer before their senior year of high school, and Kasey and Susan were trying to spend every seldom free moment they had together. They swam in the lake, went to parties in bean fields, drove around blasting music in their cars with the windows down, smoked stolen cigarettes, and chased boys. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate already, Kasey wanted a boyfriend. She was bound and determined to find a man the exact opposite of her father, and she finally did – James Harold.

James was a bit quieter than most boys his age, with conventional good looks and a square jaw. His family had just moved to Greenville in the spring and was immediately awestruck with Kasey’s natural beauty and contagious energy.

Kasey felt safe to confide in James about what had gone on in her home.

“I’m going to take you away from all of this and give you the life you deserve,” James would whisper to Kasey night after night, while they say in his car watching the stars.

Kasey finally felt safe with someone other than her best friend. She was riding high – she had a boyfriend who adored her and a best friend who would be attending the same college as Kasey. Her scholarship, and James, was her ticket to leaving Greenville for good. It was the summer dreams were made of…

…until it wasn’t.

On one of the few nights Kasey slept at her own house, she was jolted out of bed by the sound of the landline phone ringing. Her brothers were still asleep in the small bedroom they shared and her mother was either passed out drunk somewhere, or not home at all. It was Susan on the other line, so frantic that Kasey couldn’t make out the words she was hearing.

“Susie slow down, I can’t understand you!”

“They’re dead, Kasey! James and Allison are dead!”

Susan paced the kitchen floor as her mom sat with her head in her hands. Susan’s dad, a first responder and EMT, had just called from an accident scene he was called out to in the middle of the night. Except, it was no accident. Two teenagers were found stabbed and shot on a gravel road a few miles out of town. A nearby farmer heard the gun shots and called it in, assuming it was just some dumb kids firing off rounds at a stop sign. The sheriff’s deputy who got the call also assumed it was that, so he made his way to the rural road with barely any urgency. Although that decision would haunt Deputy Hines for the rest of his life, it wouldn’t have mattered – they were dead already.

Deputy Hines found a car parked on a gravel road in roughly the area the farmer had explained he heard the gunshots. The deputy turned on the flashing lights before getting out of his squad car, hoping the kids inside the parked car would be startled by the bright blue and red lights and exit the vehicle.

“It’s the sheriff’s department. Come on out now,” Deputy Hines called to them with a mix of authority and understanding in his voice.

Teenagers in this small, rural town were always getting up to some mostly harmless trouble, and the deputy was hoping to just give them a warning a send them on their way. As he moved closer, the flashlight illuminated what looked to be two figures in the driver’s seat. For a millisecond, Deputy Hines thought he had just caught two young lovers engaging in some late-night fun.

Then, he saw the blood.

The deputy called dispatch for backup and EMTs immediately. His voice boomed like thunder – a sense of panicked urgency.

“Now, god dammit!”

A couple of hours after Deputy Hines’s initial discovery, after the bodies had been identified and their families notified, Rick – Susan’s dad - called home from the gruesome scene. He needed to tell his wife and daughter what happened; he knew their reactions were going to be that of pure hysteria. Kasey was like a second daughter to him and his wife, and more than a best friend to Susan – they were basically sisters. James had recently come into their lives as well, and was welcomed at their dinner table any time. Rick could not fathom who would do this to a couple of teenagers. He also couldn’t fathom why James and Allison were found almost entirely naked and appeared to have been caught in the middle of "hooking up,” as the kids called it.

A few days after the murders, Kasey was brought into the sheriff’s department for questioning. Their town was too small to have its own dedicated police force, and the local sheriffs were not equipped to handle a case of this caliber. FBI officers from the nearest city, more than 120 miles away, were called in to assist with the investigation.

The taped interview eventually came out in trial, and it shocked everyone in the court. Two well-dressed agents and a local deputy sat around a large metal table, flanking Kasey from all sides. She was stoic, pale, and quiet. Her normally tan skin was almost gray, her hair appeared unwashed, and her posture was slanted. She looked catatonic.

No murder weapon had ever been found, but it was determined by the coroner that both Allison and James were killed by multiple gunshots to their heads and torsos, and both stabbed nearly 10 times. It came out in trial that the stab wounds were postmortem, meaning whoever stabbed them did so after they were already dead. “Overkill,” the coroner called it during her testimony.

The physical evidence was nil, almost non-existent. Nearby tire tracks were determined to be from a pretty common tire tread, and farmers in the area traveled the gravel road frequently enough, so investigators were unable to say with any certainty which tracks were those of the killer’s. The only DNA found in the car belonged to James, Allison, and Kasey. The defense argued, rightfully so, that of course Kasey’s DNA would be in the car, she and James were dating, and she had been in the car many times.

Investigators determined the killer stood about six feet from the car and likely snuck up on the unsuspecting victims. They would’ve had barely any, if any at all, time to react before the barrage of bullets from a semiautomatic pistol began flying. The bullets collected at the scene were not a match to any law enforcement database and a gun was never recovered. The courtroom was shocked again when it was discovered the number of bullets that were fired; the killer would’ve had to have reloaded – twice.

Immediately after the murders, rumors swirled around Greenville that it was Kasey who killed James and Allison. Anonymous calls were made to tiplines that pointed the finger at Kasey. People claimed to have overheard Kasey talking about murdering her boyfriend and his lover. It wasn’t the baseless rumors that landed Kasey on trial for murder - it was Kasey herself.

During several lengthy interviews with investigators, stories began to come out about Kasey’s childhood, the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents, and the violent criminal that was her father. Kasey didn’t seem to have much emotion when she talked about her father, but she exploded into a fit of rage when an investigator asked her how long she had known that James was cheating on her. Kasey stood up, threw her metal chair at the wall, and began screaming. She had to be held down by 4 people while being placed in handcuffs. That outburst, the circumstances surrounding the murder, and what prosecutors referred to as “a genetic disposition for violence” landed Kasey a second-degree murder charge. The accusations from both law enforcement, and the town, seemingly broke Kasey’s already fractured spirit.

A jury would eventually find Kasey not guilty at her trial, noting that the lack of physical evidence was enough for reasonable doubt. After being released from the juvenile detention center, Kasey returned to Greenville a different person. People stared at her on the streets. Rumors swirled through town about Kasey’s presumed guilt and James’s infidelities. And Kasey heard those rumors, every single one.

Kasey stopped answering Susan’s calls – she stopped answering anyone’s calls. She stopped protecting her brothers from their mother. She dropped out of school, forfeited her scholarship, and disappeared one day. She packed up her few belongings and skipped town without a note and without a goodbye to her best friend, Susan. Kasey Carlson was gone.

***

Over the years, Susan heard rumors that Kasey had been spotted a few states over, selling her body and living on the streets. Susan even tried to go look for her several times, but she never found her. Eventually Kasey’s mom was arrested for who-knows-what and her brothers were put into foster care. It was one of those brothers that was notified of Kasey’s overdose, and it was he who decided to bring her body back to Greenville to be buried. I suppose, Susan thought, Greenville is where Kasey experienced at least a few moments of happiness.

A pastor who didn't know Kasey was hired to oversee the graveside service. The man spoke of God and forgiveness and empty platitudes as he preached to the funeral guests. There were no special stories told about Kasey, no emotional eulogies, not even one photograph of her on display. It was like the whole town of Greenville had forgotten her after running her out of town.

After the short service, people were asked to come up to the casket and place flowers on top before it was lowered into the ground. Susan took the white rose she was handed at the beginning of the service and placed it on top before leaning over to give the casket a soft kiss.

“I’m so sorry, Kase. I love you, always,” Susan whispered.

Inside the casket lay the body of a woman, bruised, beaten, and malnourished – not remotely the body of the young, hopeful teen so many had known her once to be. After the casket was lowered, the few dozens guests said quiet goodbyes to each other and went their separate ways. There was no celebration of life afterwards, no home to gather at and share stories while sipping coffee. It was a lot of nothing for the girl who had her life taken away long before she died.

Jack opened the door of the SUV and Susan climbed inside. They drove in silence as they left Greenville and headed back home. Susan cried for her friend, for the life she lost, and for the life Kasey could’ve had.

Prologue

The summer air was hot, but Kasey’s face was hotter. The rage boiled up from inside her, having just caught her boyfriend in the throws of sex with some other girl. They were so into what they were doing, they didn’t even notice Kasey watching from a distance. Kasey liked to run at night to get out of the house and clear her head. That’s when she spotted the car, and she spotted them.

Kasey ran back home and got into her father’s car that hadn’t been driven since his arrest. She prayed it would start, and her prayers were answered. Behind the front seat sat the pistol and hunting knife her father had used to threaten her and her brothers, but also to occasionally shoot and dissect pheasants. Kasey punched the gas and headed out of town.

“First my dad, then Mr. Wilson, now James! Enough is enough!”