More Than You'll Ever Know
Katie Gutierrez
Dedication
For my family. Los quiero mucho, mucho, mucho.
Part I
Cassie, 2017
By the time I read about Lore Rivera, my mother had been dead for a dozen years. Dead, but not gone. She was like my shadow, angling dark and long in the right light, inescapable and untouchable.
Everyone had loved my mother. She was a third-grade teacher who’d once told our class that history was written by those who had power and wanted to keep it. “So, when you read your textbooks, ask yourself who is telling the story—and what they have to gain by your believing it.” My classmates had looked at me then, awed by my mother’s educational subterfuge, and I’d smiled, proud she was mine, that I had come from her.
Every Friday night, she and I curled up together on the nubby tweed couch to watch Dateline. Sometimes our fingers brushed as we worked the matted tassels of our favorite blue blanket, and we giggled softly, as if catching each other in the act of something private. Then we’d wait for Stone Phillips, with his strong jaw and serious eyes, to reveal the endless ways one human being can harm another.
This was the midnineties in Enid, Oklahoma, still some time before my ninth birthday. My life was still ordinary. I hadn’t yet learned that ordinary could be precious. So I got my thrills from watching the Dateline camera pan over photos of smiling blond women riding bikes and cutting wedding cakes, oblivious to their own tragic ends. I couldn’t help but see myself in them, or see myself the way the camera might see me, a dead girl still living. I breathed in my mother’s scent of snuck cigarettes and chalk dust as she pulled me against her side, and maybe that was the pleasure that started it all—from that nubby tweed couch, I explored an otherworld of danger without ever leaving the safety of my mother’s warmth, thrilled in the closeness of the wolf’s breath against a home made of brick.
Except it turns out brick walls don’t matter when the wolf lives inside.
Later, once I stopped watching Dateline with my mother, once I stopped doing anything at all with her, I checked true crime books out of the Enid Public Library three or four at a time, slipping them into my backpack like contraband. I devoured In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter the way I imagined boys my age looked at porn, all that furtive grasping under covers. I was grasping for something, too. Some kind of dark knowledge, understanding. I slid my hands over their plastic covers, greased with fingerprints like mine. I read the other names on the borrowing cards—Jennifer, Nicole, Emily—and wondered if they, too, read about serial killers beneath the golden dome of their covers, grateful for something more frightening than their father’s voice bleeding through the walls.
In high school, my clandestine obsession with true crime crystallized into clear goals: First, and most important, leave Enid, Oklahoma. Go to college. Become a journalist. Write the kind of books I had consumed, and that had consumed me, for so many years. Books that looked at the ugliest parts of humanity and asked: How did it come to this?
The year Lore Rivera entered my life, I’d finally landed pieces in Vice and Texas Monthly, but my biggest coup as an aspiring true crime writer was a part-time blogging gig for H2O, a television network whose market research had made it pivot from low-budget romance movies to true crime. Women, it seemed, had tired of watching pretty white couples fall in love among ice-skating rinks and hay bales. Instead, they wanted to know how many times you’d have to stab someone with that ice-skating blade in order to kill them, and whether bodies in those small farming towns ever stayed buried. And their appetite was voracious—not only did they want the “full-time crime” the network provided; they wanted a blog that would round up “the most interesting murders on the internet.” No humdrum shooting would do. They wanted novelty. That’s where I came in.
For fifteen hours a week and thirteen dollars an hour, I scoured the Web for killings that would make a jaded audience stop and click. I read national and local newspapers, scrolled through true crime message boards and subreddits, burrowed my way through 4chan threads like a spelunker of human grime. I created a set of Google alerts—terms like “murder,” “dismemberment,” “kidnapping,” and “contract kill”—and every morning my inbox replenished like an hourglass overturned.
The best-performing murders were outlandishly gruesome with an element of either brilliance or ineptitude (the latter being far more typical). They also tended to have one thing in common: women ended up dead. Though only a quarter of all murder victims are women, when women are murdered, it’s almost always by a man, and when men kill women instead of other men, well, that’s when shit gets creative. Hacksaws and living burials and mysterious disappearances from tiny Cessnas. On a blog like ours, that’s what sold.
That Friday morning, my top post was about a Florida man who’d bashed in his ex’s head with a power tool after she’d caught him with another man. Then he’d partially dissolved her limbs in acid before chopping the rest into small enough pieces to fit into a five-gallon fishing bucket, which he’d taken to a swamp to feed to the alligators—except the gators were more enticed by the man’s living limbs. He’d been forced to call 911, too badly mauled to dispose of the bucket’s grisly contents before emergency responders arrived. Most of the comments were some gleeful form of Karma’s a bitch!
I often wondered about my audience, most of them women, at least according to the market research. How did they interpret their pleasure at scrolling through the posts I curated? Did the human brush fires reduce their own miseries to matchstick flickers? Did the violence provide them with a language for their private suffering?
I wanted to think there was some of that, because more and more I felt like a forager of other people’s tragedies, grinning as I presented them like trophies to an invisible bloodthirsty crowd. The woman in that fishing bucket—she’d been someone once. Maybe her baby teeth were still tucked away in a drawer somewhere, the way my mother had saved mine in that old felt jewelry pouch I’d found after she died.
It was hard to be proud of this kind of work.
I had one eye on the clock, counting down to when I needed to start packing for Fourth of July weekend with my fiancé’s family, when my email refreshed with a Google alert: “Her Secret Lives: How One Woman’s Double Marriage Led to the Murder of an Innocent Man.”
I was so accustomed to dead women that, for a moment, I thought I’d misread the headline. Then came the prick of curiosity, instant and sharp.