The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (29 page)

“Under the Volcano”—his “ultima thule of the spirit,” as he
called it—contains a remarkable death scene, and some of the language evokes Lowry's own. The Mexican paramilitaries close in on the consul. One pulls out a pistol and shoots him, then shoots him twice more, and the world becomes a giant symbol of despair: “Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echo returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying.” This is pure Baudelaire. But, at the moment when the consul sees the gun firing, Lowry sees things more plainly: “At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. ‘Christ,' he remarked, puzzled, ‘this is a dingy way to die.'”

 

A
FTER
L
OWRY'S DEATH,
Margerie never married again, and never published another of her own books. She moved back to Taormina, while Lowry's family dragged its feet over her inheritance. After she threatened to move in with them, they released a small sum. “For all they care, I can starve in Sicily,” she wrote Dorothy Templeton, four months after Lowry's death. “I am dead or wish I were,” she wrote in another postcard. She had already begun to look for publishable work in the trunk of manuscripts that Lowry left behind.

Soon, most of Lowry's friends and family dropped her. “I haven't heard one bloody word from anybody in England since I left,” she wrote Templeton and Burt in 1959. (When I met Lowry's great-nephew Jeremy Lowry in England this summer and asked about the family's opinion of Margerie, he said, “She was never referred to.”) Margerie settled in Los Angeles and dedicated herself to her husband's legacy. Her agent, Peter Matson, Harold Matson's nephew, remembers her as a small, intense, heavy-drinking woman who “seemed to live very much in the past.” She wrote Burt in 1971, “Malc is hotter than ever in Paris
and
Le Monde
gave two full pages to him last fall,” but noted a few months later that she warded off her “grief and troubles with vodka, mixed with ice and plain water.”

The reputation of “Under the Volcano” kept rising with the years. Critics extolled it as the last great modernist novel, and scholars worked to unweave its web of symbols. “The doctorates are piling up all over the U.S. and Canada,” Margerie wrote to Burt and Templeton in 1965. In 1998, the board of the Modern Library ranked it No. 11 of the best hundred books of the twentieth century. Gabriel García Márquez has said that it was probably the novel that he had read the most often in his life.

Every four or five years until her death, Margerie published a novel or story collection that she had retrieved from the unpublished part of the “bolus,” as Lowry called his writing. Most scholars did not think that these works were anywhere near the level of “Volcano,” and wondered if Margerie was truly fulfilling Lowry's wishes in offering them to the public. “I told Margerie not to publish them,” David Markson remembers. Margerie told Douglas Day that she found such criticisms ridiculous. In a letter, she said, “I certainly wrote plenty of lines, and scenes, when I was editing ‘The Forest Path' and ‘Through the Panama'”—stories that Lowry completed—“both of which have received high praise and people write me about them all the time.” She was keeping alive her side of their collaboration—the selecting and the shaping—even though the man who sometimes rejected and improved upon her ideas was silent.

In 1970, Margerie finally published “October Ferry to Gabriola.” A short afterword, titled “About the Author,” claimed that Margerie had based her edit on “an almost complete revision” that Lowry had been working on just before his death. This was wishful thinking: there had been no such revision, just thousands of pages of a half-dozen versions, none close to complete. Margerie pulled sections from different drafts and gave the book the happy ending that she had been pressing for: the Lowry stand-in
realizes that his nostalgia for the squatter's shack is damaging his marriage. He cuts his ties to the past and the couple moves to Gabriola to begin life again. Margerie did not include any of the material from Lowry's final burst of inspiration—the pages written in Ripe, largely without her, which might have marked a creative renewal for him.

During this time, Lowry produced fascinating additions to “October Ferry”—almost a hundred pages, written in his tiny hand, in which he began to examine what he called the “alcoholocaust” of his life, and the way that drinking had affected his art. He wrote about his aversion treatment, and clearly expected to integrate this experience into the story of Ethan Llewelyn, the protagonist of “October Ferry.” His talent for imagery is apparent when he merges the nautical and the medical to describe “a psychiatric ward at noon, waiting for the doctors to pass through, with two tall nurses at anchor.” He had also put wholesale into the draft various letters of apology that he had written to Margerie over the years. None of this ambitious work was finished, but it pointed to a novel very different from the ones that Lowry had written before, one that might have taken him not under “Under the Volcano” but beyond it.

When Margerie consigned these manuscripts to the University of British Columbia, she added notes in her looping script. “Rambling notes,” one said. “Seems like a dissertation on alcohol.” Another said, “Nothing useful here.”

 

D. T. M
AX
is the author of
The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery,
the true story of an Italian family that for two hundred years has suffered from a fatal inherited insomnia. The book came out in paperback in the fall of 2007 from Random House. Max has been a book editor and a newspaper columnist. He lives outside of Washington, D.C., with his wife and two small children and a rescued beagle who came to them, fortuitously, already named Max.

Coda

The pleasure, I think, in “Day of the Dead,” is that although the particulars—the manuscripts, the correspondence, the ups and downs of publication—are distinctive to literary life, there is nothing really literary about it. It asks the question: Can we ever really know what takes place in a marriage? Marriage is the ultimate terra incognita, the last true zone of privacy in our 24-7 cable news, give us your social security number world. Did Margerie kill Malcolm? That we can almost answer. But if she did, why?—that, even after twenty-four pages, I can't pretend we'll ever know.

FROM
OC Weekly

A
T FIRST, THE MOTIONLESS FIGURE
lying face-up on the pavement must have looked like a mannequin. There were no street lamps nearby, and perhaps the security guard thought it was a stray dummy left there by a drama student. He kept driving, but something about the shape made him curious; he turned around and drove back to Lot 12, a student parking lot on the west edge of Mission Viejo's Saddleback College. It was about 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, January 18, 1986. The lot was pitch-black and, other than a few parked cars, completely deserted.

As the guard got out of his car and approached the pale form stretched out on the asphalt next to a Chevrolet Citation, two students walking to their vehicles from the nearby fine-arts building joined him. They gasped in horror.

Lying in a crimson pool next to her car was someone they had seen minutes earlier at a party in the fine-arts building: 23-year-old communications major Robbin Brandley. She had just left the party, which followed a piano concert at which she had been a volunteer usher. Her long, flower-print dress was hiked up above
her stomach, exposing bikini-style underwear and knee-high stockings. Her purse sat on the pavement a few feet away.

The blood stained the pavement on both sides of her torso. By the time Michael Stephany, a homicide investigator with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, arrived at the scene, automatic sprinklers in the parking lot had turned on and covered the body in an eerie mist. An autopsy would later reveal that Brandley had been stabbed 41 times. Most of the wounds were in her neck, chest and back, and there were several deep cuts—defensive marks, police figured—in her hands.

But besides the victim's gruesome injuries, there was nothing for police to investigate: no fingerprints; no suspect's blood, hair or DNA; no physical evidence of any kind. It was what prosecutors often call the “perfect crime.”

The grisly murder would remain unsolved for 11 years. Witnesses offered inconsistent accounts of events in the hours preceding the crime; Brandley's parents became convinced that someone she knew was responsible for the killing. Then, in April 1997, a man confessed to the murder—and several others. The cop writing down his confession would note that the killer had simply wandered around Mission Viejo until he ended up at a dark parking lot, where he saw a woman walking to her car.

The victim, in the words of the confessed murderer, “could have been anybody.” She “was just a random female.”

 

O
N A RECENT AFTERNOON,
Jack and Genelle Reilley sit on either side of a table at the
Weekly
's offices in downtown Santa Ana. They're taking turns answering questions about the murder of Robbin Brandley, their daughter, 21 years ago. It's a story they've told so often that it's almost become routine for them, although there's nothing routine about what they have to say—or about the pain of their loss, still visibly etched in the deep wrinkles on Jack's
tanned forehead and the strained, almost helpless smile on Genelle's face. Only a few minutes into the interview, her eyes well up with tears.

Part of the routine is explaining why their daughter had a different surname at the time of her death. Robbin, they explain, was born in Long Beach—the town where Jack and Genelle grew up and became high-school sweethearts—on December 6, 1962, with the name Dana Reilley. She spent most of her youth in Huntington Beach and then St. Louis, where Jack had been transferred to work at the headquarters of Ralston Purina, the company that employed him until his retirement a few years ago.

It was in St. Louis, when Dana was 11 years old, that she changed her name to Robbin Brandley. Genelle, a New Age enthusiast who claims to have psychic visions, says the idea came from a numerological booklet that uses one's birth date to come up with a new name. “It was my idea,” she adds.

Her daughter had been a hyperactive child and poor student in her younger years, but once she had a new name, Genelle insists, she blossomed into a focused, highly motivated child. “I believe in all that stuff,” Genelle says. “If what you're doing isn't working, delve into it. She grew up to be a really fabulous, sensational person. I guess everyone thinks that about their child, but she just loved to make people laugh. She was very funny and very bright.”

In 1983, the family returned to California, settling in Laguna Beach, where Brandley enrolled at Saddleback College to pursue a career in journalism.

She had lots of friends at Saddleback and dated a lot of young men, but, her parents say, she refused to get involved in any steady relationships because she wanted to focus on her career. Aside from her classes, she worked at KSBR, the campus radio station, and helped book performances at the college, including established musical acts such as the Thompson Twins. She loved to
volunteer for campus events, like the piano concert that brought her to Saddleback College on the last day of her life.

In the hours leading up to her trip to the unlit student parking lot in Mission Viejo, Brandley spent several hours with her father at their home in Laguna Beach watching television. Jack Reilley was a big fan of Charles Dickens; he was delighted when she told him that the 1946 Hollywood adaptation of
Great Expectations
was on television. After watching the movie, they sat through several reruns of the popular 1960s black-and-white TV comedy
The Munsters.

“It had been 15 years since we'd watched that show, and it was as funny as ever,” Jack recalls.

At around 2 the following morning, Jack awoke to loud knocking at the door: Detective Stephany and another officer were standing on his porch. “He had a big grocery bag,” he recalls. Stephany asked Jack if he could identify anything in the bag. Inside, Jack found Brandley's purse, and inside that, her wallet and driver's license. “The first thing that went through my mind was the drunks in [Laguna] Canyon, a car wreck or something like that,” he says. “And then he said she'd been murdered, and I just couldn't believe it. It was like being hit with a hammer.”

Jack woke up Genelle and told her the news. Four hours later, at sunrise, he called their son Jayeson, and several other family members and friends. They received another visit from the sheriff's department and answered interminable questions about their daughter. “They came down to figure out the sequence of events,” Jack said. “Who her friends were, what type of girl she was, any [love] triangles or anything else. They were curious because her last name is different than ours and thought maybe there was an ex-husband or something.”

 

L
ESS THAN A WEEK LATER,
300 mourners attended a memorial service for Brandley at a San Juan Capistrano church, an event
covered by the
Los Angeles Times.
“She was a vibrant, energetic, caring person whose concern for and love of other students was the foundation of her existence,” Vern Hodge, then-dean of student development at Saddleback College, told the crowd. The article noted the sheriff's department had “no significant leads” in solving the murder.

On March 7, Saddleback College hosted a series of bands, including Fishbone, the Rave-Ups and Secret Service, for a memorial concert in tribute to Brandley, an event prominent enough that
Times
music critic Randy Lewis covered the show. His story also noted that the sheriff's department had no leads. “It's very much an active case, but I'm not aware of any new information at this time,” a department spokesperson told Lewis.

By this time, the Reilleys were conducting their own, unofficial murder investigation, based on statements they say were made to them by police and friends of Brandley who called them to share their suspicions. Those suspicions centered on Valerie Prehm, a student at Saddleback College who worked with Brandley at KSBR and who also had volunteered as an usher at the piano concert on the night of the murder.

According to witnesses who spoke to the Reilleys, Prehm had left the party with Brandley, making her the last person to see her alive. More disturbingly—to the Reilleys, at least—was the fact that other witnesses told them Prehm and Brandley had gotten into an argument just a few weeks before the murder when campus administrators had rejected Prehm's proposal to bring Manhattan Transfer to campus, saying they wanted Brandley to handle the project. Furthermore, the Reilleys say, Prehm disappeared for three days after the murder.

Yet police ruled out Prehm as a suspect, citing witnesses who saw Prehm leave the after-concert party alone. And Prehm hadn't disappeared for three days, they said: She was at home in San Clemente all weekend, unaware that Brandley had been murdered until she returned to campus on Monday. Police hadn't been able
to interview her sooner because they didn't know her telephone number.

But to the Reilleys, particularly Genelle, Prehm clearly had a motive to harm their daughter. She became convinced Prehm had persuaded somebody to rob her daughter, to scare her into leaving campus in revenge for stealing her project. She even claims Brandley visited her in a psychic vision just three days after the murder. “She screamed. ‘Mom, Valerie did it! Valerie did it!'” Genelle says. “I was stunned.”

As the years passed with no progress in the case, the Reilleys say they grew increasingly frustrated with the sheriff's department, especially Stephany, who has since retired and could not be located for an interview for this story. “He said ‘Don't call; don't bother me,'” Genelle claims. “He just couldn't solve the case.”

The Reilleys filed a lawsuit against Saddleback College, arguing that the school was in part responsible for their daughter's murder because of the lack of streetlights at the parking lot where she died, but they dropped the suit after their lawyer quit. They also lobbied for a bill to require that all California universities and colleges provide lights at student parking lots, but the legislation, signed into law in 1990 by California's then-Governor George Deukmejian, only applied to future campus construction.

Meanwhile, they continued their private hunt for their daughter's killer, inviting a series of psychics to visit the crime scene in the late '80s and early '90s. A few years later, they also consulted with a pair of psychics on an episode of
The Jerry Springer Show.
Genelle brought a ring that belonged to her daughter to the studio and handed it to one of the psychics, who then closed her eyes and narrated what she purported to be a description of the murderer, a supernatural echo of the killer that was emanating from the ring itself.

“She was holding this ring and looked like she was going to pass out,” Genelle recalls. “She said this person was in uniform, in camouflage, and Robbin knocked the knife over his left eyebrow.
She said the man works as a security guard.” After the show, Genelle says the psychic's husband approached her and said his wife would offer her services free of charge in the hope of solving the crime. “I was going to do that,” she says. “But then she died not long after the show. She was a big, heavy woman.”

By then, the couple had hired a private detective to track down Prehm and confront her about the crime. In 1992, Genelle drove to rural Washington, where Prehm was living with a boyfriend, and convinced her to take a polygraph test in exchange for $10,000.

Wanting to clear her name, Prehm took the test and passed. Genelle believes the test was improperly administered. She provided the
Weekly
with a videotape of Prehm answering questions about Brandley's murder. In the tape, recorded on June 25, 1992, Prehm denied having any knowledge of the crime and stated that while she may have argued with Brandley a few weeks before her death, she certainly wasn't angry enough to kill anyone. She also claimed that she last saw Brandley at the party and left by herself that night.

Asked if she had seen anyone suspicious that night, however, Prehm stated that while she was working as an usher, a man with curly hair and glasses wearing an olive-drab hunting jacket had approached her and asked if Robbin Brandley were in the building. He didn't look dressed for the concert.

“I almost asked for his ticket, but I was too busy, and unfortunately, I just turned and pointed her out,” Prehm said on the videotape, adding that she told police about the mysterious stranger at the concert, but that they didn't believe her because nobody else had seen anyone matching that description. It probably didn't help her case, Prehm added, that she prefaced her statement to police by mentioning that the mother of one of her friends had also told her she'd seen a similar man in a dream.

“The police saw me twice, and they never wrote it down,” Prehm continued. “I don't remember his nose, but I remember
his hair and glasses, and he was wearing a dark-green jacket, kind of a backwoods jacket. It was an olive green with long sleeves, like an army jacket.”

 

T
HREE MONTHS LATER,
on the evening of September 27, 1992, Jennifer Asbenson, a 19-year-old nursing assistant, had just bought a snack at Palm Canyon Liquor in Palm Springs. She was on her way to work at a home for handicapped children in Desert Hot Springs, several miles away. As she waited for her bus outside the liquor store, a young man in a blue car pulled up to the curb and asked her if she needed a ride.

“No, it's okay,” Asbenson replied.

The man smiled. “Are you sure? I'm going to Desert Hot Springs.”

Because the driver seemed friendly and didn't care if she accepted his invitation, but mostly because she did need a ride, Asbenson got in the car. For some reason, she took note of his license-plate number, and as they rode together, she kept repeating it to herself. But after several minutes, she figured she was being paranoid. “‘Why do I keep memorizing his license plate?'” she wondered. “‘This guy is totally nice.'…He was just a really friendly guy, and I thought I was lucky to get a ride with such a nice guy.”